With BETT coming up, I thought I’d link to what I said after [BETT 2012]1 (at which I presented for [Pearson Innov8]2). 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 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!