I attended the Element K Learning Practitioners Forum at the start of June, a ½ day event in central London with some excellent speakers.

The focus of the event was e-learning and learning technologies. I’ve had a couple of people ask for a copy of my notes, who were unable to attend, or who saw my tweets and wanted to know more and so I’ve (finally, sorry!) typed up my notes here.

All of the talks were excellent;  there were a few key topics I was listening out for and I’ve paraphrased the bits from those talks I especially took away and added some of my notes to them.

NB: Quotes are in “double quotes” my notes are in italics.

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I’m in the process of slightly re-focussing/re-branding the socialtech world… I thought I’d take 10 mins and pull words from other web agency sites (some marketing, some creative, some techy) as part of forming an idea of how other businesses describe themselves… where there were variations of the same word (eg delivering delivered) I used the most common spelling.

I then took this list into wordle to get another perspective, the larger the word the higher the frequency it showed up in my list.

Marketing is the clear winner.

I also thought it was interesting that 3 sites use “useable” which some people would argue isn’t a real word…

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Search for or visit any company page and you’ll see a new option to “follow” a given company for updates to their company page.

Interesting that the “All employees” option will only be available to paid up members, but is free for now.

Uses?

If you wanted to work for specific organisations, you can now subscribe to them to receive an email when they post a new job (assuming they used LinkedIn to do so of course).. probably has some uses for recruiters too.

One idea that I’d suggest to any organisation looking to recruit, is to monitor if anyone is following your company page – I think it’s interesting that you could see potential candidates before posting a job advert.

Do you think this is a useful feature? I can’t see much use in it yet (apart from recruitment), if it published the news items into people’s feed it would be more useful.

See also: LinkedIn Blog about following company pages

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I went to Internet World 09 and I was really disappointed, I found it hard to say why I didn’t really like it.. apart from the poor quality of the talks I attended… now I think I know what it is.

It’s just such… an OLD and dated format, its interruptive, its all about sales and not content.

He who pays, talks – if I go to see someone talk, I want them to be an expert in their field, not just a guy with a chequebook.

Money generating not knowledge generating – it’s about selling stuff, not adding value… ok I cringed writing that, a bit of a cliche but it’s so true! If I look back at all the events I liked and hated this is the key difference

Why do we need it? – a conference, about the “internet world”? Stop and think for a minute, erm… isn’t there a better way?

Ok, I do get that it’s handy if you’re a huge product or a big buyer. Personally, looking for ideas, innovation, inspiration… it’s all about the smaller niche ones like:

ContentStrategyLondon10 – superb, an intimate gathering on a specific topic. Lots of good networking, 3 excellent speakers (and beer).

TEDxCDF – outstanding, inspiring speakers by invitation. It expanded the mind and gave me something back for my time. (Great Guardian write up)

BarCampBournemouth2 – with the almost anarchistic approach that anyone can speak, you build your own conference program and interact with almost all the other delegates.

Plus by not going, I’ve probably saved about a tree in brochures I’ll never read…

I asked on twitter if it was just me who thought it wasn’t worth my time:

“I’m bothering, but I’m not optimistic based on last year!”

“Yeah it seemed a bit s#!% to me too.”

“Not Definitely no need.”

“I’m not doing IW, did it last year. Too corporate, so many cheaper ways of doing the same things, not as handy as the A4Uexpo.”

So go forth, find the small get-togethers and un-conferences… expand your mind. Don’t give up your time to be sold at.

What do you think? Did you go to IW10? Was it any good?

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Thanks to everyone who attended #bcbomo2

Numbers were up on last year (73 signed in attendees + more who mooched around)

More useful talks on the sunday (almost all slots were full both days)

We were able to provide Saturday lunch (thanks to RedWeb) and Sunday breakfast (thanks to the “breakfast club” The G3 show, Squizzle App and BCS YPG)

A HUGE thank you to our venue sponsors C4L and Fibreband and maybe see you all next year…

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