My experience here started off to an interesting start last night. In a search for food our team, Sarah, Lauren, Ann, and I, were forced to eat at this appetiser bar place at the Disney Contemporary resort. While scarfing down as much food as we could, Andrew Hinton (Chief Information Architect of Vanguard) noticed we were holding our Digital Now fliers and decided to come over and chat with us. This spurred a great conversation about games and many of the concepts Lauren, Ann, and I have been preaching all year long. This was a great talk, for me at least because I think it really helped me get my mind back to the subject matter and ready for the following day. I retired to my suite on the fifth floor, while the girls left me to theirs on the eleventh. I felt lonely at first and then was soon comforted by my awesome suite, with complimentary computer with Internet access and balcony. =)
We all woke up early today to be here at 7 AM for breakfast. Afterwards we heard from a general sessions from Hugh Lee (who we met at MPI) and Don Dea, the President and Co-founder of Fusion Productions. Then Chris Anderson, Editor-in-chief of Wired, gave a great key note about the power of Niches... still trying to wrap my head around it.
Afterward I attended a really great session called "The three Cs of Value: Content, Context, and Connections," by Ellen Wagner (Senior Director of Worldwide eLearning Solutions with Adobe Systems. She was fantastic! She illustrated some of the points we've been speaking out about for years. She discussed how powerpoint was no longer acceptable and that these new learning technologies really were changing everyone's expectations. She even gave a brief talk about serious games and how fundamental they are. Needless to say Lauren and I were pretty excited. We then heard from discussion of panelists, who all supposedly were integrating eLearning solutions in their own businesses. Gah! That was frustrating unfortunately... It seems as though many business leaders are getting extremely close to grasping the concept but aren't quite there. They seem to recognize that the next generation of workers just flat out learn differently, but I don't think they've found out how to respond to that. From the sounds, they are attempting to reach out, by putting their teaching basis on the web but that just isn't enough.... You aren't reaching out to us just by putting information on the computer.... You aren't engaging us and therefor we aren't personalizing the information and not just not learning! Well that's my rant...
Another thought that I found was pretty funny was that there are so many people here that are completely amazed by facebook, myspace, and other social networking tools that most people my age take for granted. I attended another session entitled "Social Networking," and apparently business professionals really want a social networking tool for their organizations as a networking tool. There's a big talk about how if companies should work with facebook and other pre-made tools or develop their own...
We also had a great talk about the Semantic Web and Twine (look it up online). This is a new form of web browsing for Web 3.0. He talked about how at first we tagged websites with keywords(yahoo), then we developed algorithms biased on the links on the website search engines found(google), and now they are developing the next development in search engines the semantic web. The next step after this people are saying is that Web 4.0 will actually have an AI and be intelligent... weird I know...
I just finished my last keynote for the day... I believe... On Whyville, an extremely interesting concept! Yet a somewhat annoying presenter though... I believe all we have left of today is more meet and greet stuff... but I really need to go for now because Ann just told us something extremely exciting but also something I can't share here =)
Will post when I can...
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