ASTD Lessons Learned: February 3rd, 2006

I had all intentions of posting regularly but between evening activities and getting sick, it didn't happen.

Here are a couple of insights from the last couple of days of the conference:

• Allen Communications gave a talk about their e-learning courses for Avon Cosmetics. Did you know that Avon gives out prizes for every 30 online courses that their learners take? I'm not necessarily saying that we should do it, but I do think that it's an interesting idea for incentive.
  
  
• I later went to a talk about Usability and Online development. Here are some interesting points from that talk.
• People read online at 300 words per minute. that's about 25% slower than reading print materials. Also, readers online tend to scan not read text. More info
  
• The most preferred fonts for online reading are verdana, georgia and arial. (times new roman is meant for reading on paper, not screen). More info
  
  
• Helen and I attended a session about podcasting. Helen and I talked about various ideas of how to bring podcasting to BFAM - but I leave it to Helen to bring that discussion back to the office. There is one practical thing I learned from the experience - there's a free basic audio editing package available from Audacity, which will be very useful if we continue to do Flash animations with narration.
  
  
• We attended Mary's session. She did a fantastic job! Very professional, cheerful and knowledgable (not like it was a surprise). After interfacing with so many people from more traditional industries, it was so wonderful to remember how unique and mission driven our company is. I have to admit, I got teary at some point! But it was really nice to remember how important our work is.
  
  
• At this point, most of you know that I got food poisoning our last night in Denver. Mary and Helen were amazing care takers. I like to think of myself as fairly independent but I really needed their help and am extremely grateful that they were there and so willing to take care of me.