This is the first non academic conference I've attended, and I have to admit, it's been quite an eye opener. Lots of vendors promoting and hawking stuff - in fact the line between vendor and conference attendee seemed a bit blurred. The conference is hosted by the eLearning Guild, which is a kind of professional membership organization for people in the eLearning and corporate training business.
The rhetoric and nomenclature of this community takes some getting used to. Some of it comes right out of the information technology field, but much of it also has the vaporous, confabulated quality of corporate jargon and marketing-speak. And, of course, there is an admixture of education discourse and associated buzzwords.
This not to say that there's nothing for academic librarians and other higher education academics to learn at conferences like these. If nothing else, it provides an instructive window into the hurly-burly of the education-technology commercial sector, which for better or worse is going to affect us all.
The number of education technology firms selling various applications and platforms is overwhelming. And, given estimates I've seen for the size of the market for corporate training (roughly $130 billion for North America and over $200 billion globally), this should come as no surprise. How many of these firms will be in business five years from now, though, is anyone's guess.
Clearly, we are witnessing the beginning of some big changes, especially with the ubiquity of mobile devices, and the growth of cloud computing. But there is also the same sort of feeling of constant obsolescence as there was during the dot-com boom of the nineties. There is an almost palpable sense that most of the presenters really have only the vaguest notion of where all this is going - despite their confident, techno-deterministic rhetoric.
Superficially, the general ambiance is not unlike other conferences - there are lots of people rushing about checking phones, laptops and tablets, trying to look busy and important. (Although, I must say, it was much easier on the eyes than the typical library conference.) There were also lots of breakout sessions with cool-sounding names that were anything but.
The most important conversations I had were with various vendors' representatives in the exhibition hall, who were happy to explain their applications and discuss interoperability questions. It was there, in fact, that I got the best explanation of Tin Can API that I've heard so far. The actual breakout sessions were less than helpful, with the notable exception of the presentation on cloud computing by one of the engineers for Allen Interactions, which was excellent.
http://www.learningsolutionsmag.com/lscon/content/2594/learning-solutions-2013---conference-homepage/
