Lots of Fun at ASTD TechKnowledge 2011

Just returned from San Jose, CA, dug out of the snow here in the East (more on the way), caught up on stuff one always misses when travelling and now have time to write about the great time I had in San Jose. You can see all the tweets at #tk11

My main objective for being there was to present on the topic of Instructional Design Today: What We Really Need to Know as Practitioners, Researchers, and Designers. You can find my slides and resources at the link Kapp’s TechKnowledge 2011 Resources and a great recap of the presentation at Cammy Bean’s live blog notes of my session (no one I know live blogs better than Cammy.)

Cammy also recruited me for a fun and engaging TK Chat session (mixture of interview and discussion) where I got to muse over instructional design and what it means to practitioners and academics with an outstanding panel including Clark Quinn, Steve Villachica, Ellen Wagner and Allison Rossett. The discussion was lively as Clark played he contrarian and everyone else disagreed with what I said 🙂 or it seemed that way. And informally, I got some great ideas to improve my presentation for the next conference, great insights.

Clark, Steve, Ellen, Karl and Allison talk ID at TechKnowledge 2011

Additionally, I ran into one of our alumni who is now one of the newest members of ASTD’s team–Yeah Kristin Husak and congrats on the new job! And a shout out to Linda David of ASTD who always does a great job.

I also bumped into old friend Michael Allen who is, yet again, working on a revolutionary piece of software called Zebra.

I was able to get a personnel demo of the software and it is impressive in terms of functionality, ease-of-use and applicability. I could immediately see applications in a variety of e-learning environments.

Michael Allen and Karl Kapp discuss the innovative software–Zebra.

But the real fun of the event were hanging out with old friends and making new ones as Jay Cross so elegantly explained in his post My evolving learning journey

I caught up with Judy Unrein, Tom Kuhlmann, Koreen Olbrish, Anders Gronstedt who created a bit of stir at the end of the conference with some provocative and entertaining insights, Terrence Wing, Nanette Miner. Had a great lunch with Connie Malamed in a little 50’s diner. Michelle Lentz, Reuben Tozman, Kris Rockwell, Alicia Sanchez, Stevie Rocco who I had to travel all the way across the country to meet someone who lives an hour away. Damon Regan and I had a great discussion about 3D repositories. His is observations of the conference at Observations from ASTD #TK11: Learning in 2015

Here are some of the folks out and about:

Enjoying a lively discussion of e-learning page turners:)

The conference was a buzz with tweets and energy, here is one epic tweet… be careful who you spell check with before you post a tweet!

Aaron Silvers goofed around a bit and had fun at the Winchester Widow’s Mystery Mansion…below you can see he was impacted by the spirits of the place.

Ghostly effect on Aaron at Mystery House.

With a listing of folks, missing someone is always a danger and I am getting older so I will probably miss someone so I apologize in advance.

All in all a great conference and I agree with Jay that the best part of the conference was:

meetings with friends old and new…These reunions and check-ins were fantastic. Quick reconnections refresh forgotten but important memories from times past. Sometimes our rapid-fire 140-character conversions conveyed what was important and conveyed the right links for making progress.

Yeah technology! But nothing beats making a face-to-face connections to make you feel connected to the industry.