by Alan Nelson
We have spent some time recently discussing our strategy for this Learning Technologies 2010. What is our objective in attending? Who do we want to talk to? What do we want to say to them?
We ended up focusing on identifying the simplest way of describing how we are different to everyone else. Now I think we are pretty clear about why we are different, and if the results of the most recent customer survey are anything to go by, our clients and partners are pretty clear too.
The problem is that lots of the other companies at the learning technologies exhibition use pretty similar terminology to describe something completely different. And they are not necessarily wrong, but as a group we end up confusing the hell of the visitors.
So here is my unofficial advice on how to sort the wheat from the chaff:
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Remember that it’s all about people learning stuff. The technology has to be a means to an end and anyone who appears to have forgotten that is not worth spending time on
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Decide what you want and ask about that. What advice do you need? What would you like help with? If you haven’t heard of what they do, you probably don’t need it.
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Distrust jargon. Anyone who describes their offering as “an asynchronous distributed learning platform” deserves to be ignored.
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Plan ahead and book appointments with a few exhibitors. They will be pleased to give you time and you’ll get much more out of a few detailed conversations than many short ones.
I hope this helps. But if you do end up as confused as ever come and see us. We’ll be offering a free translation service for gobbledegook!
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