If you missed this year's Learning Technologies event, then you missed a treat! It was the biggest event yet and exceeded all expectations from both the delegates and participants.

There have been some excellent reviews of the event that we'd recommend you take a look at. Buzz words to summarise the themes discussed upstairs in the conference and down on the exhibition floor include social learning,performance, mobile, games, innovation, recession, results,rapid, innovation, design,twitter and culture.

Check out the commentary: 

Congrats to Donald Taylor who did a great job in pulling the conference together. His reflections on the event - plus a link to a whole range of other reviews) can be found here. Jane Hart (together with Jay Cross) commented on the wide spectrum of understanding of social learning at the event, particularly for those where it was an untried experience - so still someway to go before we start to deliver in this area. Lars Hyland did a great summary. TrainingZone interviewed everyone they could get hold of. Clive Shepherd picked up on the great story of BT ( see below) and asked why doesn't the event use technology to engage more attendees?! You can also catch up with Learning Technologies news and gossip on Twitter at #LT10UK.

Top tips to take away

Whilst the networking is always great and it's good to spend time with like minded people who share your passions, the proof of a good conference is in what you take away and apply.

Here are some of the top tips that we picked up over the conference

Andy Jones from Thomson Reuters shared their model for developing content consisting of Subject Matter Experts (SME’s), Champions (who will ultimately deliver the learning) and e-learning consultants.

• TOP TIP for managing resources: Andy is finding it more economic in the long term to get the relevant team together in a workshop to thrash out what’s needed rather than making ad-hoc demands, especially on SME’s on an ongoing basis.

A Moodle based portal is at the heart of a centrally driven strategy with local ownership at the Ministry of Justice , hosting all training activity for 95,000 staff. The organisation wanted  to deliver greater flexibility in learning delivery to fit with busy work schedules

• TOP TIP for creating bite size learning - They’ve also created what they describe as ‘nudges’ of learning (2 minutes), ‘know-how’s’ (5 minutes) and finally courses.

David Spruzen from CMG shared their award winning story about how they overcame the challenges of implementing e-learning in an organisation with poor infrastructure, time poor staff, limited learning culture and also to engage an audience with learning disabilities.

• TOP TIP for the discouraged  - perseverance  - if CMG can do it ,anyone can!

In his own inimitable way Jonathan Kettleborough challenged L&D professionals to focus on the outputs and what really makes a difference in their organisation, while Nigel Harrison and Darrell Minards (Xerox) explained how really understanding the desired performance improvement meant that Xerox channelled their energy into the right long-term solution rather than simply ‘more training’. Darrell emphasised the need for a different set of skills for L&D professionals in developing virtual solutions.

• TOP TIP for embedding learning into busines culture - focus on performance improvement at the core - challenge the the why

Peter Butler shared BT's journey with social software to encourage staff collaboration and sharing - implementing Dare2Share in a conservative culture took planning and foresight but the results are paying off

• TOP TIP for relinquishing control - if you are implementing social learning, make sure that everyone understands their accountability and visibility of their contribution.

....to be continued!

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