We're back from Learning Technologies, unscathed and enlightened. Amidst a heady buzz of caffeine and an overdose of Quality Street, the six-strong team from HRzone and TrainingZone had many insightful and productive meetings, met several TZ members and recruited a few more too. The exhibition floors were buzzing, albeit a bit more on the first day than the second, but there was definitely a palpable sense of energy and expectation; everyone was there to make the most of the exercise, to learn and educate in equal measures. I'd say this was probably the best event I've been to so far since becoming editor of TrainingZone, in terms of what I got out of it, both as an exhibition and a conference.

The balance between the different subject matter of the talks was perfect, an equilibrium of theoretical futurism and real-world application, from Dr Chris Atherton's ruminations on the death of PowerPoint (articulated far differently from your normal Death by PowerPoint, er, presentation) to Steve Wheeler of University of Plymouth's mind-blowing talk about elearning 3.0 and smart technology. For those who weren't there, relive the experience in our Cover It Live pane on the right hand side of the front page of the site. The only minor downside (apart from my daily sugar crash having gorged on the copious amounts of promotional chocolate available at every turn), was the quality of the wi-fi signal. This is such a common thing, it's become a long-running joke, but one you grudgingly have to accept. As my dongle was being temperamental, I ended up covering much of the conference using my iPhone. Not ideal as I have big, clumsy fingers but still a bacon-saver in the circumstances.

The iPad didn't seem to have quite the ubiquity/visibility that it did at Online Educa, although cloud-based training solutions and apps were quite high on most suppliers' agenda so you can assume the iPad was a major area that they would be targetting. (With a hard drive of only 16 Gb you know the iPad will be more successful using a cloud computing training model).

Moving on, we come to the opening of the TrainingZone shop; like Andy Gray and Richard Keys losing their jobs, or Piers Morgan leaving the UK, I didn't think it would happen quite so soon but I'm very glad it has. Have a browse around here. Doesn't it look great?

Until next time...