After two days of monitoring the backchannel tweets at DevLearn 2011, here are my top 20 insights. The full collection of curated tweets can be found here; you can also scan the QR code in the footer for a mobile version of this content.

1. Budgets for L&D to shift from formal learning towards performance support, informal, mentoring and social learning in the coming year; the swing could be as much as 40%.
2. A more diverse mix of learning opportunities is desired. Finding better ways to connect learners and ‘experts’ is key.
3. Collaboration, cooperation, engagement, trust, innovation, disruption, community, curation, agile, narratives, context, personalised, mobility, cloud are the new memes.
4. Approaching learning from the perspective of the learner and building everything around it. Begin by addressing the learners question ‘What’s in it for me’.
5. Break down silos of data by sharing across departments, assign specific people to instigate and don’t rely on it just happening. Too much information is being thrown away, lost or misused when, if analysed and shared could add great value. Lack of collaboration between departments is a big issue.
6. Allow employees to have a social media presence and represent the brand, trust that it will result in positive action. It requires trust and transpareny. Expect conflict, complications and disruption.
7. Faciliate more listening and questioning with learning, there within lies the real power. Less noise making. Critical thinking is the new gold standard skill.
8. Create a jargon repository and share to ensure everyone is talking about the same thing.
9. LMS platforms still a contenscious topic.
10. Curation is red hot! Find ways to make sense of content in small digestable mobilised pieces is the new challenge, less is now much more. Future technologies, especially from the tools aspect also peeked interest.
11. Relying ‘purely’ on search algorythms is no longer acceptable. Gathering trusted sources to form a collective intelligence is important. Clarity is king and Context is queen.
12. Don’t foucs on content or product, focus on (learner) experiences. Learning should be embedded in the workflow and not seen as a separate manageable function by one department. The learning strategy should be relevant to the organisations culture.
13. Gathering of knowledge is not the goal, application and how it affects behaviour change is.
14. Innovation and developments are being driven bottom up, where it’s actually needed to affect performance, support from above is encourged.
15. Gamification or gameplay mecahnics is hot, but must be goal/objective orientated. The ‘Story rules!’ Simulations should allow learners to see consequences of actions in safety.
16. Mobile learning is very hot. Focus on intimite experiences. Reiforce content, provide realtime performance support in manageable chunks. MLearning is about displacement not device. Design should be intuitive. HTML 5 is hot. Simplicity is King. Benchmark before you start.
17. Future tech excited the audience. Technology is rewiring us, old skills such as natural navigation being lost. Technology should touch people via an experience. “The way we play today will be the way we work tomorrow, TK.”
18. Education seen to be lagging behind the times, resistence to change is strong. Focus on developing creative skills early that develop critical thinking. Cloud learning is the only viable proposition for the future.
19. Less focus on the tools and more focus on the business performance. Be prepared to change and adapt as required, create a team to focus on the next technologies.
20. Solving the overload of information to derive meaning and sense is a top priority for the next generation.