Finally recovered enough from my trip to AACE's E-learn this year in Las Vegas. It was one of the best AACE conferences I have attended. The conference has a huge turnout - all 1100 delegates from geographically diverse areas such as US, Canada (quite a few from Athabasca!), UK, Belgium, Germany, Singapore, Japan, Malaysia, Thailand, (large Asian representatives since there was a pre-conference symposium on E-learning Asia Day), Australia, UAE, Columbia and Mexico, to name a few. It was a truly an international conference and we all benefit from the diversity of views and ideas.

The invited and keynote speakers were one of the best groups I have encountered and I definitely took home much food for thought. Special thanks go to conference program chairs Curt Bonk, Mimi Lee, and Tom Reynolds for doing such a great job in bringing in outstanding speakers. Some of the highlights from the speakers are:

Erik Duval (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium) and Wayne Hodgins (Autodesk Inc, USA) informed us of the notion of "The Snowflake Effect".   Basically, the “snowflake effect” states that user is unique as all snowflakes are. We each have our own personality, needs, goals, constraints, wants, and interests. Erik raised an interesting point about having to deal with a bad problem in the past and now we are facing a better problem. We used to deal with the problem of scarcity: not even resources/content going round. Nowadays, at the other end of the spectrum, we are facing a (better) problem of abundance: information overload and lack of personalization. I was astonished to find out that Flickr has around 3 billion images posted while Facebook has over 10 billion images. According to Erik and Wayne, massive hyper-personalization is the answer to that. Examples such as Last.fm, Pandora, Amazon, are but a few of the examples that are adapting to the individual users’ needs and experimenting with the “snowflake effect” based on the users’ behaviors and interaction patterns.

Wayne’s presentation was even more fascinating. Not only did he incorporated the Pecha Kucha presentation technique (20 images for 20 seconds each – together he did a 6 minutes 40 seconds presentation), but he was skyping us from his yacht somewhere in South America. 

Many interesting conversations follow this session. I must say these guys did an amazing job in terms of innovation in presentation format and thought provoking ideas.

Localizing e-learning to different culture context has always been one of my interests Nobody articulated this vision with more focus and clarity than Lucifer Chu who spoke on the subject of Future of Open Education and Edutainment . His effort in developing and promoting the Opensource Opencourseware Prototype System (OOPS) is simply admirable.  I also enjoyed his talk on how we can incorporate games (and the element of fun) into our learning and teaching.

George Siemens from University of Manitoba spoke about the Blurring Roles: Participation Trends in Media and Education.  I like the fact that he used Personal Brain for his presentation instead of the obligatory PowerPoint. George’s notion about “more is different” is an interesting one and he enlightened us with the notions that “If you have three pet dogs, give them names. If you have 10,000 head of cattle, don't bother."

Dave Wiley from Brigham Young University challenged the audience with the topic on “Openness and the Disaggregated Future of Higher Education”.  I love David’s opening quote: “Your institution will be irrelevant by 2020”.  This is exactly the kind of wake-up messages we need to be hearing over and over. As educators, we are being challenged on every front and education as we know it is changing. I would recommend anyone to look at his presentation slides online.

Mark David Milliron (Catalyze Learning International) talked about "A New Generation of Learning: Diverse Students, Emerging Technologies, and a Sustainablity Challenge".  Again, the theme here is that we are change agents and what do we need to enable change to take place. Also echoing Erik and Wayne’s “snowflake effect” here is the idea that education should be adaptable and personalized. When you buy a book from Amazon, it shows you what others have bought with similar purchases. Now, how can we apply that to learning to add that human touch and make it sustainable? There are definitely a few reoccurring themes here for all the keynotes/invited talks: openness, mass personalization, change, global perspectives, and a connected world.

All in all, an excellent conference and well worth my time (not that I complain about being in Vegas. The location itself is distracting enough!). I am also happy to say that my presentation with Jon went well. In between, I also got to reconnect with old friends and socializing with new contacts. Definitely looking forward to next years’ E-learn in Vancouver!