Today began overwhelming. We entered the Grand ballroom and they announced the keynote of the day: Erik Wahl with a presentation on ‘The art of Vision’. Music started (a beautiful day by U2) a guy jumps on stage and starts painting. After the music stops he has painted a portrait of Bono. This video will give you an idea his of performance.
He also proved to be a great and inspiring presenter. His message is simple. We need creativity and passion to change and innovate. It was a great start of the day, a pleasure to witness and a real energy booster.
The largest part of the day we worked in our booth, talking to people and demonstrating easygenerator. I did another presentation on the ‘Emerging technology stage’. In between I was able to attend a session by Reuben Tozman. That turned out to be interesting. The topic was Curaytion. In his definition you have aggregation (collecting information) and then you have curation which he defines as added a story to a selection of the aggregated information. Like a museum a curator that makes a selection out of a collection of art and present it with a storyline. A great definition and I am with him all the way. But Reuben is a technology believer. He is convinced that the technology will make it possible to completely automate this process. This leads him to the conclusion that we should stop making e-Learning courses and focus on aggregating and curation information. Over time we even don’t need any human involvement anymore. Software and complex algorithms will do this for us.
And here I don’t agree. I believe that the software will improve and will become better in selecting information for us and present it to us in a coherent way. But in my opinion it will be still information or even data. It will not be knowledge and it certainly will not be a learning experience. I believe you will always need a human to moderate that information for you, give meaning to it, sometimes presenting an opinion and create a learning experience based on didactical and instructional design principles.
This was the last day of the expo. That gives me the opportunity to attend more sessions tomorrow. I’m looking forward to it.
The Learning 2019 conference
I have been to a ton of learning conferences but this will be my first time at #learning2019. I’m looking forward to it and I’m planning to report on all interesting sessions via this blog.
