I am NOT a Meeting Planner

A couple of weeks ago, I received a postcard promoting a couple who could provide an entertaining and motivational presentation for my next MEETING.

In my lexicon, meetings are business-oriented, have a defined agenda of topics to be addressed and decisions to be made. Meetings lead to action items.

ASAE Tech Conference

I’m feeling nostalgic for the technology conference.  I was honored to have been invited to be a content leader last year, but a scheduled review of one of our live events prevented me from attending this year.  After having met fellow ASAE and The Center members during the eLearning Conference and via other contacts over the last year, I would have loved to have been in D.C. to connect in person and gather all the knowledge my brain could absorb!

So I’m following what I can about the conference via the Web — this entry by David Sobol in his Associated Knowledge blog for example. 

And being grateful that if I had to miss the conference because I had to be someplace else, that at least that “someplace” was Miami.

View from the Outside In

Jeff Cobb offered a great presentation at the recent eLearning Conference hosted by ASAE and The Center, and posts about trends in association elearning in his blog, Mission to Learn.

During my attendance at the conference — and I made nearly every chat and session –I was impressed by the range of what associations are doing educationally, online.  I was also amazed that there was so much talk and curiosity about the newest wave of online options — wikis, blogs, social networking, virtual worlds… especially Second Life, which I consider one of the leading-edge playspaces on the Web, populated primarily by geeks (I mean that in the most positive way, considering myself a “wannabe geek”) and entrepreneurs.

What surprises me about this is that from what I can tell, associations — by and large — are still struggling with the best ways to get buy-in from leadership to get into or expand online learning options, strategize those options, sort out the possibilities, figure out the budgeting, and then tackle the implementation of it all.