TechKnowledge 2015 - Plans and such

It's January, so you know what that means: I'm on my way to ATD TechKnowledge (quite literally, as I'm typing this at the airport while I wait for my flight)! Once again I'll be there for the full three days of the main conference and will be trying to cover as much as I can through live tweeting and blogging. I'm also considering experimenting with recording a few videos... well, if the wi-fi upload speeds at my hotel decide to accommodate that. We'll cross our fingers for that one. I'm still not sure of the exact sessions I'll be livetweeting, but I'll definitely be covering the keynotes at the very least.

I'm also happy to be involved with two events at TechKnowledge this year:

1) E-Learning Checkup - Wednesday from 1:30-2:30pm

So this is a nifty event for this year. If you have an eLearning course that you'd love someone else's feedback on, you can bring it to this session and get 15 minutes of expert feedback, including tips and suggestions for making your course even more awesome. As weird as I feel about calling myself an "expert", I'm really excited about having the opportunity to chat with people about their courses, and I'm looking forward to seeing what cool things everyone is creating. While I'm happy to talk about anything related to eLearning, I'm probably most useful to you if you want to come up with some new ideas for graphic design, storytelling, simulations, and/or user-focused design.

2) Everything I Ever Needed to Know About Simulations I Learned From Video Games - Thursday from 10:30-11:45am

Hooray! I get to talk about video games and training simulations for more than an hour! Video games and simulations have a lot in common, both from a player perspective as well as a development one. In this session I'm going to chat about what years of gaming, as well as research in to how video games are developed, have taught me about how to write and build more effective (and more enjoyable) sims for training. Whether you create process-oriented sims, like software training, or soft-skills ones, such as coaching simulations, I'll have a bunch of practical tips for you that you can use immediately. Plus, I'm going to share some recommendations for specific video games that can teach you more about creating fantastic sims. Yup... you can justify playing games as professional development!

On a tech nerd note, this will be my first conference experimenting with using an iPad Mini & keyboard instead of my usual full-sized iPad set up. I'll likely post about the difference and how I feel about the MUCH smaller keyboard once the conference is over. So far, though, the biggest difference I've noticed is just how much lighter this setup is!

If you're at the conference, I'm looking forward to seeing you there! If not, see you on the backchannel.  :)