Blogging Doesn't Hurt

So at yesterday's keynote address at the DevLearn 2008 conference, they started out by asking everyone in the audience to turn to someone else and tell them what they learned from the day before. My comment to the person in front of me was that "Blogging doesn't hurt!"

He looked at me with a rather puzzled look and I explained that, as someone new to blogging, it can be intimidating and that some people find this "painful". That seemed to be a good enough explanation for him. He even asked if he could use that in his work. I agreed. I think this is something people need to know. It's not scary, nothing bad is going to happen when you push the "publish post" button.

And in case you were wondering who the gentleman was that asked to use this phrase, go check out this blog: http://elearningtech.blogspot.com/. The man's name is Dr. Tony Karrer and he is the kind of exceptional elearning leader that I was hoping to find in coming to DevLearn this year. He has an amazing collection of elearning blogs and posts very thorough and relevant information here. I will definitely be checking this out regularly and will have new resources to explore for quite some time to come.

If you'd like to hear him in person, he will be presenting at next week's Corporate Learning Trends and Innovations 2008 online conference. It's free and I highly recommend Mr. Karrer's presentation, Work Literacy - Implications for Learning Professionals. Check out the information here http://www.learntrends.com/. It's co-hosted by another favorite resource of mine, Jay Cross, and George Siemens of the Learning Tech Center at the University of Manitoba.

I don't know if I will have time to check in to the other sessions offered, but will be following these thought leaders for some time to come. Makes that $1095 all worthwhile. :)

I'm not crazy!

OK, so I've been thinking about blogging for a while. You know, being a web 2.0 fan, you should eat your own dogfood and all. So, thanks to some friendly goading from the speakers today at DevLearn, I finally decided to just jump in and start. That should round out my web 2.0 work as I've adopted just about everything else already!

I've been at the DevLearn 2008 conference (day 1 today) and finally found people that believe, like me, that the current corporate learning and development environment is truely dysfunctional and I wasn't just imagining things. What a relief! I'm really not crazy - well, at least not about that.

However, it does look like things are really as hard as I had imagined they would be about getting learning groups and the corporations (or any groups, really) they reside in to take the leap and really embrace informal learning, web 2.0 or pretty much anything outside of the current SOPs.

I'm hoping that the types of people that I've seen and met here at DevLearn 2008 can help make that culture shift happen. At least I know I'm not alone now!