George Siemens (elearnspace & CCK08) asserts that P2P University is "foreplay when we need consummation." I think he's right. The good news is that at least we're dating. So P2P University says that it offers: "scheduled "courses" that run for 6 weeks and cover university-level topics. Learning takes place in small groups of 8-14 students. Each course package contains the syllabus, study materials and a schedule. See this page for more detail on what it is like to learn in a P2PU course. Most materials are stored on other servers and linked to - the P2PU does not want to become a content repository. Once they have been designed, course packages can easily be duplicated. This way, one structured set of materials can spawn many learning communities." Now I'm thinking a couple of things...first...having just come from the SCORM 2.0 workshop, this kind of model really tears at existing learning industry biz models doesn't it? Second, I like the small groups, the ability to copy and distribute the packages...but then comes this..."Courses are designed by someone with expert knowledge, a "sense-maker", and facilitated by a "class tutors" who is familiar with the content, and can support the group of students. Sense-makers identify the key readings, pose the big questions, and structure the content. For sense-makers the P2PU offers an opportunity to do what they feel passionately about - share knowledge. Tutors could be graduate students or amateurs with expertise in a particular field. They seek out a sense-maker to develop a course, and do most of the preparation work. Once the course starts, the tutors act as guides, facilitate discussions, answer questions, and providing feedback." And this is where George argues (and where I agree) that the model starts to fall back on the old ways. "Sense-Makers"? Really? First, sounds a bit like "Learning Shaman" or something but really feels like "teacher" or instructional designer. If the intent is to establish a peer-to-peer university (yes, just like George says - we centralize accreditation)  then wouldn't sense-makers just be the peers? Wouldn't you seek out your own "sense"? Who establishes the credentials of the sense-makers? Shouldn't the community? I'll close for now but I do want to say that I think P2PU is onto something here (and its good to see David Wiley on their Advisory Board) and I applaud their getting to this point...I just want to urge them to put out more. ;-)

(story link)This is an additional article that has spun off from Nick Carr's piece in The Atlantic Monthly, Is Google Making Us Stupid? (my post here) While I think James Bowman has done a great job with this article, I also think that Carr's article is important in that it has forced us to think more deeply about the issue of what we do. Bowman's article is really a dissection of the book which Carr used as a key resource in his article - Bauerlein's "The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future". I think what Bowman does so well is to establish a larger, richer context for Bauerlein's book. Locating both it and the author's place in a cultural context that has at times attacked the idea of the same "culture" that Bauerlein laments the demise of at the hands of YouTube, MySpace, etc. Nicely done and this should become, along with Kuhlmann's piece, a canonical referent point in looking deeply about what we do as an industry concerned with 'learning" and at least tangentially, 'education."

Phew. You guys did an INCREDIBLE job of responding to my plea for assistance. First, let me say that I hope that the family medical emergency that knocked out one of my presenters, has resolved itself in a HUGELY positive way - -there are design challenges and then there are important things right?Now, before I get to the community submissions, let me profusely thank Deborah Todd and Bob Hone - our 'in room' contributors. They both did a fabulous job and brought some amazing insights to the session. <you know its going well, when you look around the packed room and everyone is taking notes>So to recap - the challenge was to design a game that would reveal the 'ethical truth' of a person...so let's get beyond compliance training and get to actual performance right?Also let me thank the people who sent in slides <you folks are awesome and your efforts were all greatly received by the packed room!) ..and let apologize to the folks who sent in stuff that I just was not able to get to...Joe Sullivan (Web site/slides): "Finding Out Who’s Naughty or Nice?" Joe was one of the first ones to jump into the mix and did a great job - bringing us the idea of using Karma and multiple lives as a game mechanic. Sure, you could win the game in one lifetime - by being a real SOB but then that wouldn't exactly set you up well for your starting position in the next world. Alan Levine (Web site/slides): "Who the *#@% can we  Trust?"  Alan, a past ILS designer himself, brings us the latest in ethics detectors - featuring possibly the first use of canine technology in a corporate setting. Clive Shepherd (Web site/slides): "The Ethics Game" Clive's submission is well-thought out and brings up the idea of how can we apply weights to various risks/rewards in ethical situations that differ from person to person. Karl Kapp (Web site/slides): "an untitled work" :-) Karl does his typical great job and brings up the design point that the game really needs some high stakes to start eliciting hard ethical choices from people. Noah Falstein (Web site/slides): "Stealth Ethics" Noah, an amazing designer and game consultant, weighs in with an entry that trumpets one of the main and ironic themes of this challenge - namely that you may well need to hide the fact that people are actually being assessed on their ethics in order to get an accurate assessment of their ethics. Dan Bliton (Web site/slides): "Welcome back Representative Oehlert" Dan does an amazingly in-depth job in this "ripped from the headlines" exploration of ethics in a Congressional setting including possibly the first use of the word "Deontological" I've seen in a PPT deck. Dan also touches on something akin to Joe's "middle path" - this idea that there may not be a pure, ethical path for a person to follow. B.J. Schone (Web site/slides): "Designing a Game to Reveal an Individual's Ethical Qualities" I like B.J.'s idea of creating an open game where play is longer and more free-form. I also like the idea of creating an "accidental" ethical situation - something mirrored in a couple of the other presentations....OK...those are just the slides...I wanted to get those out and now I'll go and sift through all the narrative stuff I got on this...let me know if there is any problem getting to any of the slides....

I am noticing a hockey stick-like moment for ning lately - at least in my circles. Brent stood up one for our summer session on 2.0, the folks behind Corporate Learning Trends and Innovations are using it as a framework for all the good they are doing and now its even getting picked up by 'unofficial' segments of the U.S. government. Meet GovLoop. A full-on ning site designed for: "gov't employee (fed/state/local), public policy student/professor, good gov't organization,  gov't contractor with good intentions."I am really digging this particular implementation and kudos to Steve Ressler, GovLoop's founder - for going forward with this idea. I have worked for the federal government for about a decade now but as a contractor/consultant...I have only been a full-on federal employee for about 1.5 years now. I will say that one issue that  the Fed MUST address as more and more newbies like myself enter its workforce to replace the wave of retirees...is ensuring that there is powerful mentoring system in place. The U.S. federal government  - as a company to work for - is HUGE and career advancement paths and opportunities for learning and growth -while plentiful and varied - are often hard to figure out how to find and access. This is just the sort of site that could help with that.

Getting pretty psyched about this....my colleague Brent Schlenker and I, along with the great and powerful Dr. Will Thalheimer, are putting on 4 days of workshops covering everything from Web 2.0/Collaborative Learning to Immersive Learning Simulations (aka Serious Games) to Creating and Measuring Learning Transfer. We're doing it all in Washington DC from December 8-11 and we'd love to see you there.

So yesterday I posted what I thought was a fairly innocuous sentiment that I had namely, that Twitter was now more important to me than my inbox. I was a bit taken aback at  - let's just say the tenor of the responses I got. I was politely asked for more detail on that statement (which I haven't yet really provided) and I was also told that I needed "perspective" - I actually asked for more detail on that last one but haven't gotten it yet.I did want to explain a bit further since those comments really made me think a bit more about the statement. My thinking goes something like this...my Inbox has always been important but from Day One, its importance has not increased. I still get tasks, attachments, requests...all the same stuff I have always gotten in my Inbox since the beginning. Twitter on the other hand, started out wwaaaayyyyyy down below the Inbox in terms of relevance to my work, to my professional development, to staying connected with my peers...but that trend line took a hockey stick-shaped turn north for me about 6 months ago. Now I just came back from a conference. I can only access my work email via a Citrix client on one laptop using a CAC (Common Access Card)..so during the day, I really wasn't able to see my work email. I didn't really experience any great sense of loss. I was however, checking my Twitter stream constantly throughout the day and updating when possible. Why? Why was the latter more important to me than the former? Maybe its something to do with the just the psychological impact of the phrasing - people "follow" you on Twitter...that feels like it carries some responsibility to be follow-worthy...to give something back to your asymmetric community. I certainly don't feel any community coming out of my inbox. Maybe its the more near real-time aspect of Twitter. If there is a dynamic of asymmetric follow in twitter then email has a corollary dynamic of something like a temporal asymmetry. That is there is now definite match between your timeframe and the people sending you email.So as my inbox importance has stayed flat, Twitter's has risen and in some cases, eclipsed the Inbox. I also knew that people could call me...;-) follow moehlert at http://twitter.com

 No, not a Cannon...a Canon.Here are 2 definitions that I like:1: a rule or especially body of rules or principles generally  established as valid and fundamental in a field or art  or philosophy;2. The collection of books received as genuine Holy Scriptures, called the {sacred canon}, or general rule of moral and religious duty, given by inspiration;History has a canon. Anthropology has a canon. Most fields have those works which are considered indispensable or "must reads." Up until now, the 2.0 world has largely had a canon of definitions but Venkatesh Rao has blogged a post which starts to establish the case for a 2.0 canon of books. I know, seems a bit ironic to be proposing something as decidedly 1.0 as books as essential reference points for understanding 2.0 but there ya go.  Over there on the right is Rao's visualization of this 2.0 canon - again with the irony of creating a visualization of text-based works. I think its a good start....can you hear the "BUT" coming?Of course there are holes - the great pleasure is in finding the holes and proposing the works that will fill them. Here is my start [I'd love to hear/see your additions] (fair warning - I also include magazine articles):The Wealth of NetworksAs We May ThinkThe New Age of the BookThe Black SwanEverything is MiscellaneousThe Social Life of Information...now those are just the quick ones of the top of my head...help me with the rest......or is it just an exercise in futility to compile a list of static books that seek to describe such a dynamic phenom? Should we also have a canon for videos like The Machine is Us/Using Us, Did You Know? and anything from Common Craft? What about a canon of del.icio.us feeds or people to follow on Twitter - or does the definition of a canon reject such ephemera?

In case you haven't seen it, allow me to introduce Calliflower. Calliflower began life as a conference call tool used in conjunction with Facebook. It looks like it has grown well past that interesting start.This is definitely in the same class with GoTo Meeting but I think there are a couple of differences worth exploring. First, if you look at the pricing - they are roughyl similar. All the Calliflower pricing plans allow for unlimited participants, the difference in pricing comes in how many organizers (people who can set up calls) you want w/in your organization (for 2 organizers the annual cost is $500).I do like the features that Calliflower brings to the table like: Document sharing (yes, others do this too) Easy calendar integration via iCal. As someone running an Outlook calendar and a Google Calendar, this is very helpful SMS Event reminders - love it MP3 Recordings - Record the call either via the Web UI or your mobile phone iPhone App - Love this. This is not just the ability to dial into your call via the phone but rather a  full-fledged mobile interface to the call (screenshots here) Skype/TringMe Integration - Awesome. Mobile VOIP. ROI? Done. I guess what it comes down to with something like Calliflower - essentially a different version of a capability we already have - is not the new features but the fact that it seems that the designers started from a user perspective versus an admin or IT view. That makes it tremendously more attractive - especially when you add in the innovative mobile UI, similar pricing plans and integration with cost-saving apps like Skype and TringMe. Plus - what's the migration cost? Um...little to none. So here is a challenge for 2009..let's challenge entrenched systems who's ROI is hazy at best. Let's ask to see the work that went into selecting sub-standard, dangerous browsers like IE. Let's challenge our installed base of authoring tools, LMSs and LCMSs. Let's not go after new simply for the sake of it being new but neither should we stand by and just accept the status quo when valuable innovation passes us and our learners by.

15 ways to improve your presentations in 2009: Great list. Yes, there is some self-evident stuff but that's not shocking - more of us just need to apply these principles. I would also add, read Slide:ology. Jane Knight's Predicitions for Top Tools in 2009: Jane is the Queen of updating all of us on what is the latest tool/capability available so when she makes predicitions about which ones will hit in '09, might be worth a listen. Time's 50 Best Websites of 2008: Yeah, I know, MSM rating the online world right? Still, I found some on the list that I wasn't aware of - like Trip Kick - which actually breaks down which rooms are good in a given hotel.ARCHAEOLOGY'S TOP 10 FINDS: Yes, this is a personal fav. :-) Deal with it.  Instructify has a couple of great, list-laden post. This one includes Best Books of 2008 and 77 Colorful Words. This one has rules for making a good first impression and things they need to teach in high school.  Enjoy!

Apple Introduces Revolutionary New Laptop With No Keyboard

So I feel really very remiss about not blogging so long. Oddly enough, its not how I used to feel. "Back in the day" ...like a year ago...when I'd have a couple week hiatus from my blog for whatever reason, I'd feel guilty in a production sense - like I hadn't been kicking anything out and just letting ideas pile up and not get to them. Its different now.I have really become quite addicted to Twitter (see graph, courtesy of Tweetstats). It didn't start out that way for me...when I first looked at Twitter, I Saw a bunch of "going to the store" and "I'm sad" kind of Tweets (that's what you call the micro-posts you put out on Twitter) and I really didn't want to keep track of all that. Now however, Twitter really seems to have hit an age where it is incredibly interesting. To be sure the "going to the store" crap is still out there but I have a higher tolerance for it and a better understanding of how to filter it. I say I have a higher tolerance for it now because it is usually mixed in with really great, thought-provoking posts from people I respect and I'll take a couple of "store" Tweets from them - its a positive ROI. On the filter side, I'm also learning the gentle art of the "unfollow" - that is electing to stop getting updates from a particular person in Twitter. "Follow" is what you do when you want to track what someone else is tweeting. There is a whole emergent layer of behavior that is being mapped out in real-time as people explore and probe at the edges of this new social environment. What is acceptable? What is not? Is it rude to unfollow? How about "locking" your Twitter account so you actually have to approve people who want to follow you?Back to my feelings...Twitter is both a powerful and dead-on simple intake and output medium. 140 characters...that's it. Gotta love constraints for forcing creativity. So instead of blogging, I have been pusing a lot of stuff out via Twitter - stuff that I would be hard-pressed to make into a whole blog post. I've also been getting a great deal of feedback from that stuff that I sent out too. So much more feedback than blogging...I think that's really a key to the addiction is the immediate feedback...the feeling of actually being "in" a conversation instead of the monologue that blogging can feel like. So I am going to try to blog more again...there is ROI in the longer form but if you really want to jump into the conversation, then follow me on Twitter. :-)P.S. I've posted before (1,2) about the insane number of Twitter tools that are now available - with more and more coming online and a ridiculous pace. There are even a number of Twitter "How To's" coming online like this one from Webware.

  Now this is how you mobilize a conference. TED has worked with VenueM to create a great iPhone app (launches iTunes) that lets you access a truckload of content from the past and present TED conferences (content not yet created is not available). The app includes video and audio and the ability to bookmark and "share" - via email. My one little wish would be that the "share" would include the ability to push favorites to social networks. Now this is thinking. I mean TED is clearly a diff animal...$6,000 a year for 'conference membership'? You have to apply for membership. That's a lot of process and a lot of money but the quality is undeniable. I mean I think we've all watched at least one TED video and just been inspired by it right? How many times has that happened to you at other conferences- where you walk out of sessions just inspired to your core to do better, be bolder?The trick though is that TED also gets it...they carefully engineer their face-to-face experiences BUT they also release tons and tons of content and this iPhone app is just the latest step in that regard. Wow. What if conferences really carefully thought about how to engineer some amazing experiences for their attendees? What about that? What if "amazing" or "inspiring" was your baseline metric for an attendee's experience? What if you gave away so much of the content of the conference that #1 people could see what kind of F2F experience they were missing and #2 you actually created a vibrant and interested community around your conference? What if, when you posted all that content....you offered no less than 4-5 ways to actually download that content and oh yeah, users can rate and comment on that content as well and you embed the capability to share that content through an array of social networks?What if.....

So, I want to try and make sure that I have a complete picture of what is considered to be all the components of our little industry.I'm interested for a couple of reasons, not the least of which is to see the variety of opinions that are coming in. I asked this question earlier on Twitter and some of the answers are below.One of the other reasons is to better understand how change might flow or be stopped as it tries to ripple across our little pond. I'm still developing this thought but I'd love your help. I'll include what I already have below and I'd hope you'd add what you find to be missing. Thanks! (Oh and please feel free to suggest larger/Meta categories)                                                                                                (photo attribution) Components: Product Vendors Higher Ed/Degree Programs Gurus Critical Analysis Design Concepts Clients Designers Developers Conferences Expo Stages Wireless Locations Social Media Speaker pools Pre-conference input Traditional lecture setups Consultants LEARNERS CLO's Physical Locations Classrooms IT Access Locked down desktops Tensions Academic vs. Corporate Strategy/Vision vs. Front Line Upper Mgt vs. Training Dept Professional Organizations Certifications I should also include Harold Jarche's excellent post on the eLearning business

(Link)"The issue here is the loss, for the public, of a certain kind of memory: the memory of cultural, social, and political history of human timescales, the memory that not so long ago things worked differently, and that the present may have looked very different itself. Experts like Krugman and Nesse are, by definition and training, not participants in the humanities game of memory, comparison and synthesis: rather, they are experts. Experts, like the fox of Isaiah Berlin, track down the single series of facts towards knowledge. They come out of laboratories, where they have performed minute studies of a single experiment where terms like "promiscuous" and "chaste" are fixed as a supposition of the game. Experts judge the workings of the brain by the newest findings, not by comparison with Aristotle or Machiavelli. Hedgehog intellectuals, by contrast, agglomerate and compare: this definition of good behavior with those five more relative or strict versions that societies have enforced at different times; the perspective of gender studies with that of sociology. Their training in the humanities acquaints them with thinkers classical and modern; it teaches the keen eye for other cultures, the rapid absorption of information about pamphlet and canvases in everyday time. Hedgehogs generally are made not in laboratories but in libraries, where they have learned to compare dictators and democracies across time and space, dealing with the primary texts of alien societies - learning, that is, from the natives on their own terms. Hedgehogs are assimilators, and they’re friendly with the locals. Lately they do not come out of the libraries so much, and the forum is brimming with foxes."This is a wonderful article and IMHO, I think we need more hedgehogs.

So there is a wonderful conversation getting underway at Spaces of Interaction: An Online Conversation about Improving Traditional Conferences. As someone who goes to a lot of conferences, this really interests me. As part of looking around on that topic, I found this article about Webstock 2009, a conference that just wrapped up in Wellington, NZ. The post that caught my eye was one in which people were putting together the business case for attending the conference. I thought they had some nice ideas like (Oh, and keep in mind that my comments aren't directed at Webstock, which I assume is awesome but rather at us in the learning/training field and our conferences): Webstock is an unparalleled training opportunity: that's a great claim - what do we think it would take to change it to a metric? You’ll be better at your job: again - that's awesome - what's the best way to achieve that? The speakers are some of the best in the world - but they should bring relevant messages as well or else they're just marketing fodder. I'll never forget being at one conference where Rudy Giuliani was a speaker - before he was a candidate - not only was he one of the most wooden and dreadful speakers I've ever seen but he also failed to adjust his pitch one whit to map to the audience in front of him. You’ll come back better networked - this is awesome but is the conference actually deploying tools. technologies, opportunities to achieve this? Here is a crazy idea - offer a couple of stations set up using something like a CardScan business card scanner - now offer to let people use this station to scan in all the biz cards they collect and email themselves electronic copies of them before they even leave the conference. That is facilitating networking.  Webstock is run by people who care: Again, that's great and might sound superficial but there could be something deeper here as well. What if instead of having companies who's biz model is driving attendance to shows and selling booth space - we actually had conferences run by people who may have those elements as part of their model but who at base, care about the industry? So what do you think? Any hope of changing conferences at a genetic level? What would it take?

So the upshot of this article is that the NSA is joining an ongoing effort called "A-Space" within the intelligence community to share info. Its big news because the NSA is just a wee bit on the secretive side - a friend of mine who works there, never had business cards as a minor example.Beyond the fact the freaking NSA is learning how to open up and yet we still have non-classified government organizations and corporations who act like the use of these systems wold compromise their HR databases (BTW, if the use of these systems will do that - you need to hire a new IT department). Beyond that though - this line caught my eye "Political appointees and policymakers are denied access to A-Space to encourage honest collaboration among career professionals and to speed analysis." I just started wondering, if we stood up these networks in our own environments, would we have to exclude anyone to get that 'honest collaboration'? Should you be able to create your own closed enclaves within a larger corporate sphere? Maybe amongst those at your same rank or below? What about an assessment loop?I tend to think of pushing for ever more open networks so this one has me thinking a bit. Maybe some fences do make good neighbors.

Olivia Mitchell does a great job laying out what more and more presenters are going to face - if you're not already. You get to see the tops of heads and the clack of keyboards...IF..that is..the conference organizers have figured out some way to supply WiFi to the audience. WHICH THEY SHOULD!!!!Now here's the thing. I figure its going to hard enough for presenters to adapt to a living, breathing back channel - like that smoke monster from LOST - but what about trainers? Teachers?Anybody up for figuring out how a vibrant backchannel figures into instructional design? Now I'm starting to get that the whole discussion that we're having about reconfiguring conferences is converging in my mind at least, with a larger discussion about re-designing instructional design. Look at our confernces. The issues that we are bring up - how the info is presented (lecture style) - how vapid the typical assessment is (did the speaker know what they were talking about?) - is it too far of a reach to see these criticisms applied to our classes? Our training?

So I am actually generally impressed by the McKinsey Quarterly and particularly their Web site. I noticed them integrating feeds, widgets and now Twitter responses to their articles from early on. The other thing that is nice about McK Q is that it is one of those publications that goes over well with the folks upstairs. MCKQ focuses on corporate issues and they have a certain cachet when I can walk into the boss and say "see. I told you this would be important." HBR works too. I also love the fact that they footnote their stories. In this article, they lay out what they consider to be "six critical factors that determine the outcome of efforts to implement these technologies." They are:1. The transformation to a bottom-up culture needs help from the top. 2. The best uses come from users—but they require help to scale.3. What’s in the workflow is what gets used. 4. Appeal to the participants’ egos and needs—not just their wallets. 5. The right solution comes from the right participants.6. Balance the top-down and self-management of risk.From my experience, that's a pretty spot-on list.  #3 is especially important...particularly say if you happen to work in an organization whose age demographic skews older and need strong ties between what you are proposing and what they are already doing. I have this image in my head of leading a group of people thru a fog bank along a mountain path and they are help together by a thin line - that line connects all the crazy stuff I'm talking about to their reality - break the line and you lose their support.

(link)This is a really interesting article about differences in the ways that young boys and girls learn and process language. "Some careful consideration needs to made of instructional implications for boys given some of these new discoveries. Learning by listening and learning by reading are not synonymous; route-congruent factors(listening - oral presentation, reading - written response) may need to be considered when a learning gap or frank underachievement is seen, and an insistence on the availability of auditory-visual supports (reading along with books-on-tape, detailed handouts for lecture courses) should be a requirement of every classroom."Take a read for yourself - I need to dig deeper into some to the other resources mentioned in the piece - but am I alone or does this give anyone else pause about how we think about instructional design? Does anyone else wonder what else we may be missing? Anyone? Anyone?

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10cCNBC Gives Financial AdviceDaily Show Full EpisodesImportant Things w/ Demetri MartinPolitical HumorJim Cramer

Wow. At least it hasn't been a whole month. In my defense, I have been a wee bit busy since I last posted. Saw some great stuff at the Federal Consortium for Virtual Worlds conference, the TTI/Vanguard re:Learning conference, trying to squeeze in time to co-write a book, see my family, do my day job oh and sleep every now and then. So, sheesh, I don't even know where to start. I will say this - my short take on virtual worlds and social media based on the interactions I've had over the past month is that #1 SoMe is well on its way to enterprise mainstream and #2 there is sufficient heat around virtual worlds for the enterprise that I believe we'll see a big uptick in exploration and adoption over the next 12-24 months.I will also bang this old drum on both these items - that if we FAIL to think differently about the learning opportunities that we can dedsign using SoMe and virtual worlds then we would be outright stupid to expect any kind of enhanced ROI from those activities. OK...just so you know, while I've been quiet on the bloggin front, I have been pinging away on the Twitter front. You can always catch me here. I also wanted to try out Wallwisher, which I think is pretty cool so check it out below:

 So when have you ever paid a couple hundred dollar registration fee to hang out in a fairly intimate setting with the likes of Will Wright, Brenda Brathwaite, and Vint Cerf not to EVEN mention hanging with the likes of @rasebastian, @mrch0mp3ers, @oxala75, @busynessgirll, @quinnovator, @peterasmith, @mkfrie, @koreenolbrish, @smartinx, @RVAfoodie, @spydeesense and @wwickha1? (sorry if I am missing people - and I know I am)Well the Innovations in e-Learning conference really delivered. Super awesome shout out to @chrisstjohn  for his UNBELIEVABLE work in getting truly world-class speakers. The Twitter back channel was also in full effect and be sure to check out #iel09 for the archive of tweets. There are a number of really good blog posts already summarizing the conference and I'll link to those below, I did want to pass along some of my general impressions though: Wow, what an engaged audience. Really. Even if this conference didn't have the largest percentage of people Tweeting (that award probably goes to 3DTLC), it was an incredibly engaged and interested audience. Great speakers. Seriously, when Vint Cerf got to the part in his talk when he mentioned that in his  free time he was working on re-building TCP/IP so that it would work at interplanetary distances or when Will Wright blew threw his keynote, explaining his game design process, at an insane pace-shattering the Twitter API along the way-this was classic stuff. Great logistics - Kelley Shillingburg and the George Mason Team had it all working from WiFi access to food/drink to parking...never underestimate the power of those details to wreck an otherwise great time. No selling. Now I'm not talking about an expo floor, I actually like those..I'm talking about the fact that I can't remember seeing one speaker that I came away from their talk thinking "well at least I know what their company sells" as the main point.    At least one pre-con workshop that actually produced something. Mine didn't but that's my fault not my attendees.Brenda Brathwaite's workshop actually produced game design storyboards that were then put out for a popular vote but also a "critic's choice" judged by Brenda, Alicia Sanchez and Will Wright. I love this idea of actually producing something. I made the mistake of not making sure that everyone coming to my workshop knew to bring their computers so we could actually walk people thru some Social Media exercises - my bad, will re-configure that for next year. An informal talk at the GMU coffee shop also resulted in the creation of the Black Swan Society (stop by and join!)  - dedicated to the sharing of ideas around Black Swans that can impact our learning world. Thanks truckloads to my brother from another mother Aaron Silvers (@mrch0mp3ers) for setting this up. Also kudos to the attendees like @koreenolbrish who weren't afraid to go up to Robert Scoble  after his session and say thanks but maybe you missed the mark a bit with that one...he knew it and was gracious about getting less than positive feedback (the guy is some kind of bizarre carbon-based information processing machine)...and yes, hi Peter (@peterasmith)! So that's it, a great conference for not a lot of money, great conversations (still ongoing) and some amazing interactions with people you never think you're going to meet (did you know Will Wright and I are both from Atlanta?).  Well done DAU and well done GMU. Blog posts (please help me and add others in the comments):IEL09: 12 take-awaysIn the Middle of the Curve: Wendy did AMAZING work live blogging much of the conference! My Conference Recap: Innovations in e-LearningMeeting your IdolsConferencing Reflections