Imagine you had the opportunity to design a conference from scratch, without ever having attended a conference in the past, without knowledge of what a conference actually is, without a clue as to what the expectations are of attendees at <ahem> the conference.
What would you do?
This is the challenge I’m putting out to CLO Magazine, and obviously by association, the CLO Symposium organizers for their 2010 event.
At the 2009 CLO Symposium in Colorado Springs, there are good things to report back with. There was no talk of corporate universities, competencies, Kirkpatrick’s levels of evaluation, ADDIE and thus instructional design, or ILT / classroom training for the most part. Hallelujah.
The discussions focused almost entirely on the ‘coming out party’ of informal and social learning, along with pertinent leadership opportunities for a flat-based connected workforce. It was fabulous, and I really enjoyed my time throughout the two days. (kudos to Cushing Anderson’s birds of a feather session – very engaging and interactive)
Now, the challenge for CLO Magazine the next time the conference is in the planning stages. In 2010, I’d like you to ensure every speaker (be it keynote or breakout) follow the guideline presented below:
In a world that is rapidly augmenting an all Instructor-Led (sage on the stage) approach to learning in favour of formal, informal and social learning concepts, why can’t the CLO Symposium adopt this model for the conference itself? A perfect example in 2009 was the keynote presentation delivered by Ted Hoff, VP of L&D at IBM. Whether on purpose or not, Ted spoke for roughly 20 minutes and the entire audience then became engaged in an interactive question and answer forum thereafter (and for roughly 30 minutes) that complimented his initial thoughts, and introduced new ones for everyone. In a nutshell … it was spectacular.
Imagine if every session was delivered this way. We, the attendees, would be able to engage in such rich and detailed collaborative dialogue (facilitated by the ‘speaker’) that our proverbial socks would be knocked off. Let’s drive towards this model for 2010 and act as ambassadors of an informal and social strategy, using the CLO Symposium as but one of many examples we should be employing as leaders.
(and I hope attendees are more versed in Twitter – or another micro-blogging tool – next year, because that needs to become a firm social learning extension of the CLO Symposium as well)
In a world that is rapidly augmenting an all Instructor-Led (sage on the stage) approach to learning in favour of formal, informal and social learning concepts, why can’t the CLO Symposium adopt this model for the conference itself? A perfect example in 2009 was the keynote presentation delivered by Ted Hoff, VP of L&D at IBM. Whether on purpose or not, Ted spoke for roughly 20 minutes and the entire audience then became engaged in an interactive question and answer forum thereafter (and for roughly 30 minutes) that complimented his initial thoughts, and introduced new ones for everyone. In a nutshell … it was spectacular.
Imagine if every session was delivered this way. We, the attendees, would be able to engage in such rich and detailed collaborative dialogue (facilitated by the ‘speaker’) that our proverbial socks would be knocked off. Let’s drive towards this model for 2010 and act as ambassadors of an informal and social strategy, using the CLO Symposium as but one of many examples we should be employing as leaders.
(and I hope attendees are more versed in Twitter – or another micro-blogging tool – next year, because that needs to become a firm social learning extension of the CLO Symposium as well)
