Thoughts on my ASTD TK07 Sessions - Social Bookmarking and Blogging

First - want to thank Jay Cross for taking pictures at various ASTD events. He took a picture of me while I was presenting one of my sessions without me knowing (on the left). What you probably didn't know is that I'm a giant and that the room was too short.

At ASTD TechKnowledge, I did three sessions around Blogging and Social Bookmarking. One was an overview session and the other two were hands-on sessions to learn to use the tools.

If you attended one of these sessions, please keep reading all the way to the bottom…

I wasn’t as smart as Jay (write-up) to take pictures and look at my evaluations right after the sessions.

You can find the handouts at:
http://tk07.astd.org/speakerhandouts.htm

For the hands-on session, it’s best to go to:
http://elearningtech.pbwiki.com/HandoutTK2007

A few random observations -

1. The discussion in the sessions around potential uses and where to start was fantastic each time. I think people really saw the potential.
   



2. Unlike past conference sessions on eLearning 2.0, many of the attendees already knew about blogs.
   



3. Many people were very concerned about issues of regulating the quality of content and security. I’ll try to get to some of this over the next few weeks.
   



4. By in large, getting up and going on Blogger, Bloglines and del.icio.us was accomplished in 60 minutes time. That’s quite remarkable.
   



5. Software as a Service makes doing hands-on sessions quite challenging. First – between the time I had made up the handouts and the presentation there were changes in all three applications that made the notes incorrect (about two months time). Second, when your Internet connection goes down – well …
   



6. I want to commend the first hands-on group. The connection went down and the indication was it was going to take a while to get back up. So, I told everyone (who were dead in the water) that they could feel free to leave and in the meantime, we’d just sit and discuss any thoughts they had around the topic. No one left and the discussion was good (or at least I thought so). It could have been a disaster and the group really made it into something good.

Part of the reason that I wanted to do these sessions is that I truly think that these tools are immediately applicable for personal and group learning. My hope would be that the following might occur:

• Some attendees will try out reading/writing blogs, using an RSS reader (like bloglines), and/or use social bookmarking tools to support their personal learning.
  



• Some attendees decide to try to introduce using these tools in a few specific cases within their organizations.

I have no idea if any of this will happen. So, let’s get a really crude estimate of any activity.

• If you attended the session and are reading this blog post, please leave a comment (we’ll get a sense of how many people are reading blog posts and actively participating).



• If you attended any of the sessions and you either have a blog or are planning on trying out blogging, please include your blog’s URL in your comment.



• If you are planning on trying our using these tools within your organization, then let me know that. Of course, the best thing would be for you to write about it in your blog. ;)