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.

Related posts:

1. BECTA X to Nick Gibb – social media in action
2. Why school environments matter
3. School capital investment – getting our house in order

I had a great chat with Katz Kieley - the mastermind of a fantastic programme of events in the digital world called B-tween. She has been asked by BECTA to set up a collaborative event at the end of March called BECTA X. My chat with her is now a blog on their site

For me, the use of social media is starting to infiltrate a lot of the processes and the debate itself in education. Another example, was a lot of traffic last night on twitter about the debate about new schools and what comes next after the next election. Maybe its under most people’s radar – but the exchange between Bob Harrison @bobharrisonset (tech adviser) and Sam Freedman @Samfr (special adviser on education to the conservatives) last night – and a further intervention from social media guru Steve Moore @stevemoore4good about Nick Gibb’s comments on cutting school capital investment – is a great example of policy debate being out in the open rather than being kept behind closed doors.

We keep saying the debate is hotting up – I think we haven’t seen anything yet and social media will play a major part in the outcome. One question we have though – where are the Labour Education team in this debate?

Related posts:

1. Using social media to change education policy
2. School capital investment – getting our house in order
3. Technology and school buildings