Random thoughts, by way of introduction

I attended the eLearning Guild Annual Gathering last week and have been reading about it in the blogosphere ever since. I was glad to go, and learned a lot, and am happy to join the cadre of related bloggers. While I am still new to the field, I am proud to be a part of this community of smart, innovative and creative professionals.

In particular, Brent Schlenker, Silke Fleischer and Stephen Downes gave memorable presentations on the use of 2.0 technologies. I honestly knew almost nothing about these before last week. I am eager to take a host of new ideas back to work and see if/how they fit.

Stephen Downes' presentation on Personal Learning Environments (PLEs) was remarkable. Since the conference there has been a lot of talk about it, and Stephen has voiced concern over the corporate world's apparent (duh) lack of creativity in this area. PLE's are organic, not top down, and the concept fosters the ability for people to take control of their own learning. Michelle Martin wrote a great article about this very thing.

Thanks to Brent, I now know that Google Reader exists, and how to use it, and have essentially created my own PLE by pulling in feeds from sources that interest me. Thus I have been able to keep up with the blogging about last week's Conference.

Thanks, eLearning Guild and all presenters for an amazing week - delivered on the promise to "expand your eLearning horizons".