With BETT coming up, I thought I’d link to what I said after BETT 2012 (at which I presented for Pearson Innov8).  My concern then was that in fact a lot of the technology being talked about was quite conservative, and in line with very traditional monetisation strategies.  One suggestion from that is that a focus on non-technological improvement (e.g. in pedagogy, types of schools, etc.) might be more interesting, and that events like BETT need to engage in that sort of dialogue too.  I linked to a great video discussing this distinction between improvement – incremental, applying research, etc. – and innovation, which takes leaps and may, when evaluated, fail (which is fine).  My suggestion was that while a bigger focus on improvement (and applying the evidence we already have!) would be very important, we should also talk about innovation in terms of measuring the success of those improvements – something the Nominet Trust, and Learning Analytics community both work on.

The full piece is available here http://www.nominettrust.org.uk/knowledge-centre/blogs/nurturing-and-measuring-%E2%80%98value%E2%80%99-innovation-%E2%80%93-bett-and-beyond

I’m happy to say that from what I’ve seen, this year’s BETT has got more speakers talking about lots of interesting things – so we’ll see what people say afterwards!