London had uncharacteristically beautiful January weather for several days last week. After weeks of trying I finally managed to convince my Apple Watch I was getting enough exercise. I've started deliberately taking the stairs in a conscious effort to get my Move score up. It's insidious. Also effective.
BETT 2020
BETT is one of my favorite conferences, not least because you get so many chances to talk to your real customers -- instructors and students. So many education technology conferences are events by and for IT people like me. It's more fun when you remember who you're working for.
By tradition BETT is mostly aimed at a K-12 audience, so I had a few people look at me oddly when I announced I was going. About 20% of last year's attendees were higher education (or, as our UK friends call it, "further education") and there was a talk track specifically aimed at HE / FE folks, so I thought it was a good use of time.
A few things I learned:
Transformation continues to be hard. It's not, at the end of the day, about the technology, but about the processes and pedagogy you're trying to enable, to say nothing of research and community building and everything else a modern higher education institution does. We can and do build solutions, but it's just as important to help universities think about what they do and want to do. (I love the Education Transformation Framework as a tool for this.)
Demand for metrics and analytics from instructors, school leaders, etc is at an all time high. We've just launched our Class Insights Preview but there is so much more to do.
We're not making it as easy as we could to transition from one level of schooling to the next. (By we, I mean Microsoft, but also the education technology industry more generally.)
At the Sherlock Holmes pub, you will be denied service if you order the Sherlock Holmes Pale Ale on tap, but they will make you one hell of a gin and tonic instead.
If you missed any of the Microsoft announcements, it's well worth taking a look at the Microsoft Education Blog, especially the What's New in EDU videos -- produced by and starring friends who look far better in front of a camera than I do. I have a face for radio.
Davos, Not Davros, That Was The Other Guy
Lots of people at Microsoft up to and including CEO Satya Nadella find wisdom in Klaus Schwab's thinking about the Fourth Industrial Revolution. It's a complex topic that I can't do justice here, but a lot of the ideas you've heard percolating about job displacement, disruptive innovation, AI and automation, etc. are partly inspired by Schwab's ideas. Schwab argues that the technological revolution currently underway will "change not only what we do but who we are." His work has driven some fascinating thinking as well as some over-the-top hype by consultants offering to help your favorite company or country Lead The Way.
Schwab is also the founder of the World Economic Forum, most well known for their annual gathering of the elite at Davos, Switzerland. This opens Schwab up to several critiques of elitism, borrowing buzzwords, and ignoring current data.
I'm not above trolling my co-workers, so I sent that last link out to a few of the higher education strategy types I know. Alex Usher at Higher Education Strategy Associates often takes on an entertaining crank role, and while I often don't agree with him, I appreciate his, er, direct approach to describing his view of a problem space.
After some spluttering -- when a PhD uses the terms "shallow understanding" and "superficial" within two sentences, you know they're annoyed -- a colleague came back with the following observation: "the article reminds me of someone who mistakes local weather for long term global climate trends." Which is fair. Schwab describes a long term global societal trend where Usher is using current data from one country, Canada, to refute it. Usher nods to this when he mentions that the Fourth Industrial Revolution rhetoric is problematic "at least if you are using it as a concept to describe the present day" and I'd have added "in Canada."
The discussion does raise a couple questions that I keep coming back to. What is the path that leads us from today to this Fourth Industrial Revolution? How does that path change in response to sudden or traumatic events? Most importantly, if we start with the assumption that the world is not guided by benevolent elites: how does this transformation impact the people of cultures around the world, if it isn't guided or is manipulated for self-serving ends?
Things I think about on airplanes. I need to keep reading.
Inspiration
Wow, London sunsets.
(no idea what's up with that odd digital artifact in the water on the right hand side, ask the Apple camera people)
Tomorrow I'm off to North Carolina (my first visit!) to talk to UNC Chapel Hill and North Carolina State University about a couple of interesting ideas we'd like them to try out. I was hoping I'd warm up a bit but the weather forecast looks similar to my hometown of Vancouver. Oh well. Note to self: find a university to talk to in the desert.
Onward. Remember to breathe. The rarest gift in higher education is to be kind.