Reflections on Great Time at ATDTK

This past week I had the opportunity to travel to Las Vegas to see old friends in the L&D world and to make plenty of new friends as well. It was a great time and is always full of energy.

Of course Las Vegas is a world unto it’s own as evidenced by the signage in the airport.

So right away I was faced with a tough choice but I decided to stay focused on what I needed to do and headed straight to the hotel.

It wasn’t long after I got to the hotel that I ran into one of my favorite conference going friends…Dan Steer or @dan_steer as he is known on Twitter. If you are going to a conference, you need to see Dan speak, high energy, high excitement and high level of knowledge. So much fun to hang out with as well!

Dan was busy at the conference, he did a workshop on Social Media, he did a session titled “Practical Usage of Social Media for Formal Learning” which he did twice and he lead a TK Chat on building community.

Unfortunately, at these conferences I don’t always get to see as many sessions as I’d like. I spend a great deal of time in the Speaker Ready room catching up with friends or doing other activities involving collaborating with fellow speaker or attendees, talking to vendors and checking out all the latest they have to offer or doing last minute preparation for my own presentation.

However, this time, I made it a point to go see a presentation called “Gamification’s Good, Bad, and Ugly: See for Yourself ” and was great. The team from SAP–Jenny Dearborn, Omar Zaki and Enzo Silva gave a great presentation about gamification. They not only explained it but allowed the attendees to participate in a gamified experience. It was well done and if you have a chance and are curious about gamification, it would be a great session for you to attend.

At one point I made it all the way to number 5 on the leaderboard but, ultimately, I did not win. Which is OK since the prize was a signed copy of my book and I already have a few copies of that:)

The next day I was busy doing some filming. ATD is creating an online asynchronous class about adult learning and they asked if I’d answer some questions and tell some stories so that the learners could hear from some more seasoned folks (read “old”). It was a great deal of fun answering questions and talking about learning and development. I am eager for the course to be released. Look for it around the ATD ICE conference.

And on top of all that, I learned there is even an app to replace the old wooden slate. It’s not the same (no clack sound) but it’s niffy none-the-less and you don’t have to carry the big slate with you all the time on location.

I also spent some time cruising the expo floor with Marc Rosenberg and Allison Rossett. Allison really enjoyed playing table top tennis at of the exhibitor’s booths.

I also caught up at the Adobe booth with colleagues Allen Partridge and Pooja Jaisingh. Pooja made the trip all the way from India and I thought I had jet lag. We had dinner at a great Italian place and I had a chance to catch up with Joe Ganci and met Josh Cavalier. We had a great discussion at dinner.

Also, Tony Karrer had the great idea to create a meet-up for bloggers of elearninglearning. It was a great time putting names with faces and talking to all those wonderfully insightful and fun bloggers.

One of the favorite things I like to do at conference is catch up with alumni. This time I got to have lunch with Kelly Harrison who now works at Ford doing some really neat technical stuff and I had dinner with Jason Hiltabidel who works not too far from Bloomsburg for First Quality and he is transforming their training program into one of the coolest training programs with simulations, QR codes and other innovative elements into one of the coolest I’ve seen. I am begging him to write up a case study on the cool stuff he is doing.

Kelly and I right before lunch.

Catching up with Jason.

On the last day of the conference, I sat in on a session called “Games, Activities, and Energizers for Live Online Training” with Kassy LaBorie and Thomas Stone. They did a great job providing insights into how to get your learners motivated.

I also presented myself and afterwards caught up with two delightful people–Coline Son Lee and Diane Smith. And, yes, talking to those two is like watching a tennis match…but a great match.

Finally, I was able to catch the final keynote by Katie Linendoll. Whenever I keynote, I don’t like to be the last one of the conference so I try to go to the last keynote whenever possible. It was worth the wait.