IABTI Conference

My colleagues and I recently submitted a paper/presentation for the International Association of Bomb Technicians and Investigators (IABTI) Conference. This was their annual training and technology conference. We presented on some of the training programs we are working on, and we also gave a primer on trends in the learning field.

One of the more remarkable things was a simple question asked by my colleague. Presenting to a room of about 100 people, she asked who had heard of "Web 2.0". Guess how many people raised their hands? 2. I think we picked the right audience to give this presentation to :-)

My biggest realization is that sometimes it is imperative that we get out and brief these concepts to people who may not know about them instead of hyping ourselves up by continuing to brief ourselves in the learning community. I'm not saying that learning conferences are bad...far from it. It's just that sometimes we suffer from briefing ourselves to make us appear smart, rather than reach out to those that we intend to help.