One week after this year’s ASTD International Conference & Exhibition  I thought I would take a moment for a little reflective learning and lessons learned.

Importance of Pace and Energy Conservation

From years of conference attendance and presenting, I have learned how important it is to pace myself and monitor my own energy. As a participant, this means not trying to go to every single session, meet every possible contact, and visit every exhibition booth. Early on, I learned that with this strategy I soon met with diminishing returns. Much better to attend a few sessions that are right on target for my current interests and practice issues, take some breathing room after to make notes and think about application than to scurry off to the next session.

Similarly, I find it much more useful to have quality interactions with people, than work on quantity. I found some wonderful connecting places and opportunities to share resources with the folks who I made the time to get to know.

Whole Person Learning in Action

Pace & Energy in Facilitated Learning

Attuning to pace and energy in the learning sessions is especially paramount on long conference days. No matter how ground-breaking your content, if you haven’t engaged participants energy and ability to make meaning of your content you are dead in the water in the first five minutes. The sessions I attended that were most effective respected the basic human need for whole person engagement, without reducing the experiential learning to a “dog and pony show.” In other words, the learning experiences need to be relevant. This is not new news, and from the sessions I participated in it is clear that even at this stage in our practice and understanding we all need to be reminded of it.

Emerging Technology & Learning

Perhaps the biggest trend at the conference was the power of social media to help us connect, keep us connected and share key learning. Throughout the conference many participants tweeted from sessions, giving people who could not attend the specific session (or the conference at all) a chance to “get the high points.” People were tweeting across session rooms, as well, commenting about what they loved (and didn’t love) about their experience. Twitter also served as the bulletin board for spontaneous gatherings (Tweet-ups), Exhibitor give-aways, and program updates. The blessing of this is engagement; the potential “curse” is that rich content and experiential learning cannot always be reduce to a140 character limit.

I highly recommend checking out the #astd10 twitter stream to get a taste of the content, as well as some great tips on Chicago pizza and sights seeing!

Relational and Social Learning

Walking the Exhibition Hall, I was also excited to see all of the new platforms available using technology to enhance learning. The biggest trend I see is the use of multiple platforms to support informal, incremental and just-in-time learning. Many, such as bloomfire.com have designed programs that are embedded in, or facilitate the creation of communities of practice. I am heartened to see this combination of relational and social learning, with content, and skill development.

The future of training and learning looks bright. It is social, interactive, engaging, improvisational and sometimes even playful!