ASTD 07 Introductory Session

There were two speakers to kickoff the conference. The first was the CEO of ASTD, Tony Bingham. The other was Thorton May a “futurist” – an e-learning guy that consults and teaches at a couple of different business schools.

Take away messages from their talks:

With the advent of Web 2.0 (I’m still not completely sure what Web 2.0 is…), the Web is becoming much more of a pull technology than a push. By that I mean that users are now generating content. NOT having content placed on them.

The popularity of Wikipedia, YouTube, Flickr and Myspace point toward the trend of user controlled content. It is user created, user filtered and user sorted.

How does that impact organizations?
- Liberate yourself from content control. Let the community filter and review. (for example, think about how Amazon ranks content based on user comments and rankings).
- make content more compelling. Using game/quiz shows. Personal stories (like NPR’s StoryCorps)
- It’s not as important that content is relevant. It’s more important that it’s RELEVANT.

Have to create a DEMAND for knowledge. “Learning is the information age’s vegetables.”

Interesting misc. fact: 80% of podcasts are listened to on a computer (not an MP3 player)