Advocating for an industry

I had the pleasure earlier this week of spending some time in the company of Dr Allen Partridge. 

Allen was in San Francisco yesterday presenting to ASTD members and guests for a full day workshop (that I missed half of due to Jury Service!) and a Chapter meeting in the evening.

Allen works for Adobe and his title is Senior Technology Advocate for eLearning. What a cool title.

The job is even cooler.

He gets to listen to what the world of eLearning development folks want and need from their vendors and explain all that to the team at Adobe.

He also gets to listen to what the team at Adobe have built and how they see it being used and he gets to explain that to the eLearning developer community.

So Allen was the perfect person to show us around the new capabilities that have been built into Captivate 8 and he spend the workshop focusing on responsive design and the ways that with the new tool you can build a course that looks good on a mobile phone screen, a tablet and a laptop or desktop sized screen as well.

For me however the evening was the most fascinating. 

Because here he shared what he was hearing in those advocate conversations he has been having all around the world. I tweeted out a few notes  and they are captured here.

But the overarching theme, as I saw it, was this:

• The learners of today and certainly the learners of tomorrow want to learn
• ELearning designers want to create great and effective eLearning
• Companies need their workforces skilled up in effective, scale-able and cost efficient ways
• And the technology is just about catching up with those needs, despite it's attempts to trip itself up again and again.

What exciting times we live in.

Happy Learning