Outstream Consulting

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First day at BETT

Monday, May 10th, 2010

Today was my first day at the 2010 Bett show and it has been a day of highs and lows.

The lows started at the outset; fresh snow had fallen overnight and there was some concern whether the bus would run on time. As it turned out the bus got to London less than 1 hour late which was great considering the conditions and a credit to the driver. In the end I was a lot luckier than than many travelling from parts of Yorkshire or Scotland, who had a far more horrendous journey due to the weather.

The highs were the people I met today. It is always great to meet other proletariat with a passion an interest and insights into the world of ICT in schools. My thanks today go to Richard and Alison Allen, Terry Freedman and Bill Gibbon for sharing their insights. Thanks also to VitalCPD, NAACE and Outstream Consulting for their time and presentations.

A final low for the day and this really hacked me off was the mix up at the hotel. I arrived at the hotel Id booked with the intention of booking in, dropping my bag and then going to the TedxOrenda meeting. On arrival at the hotel, however, the hotel was closed for maintenance and they had to book me into a different hotel. Getting to this hotel, which was a nice one, wasted a lot of time and meant that I could not get to the TED event. Thanks to the power of Twitter , however, I was able to follow key points of the speakers presentations.

May 10th update;

So, four months on and looking back at BETT 2010, was it worthwhile attending? Although I felt that this year’s BETT show lacked the display of new innovations that I like to see at BETT, I do still feel that it was worth the time attending. This year, I felt that the innovation lay in practitioners being given time on various stands to talk about how they had been using technology in their own classroom.

Last year, and a couple of times previously, I had attended a seminar or two while at the show. I didn’t do so this year. My experience in the past has suggested that such seminars rarely tell you anything you don’t already know and, if you’re only at the show for one day, they do take up a lot of time that might have been better spent visiting exhibitors. I have to admmit that on the years when I’ve not attended a BETT seminar, I’ve not come away with the feeling that I’ve missed anything.

Looking back at the time of BETT, I’ve asked myself what have people been talking about since? Well, there’s been talk about 3D projectors and 3D printing, much in the same way that there was talk about the Smart desks after the 2009 BETT, and what has happened to them since?

VLE and their suppliers were quite low key in the 2010 show, unlike the previous two shows. So what has happened to them? Well, to the best of my knowledge, one seems to have gone bust and one or two more seem to have got into financial difficulties. Meanwhile one or two next generation VLEs, based upon school education (e.g. Frog, DBprimary) seem to be emerging and there seems to be renewed interest in Moodle (which on its own is not really a VLE but, similar to Sharepoint, can be added or extended to offer added functionality). At the same time, there has been continued debate in HE circles along the lines of the VLE being dead but this seems to be based upon a misuse of VLEs as CMS. One still hopes the HE guys can get their act together and see that a VLE is far more than a Content Management System.

Of course BETT 2010 all took place before details of Apple‘s iPad were fully known. I daresay that BETT 2011 might have more on display to show how iPads and iPad apps can be used in education ….. but then maybe not, after all the iPhone and iPod Touch were very conspicuous by their absence in BETT2010 exhibits; it’s as if the whole concept of handheld or personal learning has not yet reached BETT :(