Thursday, April 16, 2015

The story of how I got to speak at #LT11UK….

….. begins in the Summer of 2010.

I was speaking on the telephone with the fantastic @juliewedgwood on the subject of my progress with using learning technologies since attending LT10, when she suggested that @DonaldHTaylor may be interested in the story as a potential session for LT11… I joked about this…. mulled it over…. dropped Don an email….

… and so it came to pass that at 1400hrs on Day 2 of Learning Technologies 2011 I found myself co-facilitating a session entitled ‘Taking the next steps‘ with @simbeckhampson

I remembered the presentations at LT10 being broadly broken down into 2 types:

The sage on the stage with a pocket full of Bullet Points.And the ‘guide by your side’ with a pocketful of interaction and activities.

It will probably come as no surprise to you to hear that the content of the latter still resonates with me today and indeed Julie Wedgwood (who has become a friend and has delivered that same session back into my organisation for me) falls into that category.

It was that same impact that I wanted to have on those delegates who were kind enough to attend my session at LT11. Here are the simple steps that I took in planning and preparing my session.

Given that my session was about my ‘journey’ over the past 12 months I thought it would fit quite nicely into a calendar format.I identified 12 tools that I had used over the preceding 12 months and slotted 1 of these into each month, which then formed the basis of a PowerPoint deck.I asked my friend Sam, to create a desktop calendar from my PPT slides and then ordered 100 of them

Share photos on twitter with Twitpic

I added some autotweets to each of the slides order to feed the #LT11UK Twitter backchannel.Given the target audience for my session I anticipated that many of them might not have a Twitter account (not yet anyway!), so I set up a Text Wall (courtesy of @xlearn) to allow non-Tweeters to experience participating in a back-channel.I realised that as I had only 25 minutes to cover a 12 month period that I would not be able to cover each of the 12 months, so I created a slidecast using Slideshare which allowed me to cover each of the 12 months in greater detail due to the lack of time pressure. Here it is:

At that point it was time to put everything in the laps of the Gods and as Nike would say

The footage can be viewed here (please not that is appears that this site is still being edited (at least I hope it is) but you’ll get the idea)

The actual presentation went as I had anticipated, however the feedback I received be it  face-to-face, via the backchannel or peoples blogs was phenomenal and quite humbling. I had never thought for a second that such a ‘simple introduction’ to Learning Technologies would have pushed so many peoples buttons. Some people have commented upon the unusual, non-linear, delegate-driven presentation style that I used, others have mentioned how passionate I was…

… whatever the reason, the key factor for me was that people enjoyed it and gained some small measure of motivation of it. I wish you all the very best for your future implementation of Learning Technologie and if I can be of any help or assistance then please don’t hesitate to contact me.

On a final note a BIG “Thank You” to Julie Wedgwood for being the catalyst to me speaking at LT11 and to Don Taylor for taking a ‘punt’ on me.

Did you attend my session?

What (if anything) did you take away to action?

How is the action progressing?

Why not provide your responses in the comments box below?


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