DevLearn has been a great experience this year as expected! The theme this year, creativity, was woven through all of the keynotes as well as many of the sessions that ran concurrently for three days. If you are an Instructional Designer or Technologist, you should strongly consider attending this conference. It's filled with new ideas, interesting perspectives, and a whole lot of learning-nerdy people to spend your day happily talking about your passions: coding, learning, instructional objectives, cool ways to create graphics, data and analytics about learning, virtual classrooms... and on and on. Awesome!
The keynote presentations were also from creative areas: Penn Jillette the amazing magician, Maxwell Planck from Oculus Rift, Tony DeRose from Pixar, and Karen McGrane from Bond Art & Science. Each of these fascinating presentations focused on things that explored the notion of developing and using creativity within constraints. Penn Jillete talked a lot about being true to a story by allowing the participant to build it in their own imagination with your guidance and the lie that is the truth of a story. Maxwell Planck introduced us to a new way of thinking about looking at the world. It is an interesting idea that one can exist in the real world at the same time as ring immersed in in another experience. Those who are deeply into immersive games might not find it hard to understand this idea. Tony DeRose talked about how things that seem unconnected to each other in the traditional sense or the 'school' sense are actually part of the same thing. He demonstrated this by showing us how some of the best and most interesting art to come out of Pixar is actually only possible because of math that we started learning in our high school years. People don't usually connect art and math together but at Pixar they are dependent on each other. Karen McGrane spent time with us talking about delivering experiences in a thoughtful way thinking about the content in a way that will allow us to deliver a better experience paired with design and delivery details to make the content truly responsive and potentially tailored to the learner's context.
The interesting thing about becoming a part of this community is the way we build upon each other's successes. Just like the keynotes, many of the participants in this conference commented and demonstrated their commitment to thinking about every day things in a new way, creatively solving problems, and collaborating with both very experienced learning people and new ones. This is a key feature of the conference. People came here from all over the world (seriously, some even came from Singapore!) to work together! Even those attending solo had a way to connect with others so as not to eat alone, run alone or think alone (unless they wanted to of course!)
This conference is an affirmation of our professionalism as learning professionals and is a call to continue to build our community and exercise our ability to work together to solve problems. We may not be performing surgery or deep strategic planning - we are teaching it! Our responsibility to develop learning in a way that will allow adults everywhere to grasp their work and their own responsibilities is an important one and we will have to be more and more creative as we go along in order to help build a better working and living community, wherever we are.
