Photo credit: Mr Ush
Ewan McIntosh the mercurial host of yesterday’s #Bectax event suggested the 150 participants – taken from across education, tech and media industry – have a well earned Easter break before reflecting on the conference. So I’ll take his word and blog the morning after!
The event (hats off to BECTA and Katz Kieley @katzy by the way) had some real highlights – the ambitious live video feeds from 12 schools, the high octane speed networking, the challenge sessions / pitches and the pechu kucha style quickfire sessions. There was also a dynamite presentation from a legendary school librarian who challenged schools to be brave and open up tech for all students and staff
There was a torrent of backstream activity and a lot of great twitter posts from young people from the schools throughout the event. What was tough was integrating all of this seamlessly into the programme to give real power to those not in the room. Also – as seems inevitable with a technology conference – the tech failed a few times – which meant some of the students were switched of. But that’s not to say we shouldn’t try to bring so many schools into the debate and take risks.
One twitter post this morning rightly said ‘Becta X – ok but what impact will it have?’. For me the debate definitely got caught up too much in box and wires issues such as wifi, filtering and networks and not enough about what changes we want from the education system as a whole. There was also less about teaching and learning and of nothing about design, space or infrastructure. One of the 2 elephants in the room were also: what if BECTA isn’t here after the next election and also what if technology becomes a less important factor in the next government’s thinking about education. I would also have liked a ‘grill the policy makers’ session and much more input from the learners themselves.
That said – I would rate Becta X a real success for 3 reasons: 1. its rare for an education government body to pull together a mixed group of educationalists, technologists, policy makers, industry people and young people and simply ask – what next? 2. It modelled an approach to solution focused policy making– the challenge sessions took 5 questions created by practitioners, professionals and learners and asked teams of to come up with a pitchable proposal in 1 hour. Some were ambitious and would need major cash, but others were low cost and high impact. Imagine what we could do in a day or with the students there? 3. there was a real sense of energy in the room and with those joining the event virtually to reboot education and continue that debate. As for the impact – the brave move for Becta would be to mainstream these events and ideas into the heart of their work. It would be a great shame for this to be just another talking shop – and the students would switch us off.
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A good article and I agree with the feeling of the event. My daughter was taking part from the primary school online. I’m a governor at her school and also being an IT Manager I get frustrated by how restricted (for obvious reasons), that the schools are in terms of Tech usage.
It would have been nice to have the kids a little more involved on the web cams and actually contributing that way, but I have to say that our school, (age 10-11), did feel engaged and did give more inputr than I expected, which proves one thing that being the kids really have a strong opinion with what they would like to see.
I do hope that there is some follow up from this. I’d like to see Becta engaging the schools involved in the conference some more in the coming months, even maybe visiting the schools and having some face to face discussions to get some real feedback.
One suggestion from my school was they would like to gave a “Technology Day”, which is a great idea. How about Becta use their influence to get some IT vendors involved and devise some sort of roadshow to the schools, to demonsrate how Tech can help with education.
One thing that did come from the Twitter feeds which proved why there is caution in this area in terms of filter and control, was the fact that #BectaX was a top trending Topic on Twitter for some time, and within an hour of the debate starting, porn bots had caught onto the topic and soon we saw offers of “good times” appearing in the feeds. This is an area that is very concerning for parents and teachers alike, however I am not sure that there is a solution.
Great conference though. Let’s if if anything comes of it.
Thanks
Great summary Ian…thought there was some really good lessons from BectaX for Becta and other quangos about how to arrange a high energy event.
I also agree that with some much “noise” it lacked “depth” and whilst the video-links to schools was fun and risky I am not convinced there was much learning going on?
It was a worthwhile(but costly £150-200K?) experiment which leaves me with this question?
When all the froth has gone from my cappucino am I still left with a coffee?
Bob, I can only speak for the school that my daughter was representing with her classmates, but they got plenty out of it and were very enthusiastic when I popped in later on.
Not so sure that it was a good forum for learning, but excellent for opening the debate. Also I think the adults can learn a lot from the children, but i take your point in that, what are the next steps to keep this energy going and actually improve the use of tech in schools.