DevLearn 2016

Here I am again - DevLearn 2016. It's been great so far. 

Day 1: A day-long workshop focusing on interactive video. What does this mean? Interactive video means making a video more interesting than it already is. It might mean putting in a hotspot, or adding text to emphasize a point. It might mean a pause to allow for a question. 

The workshop covered a tool, HiHaHo, which sort of fast-tracks your interactive elements ("enriches" in HiHaHo language) by providing a web interface for you to add the components of interaction.

Pros: Quick and dirty results for interaction, easy to use, ideal for microlearning and informal learning.

Cons: Not suitable for high quality results, video must be edited to a high standard in order to use the product. It's more like you are "dressing up" your existing video (which should be awesome). Delivery method is unclear. Requires subscription to view. 
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Bottom line: A good use of time, although I would not use this platform to create production content. I think it's a good storyboarding tool. 

Day 2: 

AM
Attended half of the keynote, which was given by Penn of Penn & Teller. He talked about storytelling. Penn thinks PowerPoint is sort of lame and prevents human sharing. Ok. 

Next, headed over to the Expo to try and hear about Articulate 360. Too noisy in room. Could not hear. Headed over to get a cup of tea. Ended up talking to an Articulate trainer who did our training last year

After the trip to the Expo, returned to the main hall, where I hit a Camtasia session entitled, "Eight Things I Hate About your Screencast", which was based on (I assume), this article.  Since I'll be doing video soon, I wanted to see what Mark Lassoff had to say about Camtasia. That was a good use of time. He's also a good speaker. 
Takeaway not in article: Upgrade to Camtasia 9.0, it's worth it. 

PM
After Camtasia, I headed over to get some lunch. I landed myself on a chair in a random session about LRS'. Hmmm. Ok. Learning Record Store. I don't know. I was involved with my sandwich, and couldn't get a lock on this one, but maybe returning to the description and the slides or content (if made available) will jog my memory. 

I hopped over to a talk about PowerPoint. Wow. This was like a tour-de-force of everything PowerPoint can do. It was called "Eighteen Awesome PowerPoint Tricks for Effective Presentations". This guy, Richard Goring, is a great presenter and he's like some kind of PowerPoint savant. We got a nice little booklet with some of the tips, and also a good website to search on videos with more tips! Yay! 

Day 3: 

Made it over to a couple today before catching the plane. First, I went to another loud and inaudible talk at the Expo. It was about how to make your eLearning more efficient. Not much gained, unfortunately, since it was so difficult to hear. 

The next one was extremely useful - this was a discussion about how to make your videos more interactive. The focus was really on having good videos with some kind of easy to understand structure (e.g. branching, messaging). Engagement here was really focused more on making a good video, then adding into it simple elements like hotspots. This really focused largely on marketing education videos, but still, some great ideas. Link here for examples we saw in the talk. 

Thanks DevLearn! Love this conference!

eLearning Challenge #140 + eLearning Diwali Trivia Game

Well, finally got another one in. This one was a cooking analogy. I'm like 10 behind on these, but something is better than nothing.

eLearning Challenge #140 : An ADDIQuTE Kitchen

I also did something for the work Diwali party which worked out when used in a large group - teams of four. eLearning Diwali Triva Game : The Diaspora Game