10 examples of how ‘DEVICE fetish’ is ruining EdTech

Educational debate around technology is, as my father often says, ‘arse before elbow’, as are shows such as BETT. It’s obsessed with devices – tablets, mobiles, whiteboards, holes-in-walls, micro:bits, Raspberry Pis, 3D printers, VR and so on - which is to focus on the wrong end of the problem. Device fetishism has been a destructive force in research, procurement, projects and outcomes in education. So here’s some blowback. Note that I’ve been implementing and writing about the use of tech in learning for 33 years, so I’m speaking, not as a philistine, but a convert.

Here’s Audrey

This is Audrey Mullen, a US high school student, with an entrepreneurial flair. She does Kite Reviews, through a consultancy that hires out fellow students to evaluate Edtech. I like this. She found that faculty, schools and HE tended to think devices first, bandwidth and services second. She's right. I founded and ran a large test lab, called the ‘Epicentre’ and for years and got to know a lot about testing, usability and target audience evaluation. One thing I did learn, was to listen to real users, backed up with methodologies developed by Nielsen, Norman, Krug and others. It’s so easy to get 50 year-olds entranced by shiny devices, to buy stuff, implement their ideas, only to find that they are then treated with contempt by users. Young people always like receiving new shiny toys, then look on their use in school as if they were watching their dads dance in a nightclub.

Fail 1:  Poor procurement

This is the big one. Devices are identified and purchased without a detailed plan for the actual improvement of learning outcomes. Teacher support is left out, actual cost-effectiveness analysis (never ever seen one) is absent, detailed analysis of the device affordances matched to learning tasks rarely thought about, mainteannce costs underestimated, insurance a problem, change management and internal communications plans usually beyond the skills of the purchaser. They’re so often bought, with external funds, grants or on the back of the whim of someone who has attended a couple of conferences and ‘seen the shiny light'. That’s the first problem right there – piss, poor planning.

I’ve seen some of these documents, where the pedagogic bit does nothing more than list some ‘C’ words. I actually saw one yesterday that had a record of ‘C’ words; Cultural Cognitive Constructive Communicative Confident Creative Critical Civic. Is the world really that alliterative? Here’s my alliteractive alternative for the premature purchase of devices. Poor Planning Leads to Piss Poor Performance. For a serious analysis of bad procurement see here.

Fail 2 – iPad is NOT a computer

Listen to what Audrey and her mates have to say about iPads. “A Cat Is Not a Dog; An iPad Is NOT A Computer” she starts. “Have you ever typed directly on an iPad? Kill me. Almost every word is a typo… and don’t get me started on keyboards that connect to the iPad”. Her advice to teachers, “On behalf of millions of students everywhere, I beg: Don’t make us type on an iPad”.

I have few problems with iPads in primary school but in secondary and Higher Education it’s totally misguided (see my critiques here). It’s a consumer device and when it comes to more advanced and almost any serious, productive skill like long-form writing, coding, photoshop, spreadsheets - it’s a ‘dog’. You can’t write effectively, as touch-screen typing is slow and produces far too many errors. Cut and paste work, essential to good redrafting and writing, is difficult (indeed there’s evidence that it cramps writing style). They’re expensive, difficult to network and encourage the cul-de-sac that is apps development.

Fail 3: Coding devices

Coding is a software skill. Sure peripherals matter but the core skills are around structure, logic, comments etc. Unfortunately, and this is part of our awful, English hobbyist culture, fed invariably by the ‘Cash in the Attic’ folk at the BBC, hideous devices are thrown at the problem like confetti. The Raspberry Pi and late and badl branded MicroBit (critique) are not the solution to our problems in computer studies and coding, they may even exacerbate the problems. If you really want to frighten new entrants, especially girls, show them one of these circuit boards, that take ages to get working. They’re largely bought by already nerdy kids and their dads. That’s OK but it it’s illusory to suggest that they’re a catalyst for change. Focus on good software not ugly gadgets.

Fail 4:  Mobile devices

“Put Away the Phone” says Audrey, and “Save us from ourselves”. Her advice to teachers, “Don’t go crazy with phone rules and regulations because we won’t follow them… Instead just stick with the basics – no phones during school hours”. Not what we tend to hear from the mobile learning lobby. The affordances of a phone are rarely congruent with learning needs. We use them for everything BUT learning.

Fail 5: Devices over organisation

Audrey hates it when teachers ignore the need for proper software that allows everything to be accessed and stored in one place. “Be Crazy, Hyper-Organized With Your Technology And We Will Love You For It” she says. By this she means have a VLE/LMS or system that is universal for all use of tech and one that works. Forget all this jazz around devices – most stuff now works on most devices. She pleads with teachers to. “Keep all your information in one place…. Don’t go scattering it around in different apps”. That last word is a salutary warning. Apps are apps, they’re cul-de-sacs. Browser based stuff is the stuff of learning. Focus on mobile devices and you focus on apps – big mistake.

Fail 6: Content matters

Educational professionals can be very sniffy about content and when it comes to Wikipedia, Khan Academy (my analysis), YouTube, Duolingo and MOOCs (my view on), they turn into illiberal prohibitionists. Get real, hundreds of millions use this stuff. It’s free content. It works.  Audrey’s advice “More Please”. To be specific, “Khan Academy has science, language, arts and much more… I like to think of it as my partner in school. If a teacher is hard to understand, I pop onto Khan…  often I only need 30 seconds. I visit the website maybe 20 times a week”. Enough said.

Fail 7: Pavlovian gamification

Don’t play Pavlov with learners…. That doesn’t mean don’t use games or gamification. It does mean that you shouldn’t be making folk chase down rubies while being chased by a pacman, when they need to focus on learning something useful. Gamfication, led by apps, and an obsession with devices, has led to a flood of ‘edu-games’ that usually (not always) distract, disappoint and even put learners off learning.

Many young people look upon these games with contempt. Games are difficult to make, good games are fiendishly difficult to make. University departments, JISC, the BBC, C4 are NOT the places where good games are made. Many simply result in cognitive overload, as the learner has to learn the rules and implement the mechanics of the game, as well as learn. Oh,.. and to do them well cost real money. Ignore devices and apps and focus on some core virtues from games that are based in good learning theory; progress through levels, failure (even catastrophic), repeated practice until skill acquired, time constraints and congruence between the game and the learning competences.

Fail 8: Don’t dump devices in developing world

Sugata Mitra and Negroponte have both made a career out of dumping devices into the developing world and teachers lap it up as if they’re some sort of saints. Listen carefully – they don’t like teachers and schools. Researchers, like Arora, from Erasmus University Rotterdam, visited hole-in-the wall sites and reported “little real independent evidence, other than that provided by HiWEL“, accusing Mitra of “not comparing amount of time spent on hole-in-wall material with same  time in school… making the comparison meaningless”. It was, she concluded,“self-defeating… ‘hole-in-the-wall’ has become the ‘computer-in-the-school”. This was confirmed by Mark Warschauer, Professor of Education at the University of California, who also visited sites, only to find that “parents thought the paucity of relevant content rendered it irrelevant“ and that “most of the time they were playing games…. with low level learning and not challenging”. The “internet rarely functioned” and “overall the project was not very effective”. I also visited a site, in Africa, and confirmed all of this and more. Read Mitra’s comment on my blog, “it took me 30 minutes to think about and write this response. I would have spent the time on planning a new project for very poor children. Would someone, perhaps Donald, like to take the responsibility for this wastage and the resultant loss to them.” Sugata Mitra. This is what happens when devices trump reason.

Fail 9: 3D printers

OK, if you have a spare grand or so for a 3D printer. But are they the ‘next big thing’ or merely an expensive way to produce lots of ‘small, useless, plastic things’? Apart from adding considerably to planetary waste, what impact will 3D printers have in learning? Every educational institution could have a 3D printer that can create objects across the curriculum, on demand. STEM subjects are often the first port of call, but many other subjects can benefit, especially art and design. While it is true that the potential of a technology is often realised once people start to use it in anger, 3D printers are in danger of being the ‘next big thing’ when they are, in fact, just expensive machines that churn out ‘lots of useless small things’, more gimmick than game changer. I’m not against the use of 3D printers in learning just against buying them and hoping that they’ll be useful in learning. It’s way too early to invest in these things.

Fail 10: Whiteboards

That most expensive of devices, whiteboards, were hailed as the technology saviour in schools, but many saw them as reinforcing an old preachy, teacher-centric, classroom model. And so it came to pass. The UK has led the way here with more whiteboards in schools than European and US schools. But has it worked? Studies in the UK show NO significant improvement in attainment through whiteboards. Professor Frank Coffield warned us for years that this was a misguided policy. A critical review of the literature by Heather J. Smith, Steve Higgins, Kate Wall & Jen Miller, Centre for Learning and Teaching, School of Education Communication and Language Sciences, Newcastle University. showed that there is "insufficient evidence to identify the actual impact of such technologies upon learning either in terms of classroom interaction or upon attainment and achievement.”

Mosquito v Turtle projects

All of this focus on devices leads, year after year, to a swarm of ‘mosquito’ projects. Let me explain. Most EdTech projects are mosquito projects; lots of buzz, tricky to spot & short-lived. They are funded but rarely sustainable. Innovation is not innovation if it is not sustainable. We need long-life 'turtle' projects.

Turtle projects are infrastructure projects that improve bandwidth in schools, the Open University, Janet & SuperJanet, Wikipedia, Khan Academy, YouTube, MOOCs. Moodle… I could go on all day. None of these initiatives are device-focused. They focus on cognitive ergonomics not consumer electronics. Lesson here – stop the largely wasted research on device-based projects, the endless stream of apps and do not keep on taking (and buying) the tablets. Think about learning and learners not devices.

Chomsky on education & learning – curiously utopian and elitist?

Noam Chomsky is a towering intellectual. He is to linguistics, what Darwin is to biology. He is also famous for his relentless work in politics, an outspoken critic of US foreign policy. As a cognitive scientist he also has deep and considered views on many areas of human endeavour, including education and learning.

Theory of knowledge

To understand Chomsky’s thoughts on learning one must understand its roots in his "transformative-generative grammar" which describes the deep syntactical processes common to all human language, as opposed to its surface structure. The minds is not a tabula rasa, it has a set of innate rules in language, hardwired in the mind. Knowledge builds on prior knowledge on an underlying cognitive matrix. Our human nature, with a set of common cognitive traits, is the driver for learning. Education, in his view, must continue to encourage this growth and development and not thwart its progress. The teacher must nurture the natural capacity to discover.

Education

Like many Marxist theorists (although he is not a Marxist), he thinks that the state shapes education which in turn shapes minds to the needs of the state and market. It is nothing less than ‘indoctrination’ through control and coercion. Children are taught, not to think for themselves, but to ‘obey’. He likens schools, college and universities to factories, where students are, by and large, indoctrinated by a ‘liberal elite’ to conform to their orthodoxies. In particular, he thinks that history, a self-serving narrative, is written by these elites

Assessment

He is a strong critic of education that proceeds by staged preparation for tests. Taking tests can be useful but they should be ‘ancillary’ not central to the educational process. As an advocate of genuine search, inquiry and discovery, to challenge and look for alternatives., he hopes that teachers can bring students to the point where they can autonomously operate and learn for themselves. Rather than shape young people it should encourage them to shape themselves.

Criticism

Chomsky may confuse conformity with real needs. We can all bow to this academic, Enlightenment view of education but this may not be relevant in poorer countries where the needs are for vocational learning, something that Chomsky finds all too easy to denigrate. Not everyone can or is suited towards being creative intellectuals. He may also be charged with being part of the very intellectual elite he denigrates, promoting an overly intellectual and academic approach to education that focuses on the production of an academic elite, rather than the many needs of society.

Conclusion

Chomsky is an enlightenment figure, who believes fundamentally in free, independent and autonomous thought. Education, for him, must have the purity of this spirit of inquiry. He rightly warns us about the hidden hand of the state or commerce and warns us of the dangers of indoctrination. While this is true to a degree, it is not clear that it is a fully explanatory theory of education and learning.

Bibliography

Chomsky, N. (2000). Chomsky on miseducation. Oxford.

Chomsky, N. (2002). Chomsky on democracy and education.

10 ways to avoid snafus in WEBINARS

Whether it’s a webinar, webcast, online meeting or online instructor-led training, the potential for snafus is enormous; no audio, feedback loops, chaotic breakout groups, timezone confusion… you name it, it WILL happen. You’re only one click away from oblivion. So here's a few tips to reduce the risks.

Virtual snafus

First, let me say, it’s a wondrous thing, being able to communicate visually and orally across the globe. Yet it is not easy to do well, as it comes with a truckload of potential snags, glitches and complications. What you need to do, to be effective, is master the process, so that you can focus on the delivery of the experience, not get sucked into distractions and troubleshooting. So here's a few tips.

1. Use checklists

Seems simple but people often underestimate the management and logistics of virtual sessions. Checklists for planning, marketing, troubleshooting.... whatever. They seem to work for a lot people, as it’s easy to miss things and you benefit from the accumulation of experience. Preparation matters but structured preparation matters more.

2.  Takes two to tango

Some organisations have large teams, with a Producer, Presenter, Technical support and Monitor. Most recommend that you have at least two people, especially for sessions that want to have polls, high levels of engagement, or breakout sessions - one to present, the other to manage the process and sort out problems. That second person can be a godsend, not only when there's problems but also to monitor chat, welcome people and wrap up.

3. Test

Test before your session. There’s lots of things that can go wrong; technically, loading PowerPoints, loading videos, audio issues, timing issues. One full test will save lots of live pain.

4. Audio is No 1 problem

Audio is the number one problem in virtual learning. If it can go wrong, it will. What if your audio disappears? Do you know how to open mics and mute? What problems will users have at their end? If you have hundreds online this can be overwhelming. First, get to know the software. Second, try the software. Third, test, test, test. Know how solve the problems that WILL arise.
Ideally you want to hardwire your device to your router via an ethernet cable or at least sit as close as you can to your router. Then use headphones and, ideally, a headset microphone. get your audio levels sorted prior to launch. Know how to mute and unmute.

5. Instructions

Remember, you can send lots of stuff beforehand but, believe me, they won’t read it. So you have to find a way of making this simple and effective. Make this really clear with visual and verbal cues. For example, on timezones, state what time they need to be there in their timezone. Explain, before you start, that there will be questions, polls, whatever. Encourage them to chat.

6. Takes time

Timing is tricky but critical. Some things are quicker online but many are take longer than you think. Presenters often go way over time. The biggest problem is too much content – too many slides. The second is going off at a tangent. Rehearsal and practice will solve these problems.

7. Presenter skills

Try to avoid the ‘uuums’ and filler words. Speak enthusiastically but be natural, be yourself. Learn to cut and paste URLs for your audience. Coaching is useful here as it’s not easy to see ourselves as others see us. Above all, avoid reading from a script (the audience can tell) and don't do a monotone delivery. They often can't see you and don't have any facial or body language cues, so up your level of enthusiasm and emphasis. Also, pause, occasionally, especially when you're moving to a new topic or want people to reflect, even respond.

8. Engagement

What tasks are required to produce engaging, virtual, online sessions? First, don’t load them up with long biographical intros, dull learning objectives or a manual’s worth of instructions. You must grab them by the throat or they’ll be off doing email, Facebook or Twitter. Rely more on visual and verbal cues. Change screen frequently and don't do PPT slides with endless bullet points and text - which you read. if you catch yourself doing this - STOP! Add questions with prompts. Keep things moving as your audience may feel that things have gone wrong if they see the same thing on screen for too long. One word of warning; with breakout sessions, they always take longer than you think and it’s sometimes difficult to get them back.

9. Monitor chat

Presenters often set off at pace then forget to monitor chat. A good practice is to stop, periodically to review chat and answer a few questions. Above all, keep in control and make sure you are happy to both present and monitor chat. There may also be a need to stop chat if it gets out of control or disrespectful.

10. Practice, practice, practice

How do you get to carnegie Hall? Practice, practice, practice.  You need to be on top of your game to run these sessions well and that means rehearsal and practice.

Conclusion

I know a lot of this seems obvious but it’s the obvious things that most often cause problems. Your audience has to see, hear and engage to learn, the rest must be made invisible or as easy as possible.

There's more!
Top ten tips in top ten topics in online learning:

10 ways to make badass INTROs in online learning 

10 bloody good reasons for using much-maligned TEXT in online learning 

10 essential online learning WRITING TIPS in online learning 

10 stupid mistakes in design of MULTIPLE CHOICE questions

10 essential points on use of (recall not recognition) OPEN RESPONSE questions

10 rules on how to create great GRAPHICS in online learning ‪

10 sound pieces of advice on use of AUDIO in onlinelearning 

10 ways based on research to use VIDEO in online learning

10 ideas on use of much maligned TALKING HEAD videos in online learning

10 unusual ways to make SPACED PRACTICE happen in online learning 

This started with a simple observation that I'm seeing, over and over again, the same mistakes being make on screen, with online learning. I hope you find them useful.

Does Higher Education need a Reformation?

Whatever you may think of Peter Thiel, he’s smart. I don’t just mean business smart but intellectually. PayPal entrepreneur, first investor in Facebook, predictor of the financial crisis and so on… impressive CV. Sure he’s an extreme libertarian, with some extreme views, but we need people who pop our conventional bubbles. So, when I heard him utter the following in an interview, it hung around in my head, until I was compelled to expand on it… Here’s the phrase, ‘Higher Education is like the Catholic Church on the eve of the Reformation’. That’s a damn interesting observation. I've written about Illich, who drew parallels between schools and the church in Deschooling Society but Thiel captures both a diagnosis and treatment in this one phrase. He’s talking Reformation.

Costs

What Thiel went on to explain, was that like the Catholic Church, HE had turned into a global, institutionalised phenomenon that demanded increasingly large sums of money from people, for an experience that is much the same year after year. The cost of indulgences as well as the transfer of productive wealth into the non-productive church, was a major catalyst for the Reformation. People were literally becoming indebted to the level of indenture to the church. This was impoverishing the populace while enriching the institutions. $1.6 trillion of student debt in the US. and similar problems arising in Europe? Even the rich, were handing over huge sums, not to charity but to the Church. This is reminiscent of hedge-fund manager Paulson, who recently wrote a cheque for over $400 million to Harvard. This is buying personal prestige (used to be salvation), not in any way moral progress.

Promises

The insidious side of the Catholic Church was the threat, that if you didn’t pay up, you were damned. This same powerful idea has been nurtured by University-educated politicians and HE lobbyists. If you don’t get a Degree, you’re damned as a failure. They perpetuate the myth, that if you don’t go to University, you’ll go to some sort of economic hell, never being admitted to the heaven that is gainful employment.

Monastic campuses

Like the enormous building projects by the Catholic Church, Universities are spending untold sums of money on monumental buildings. The occupancy rate of their existing property is already ridiculously low, as it was and is with churches, yet the capital budgets keep on rising. It would be more accurate to say, that like the Catholic Church, campuses have become huge, self-sufficient, monastic communities, almost towns within cities. Board and lodging has become a significant revenue stream for many institutions. In some cities they almost overwhelm everything else. With University Rankings they also have their Cathedrals; Ivy League in the US, Oxbridge in the UK.

Teaching as preaching

The dominant pedagogy is still the lecture, basically a sermon to a compliant audience. There’s a lectern, a lecture, designed for the one-way transmission of knowledge, surely as far from contemporary needs as one can imagine. Stuck with a Medieval pedagogy, founded, through necessity in an age when there were no books, the dominance of the lecture lives on as a shameful, religious, pedagogic fossil. Even worse is not recording lectures. Imagine a journalist not publishing their pieces in print or a novelist not putting their work into print? Denying students access to that lecture for revision, note taking, reflection, rewinding (especially if students are being taught in their second language) and so on, is pedagogically bankrupt.

Crisis of relevance

We seem to have reached a position where HE has drifted in terms of relevance, whether it is the degrees offered, the way they are taught or the exaggerated promises. It seems to have lost its way a little, just like the Church in the 16th century. Rather than serve our needs it often seems to be serving its own needs. With falling enrolments, suspicion about the worthiness of a degree when everyone has one and the high cost, is leading to arguments that question its relevance.

Scriptoria

Higher Education's increasing distance from practical skills, unless they involve high salaries (medicine, vets, engineering, law, architecture…) has turned them into seminaries, with the academic priesthood writing ever more obscure manuscripts for smaller and smaller audiences. The scriptoria and libraries are being flooded by manuscripts, most of which are read only by the authors and reviewers. It has become increasingly scholastic, moving in decreasing circles of relevance. The ballooning world of third rate Journals, which are rarely read, and full of low-level research has happened as the incentives have been around publication (no matter where) rather than teaching and learning.

Undue political influence

We have politicians who almost universally went to University, leaders who largely went to just two Universities and many Ministers who did one particular course at Oxford, PPE, a medieval hangover (replacement for Classics). Maybe the idea of a trained Priesthood for politics isn’t too far-fetched. Beyond this David Goodhart in his book The Road to Somewhere identifies an emerged 'graduate class' that now dominates politics and the professions imposting their views on others. Brexit indicated that many had had enough of this views. 

Academic dominance

Like the scholastic age (the Dark Ages) this has also led to the decimation, in some economies, of vocational education, which they are desperately trying to revive. As HE sucks the life out of vocational learning, we find ourselves in Europe with HE heavy economies struggling, while the German, Austrian and Swiss economies thrive. Hold on – isn’t that where the Reformation hit originated and spread from? Luther, Calvin, Knox… There are serious questions being asked about so much time and money being spent on abstract, academic pursuits at the expense of other needs in society, such as those who do not go to college, healthcare, social care and so on.

Calendar

Off for Christmas? Off for Easter? The University calendar is punctuated by holidays, largely determined by religious and agricultural concerns. The Michaelmas terms starts on the feast day of St Michael, the start of the academic year. This adherence to a rigid timetable with only one entrance date per year makes the system primitive and inflexible. It meant that workload for faculty and students couldn't be spread more reasonable across the sort of timetable that the rest of society had adopted.

Anti-technology

The Catholic Church was none too pleased when the printing revolution produced Bibles in local languages and thinkers who questioned their authority. They found themselves losing control of knowledge; its censorship, means of creation, production and distribution. That’s because the Reformation was, in part, amplified and accelerated by a technology revolution – printing. Similarly, the resistance to the use of technology in teaching and learning has led to little more than recording lectures and resources on a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE). They were ill-prepared for Covid, rushing to replicated lectures on Zoom and struggling with the more sophisticated forms of online learning that have been around for decades, including online assessment.

Conclusion

The Church, which taught in Latin, kept their power by excluding people from reading in their own languages, suddenly found that people were not only reading scripture in their own languages but also writing and challenging the orthodoxy. The Enlightenment came fast on its heels. Now we have a technological revolution that is no less Copernican, the internet, which democratises, decentralises and disintermediates the learning game. I expect this revolution to have a similar effect on HE, driving access to knowledge and learning through a new means of creation, production and distribution. Rather than accepting increasing costs, we should demand lower costs, better access, and a future where education is not seen as built on elitism and scarcity but on scale and abundance. One beneficial effect and almost immediate effect of the reformation was a push for universal education and access. That stuck. This, in our modern age, is what we need in tertiary education. What I’m arguing for is not the extinction of HE but a Reformation. The Reformation did not destroy Christianity and its ethos. It was strengthened by shedding its obsession with money, indulgences, outdated processes, hierarchy, priesthoods and elitism. In fact, the Reformation led to the rapid expansion of our Universities and a change in their character, awy from religious centres towards more secular, intellectual environments. We need something similar today - a rethink about their purpose, processes, pedagogy and payment.

Devlearn – Leaving Las Vegas

Never been to DevLearn but what the hell, we took the opportunity to head out early to Vegas, hire a car and set off on a 2000 mile road trip across Nevada, Utah, Arizona and New Mexico. Two weeks later we arrived back in Vegas, with a car coated in bumper bugs and sublime images seared into our heads.

I’m a fan of the SW US but not a fan of Vegas. You can walk from the Pyramid of Luxor (even though the pyramids are hundreds of miles away in Cairo), through Caesar’s Palace (where a statue of Caesar stands among a legion of slot machines), shop in the Appian Way Shops, then into a tacky, medieval England to gamble among the knights at Excalibur, on to Renaissance Venice (where a gondola waits to paddle you through canals in a desert state that is suffering a drought). You may even pop into Paris on the way home. It purports to mimic European culture but it mocks it. Vegas is as tacky as a piece of used flypaper. 

Anyway – I was in the MGM Grand for a conference, really a small city full of slot machines (Vegas is not really a high-roller, gambling city - it's mostly slots) and a few Chinese folk who were at the card tables when I went to breakfast, after all-nighters. Our room was at the end of a corridor so long, we couldn't see the end. I'm OK with hedonism but this was ugly.

Rootsy

So, what of the conference? Overall DevLearn is much more rootsy than say, the overly self-promotional Masie Show, down in Florida. It’s practitioners, who work in real organisations do real work for real people. So you get some great, grounded sessions, packed full of tips about how to do things better. On the other hand, some of the bigger thinking can get a little lost. That’s OK. We have a surfeit of big thinking at conferences, often from people who have never really built, run or led anything. I’m tired of hearing about ‘Leadership’ from people who have never ‘led’ anything, other than a course on ‘Leadership’. It was refreshing to be among some realists.

The good stuff….

First reflection: I had a great three days at this meeting. I met (for the first time) some people I’ve long admired – Clark Quinn, Alison Rossett, Will Thalheimer, Mark Britz, Cammy Bean and so on.  It was good to have some in-depth conversations with people who have a track record and some depth in their experience and insights.

Then there were the excellent sessions where I gleaned lots of practical advice from expert practitioners. To take just one example, I learnt tons in the session on running Webinars. In one sense there was an abundance of good sessions, so many that it was difficult to choose.

As usual, most of the interesting stuff took place off-piste.  I gave three sessions, all of which I found easy to deliver, as they were packed with enthusiastic and informed participants, so I'd like to thank the DevLearn folks for allowing me to speak. The early morning ‘Buzz’ sessions were debates, with no PPT slides – these I loved and the one I ran on AI was full of lively and knowledgeable folk who made time fly.

Futurists are so last year....

But let me come back to the ‘big ideas’ issue. One expects keynotes to provide some new, insightful thinking. Sorry, I didn’t feel or get it. A guy called David Pogue did a second-rate Jim Carey act. His ‘look at these wacky things on the internet’ shtick is becoming a predictable routine. Kids can play the recorder on their iPhone! No they don’t. Only a 50 year old who bills himself as a ‘futurist’ thinks that kids take this stuff seriously. To be fair, I didn’t know about the DickFit, a ring that tracks your sex life. That was the only thing I learnt from that session. I’ve begun to tire of ‘futurists’ – they all seem to be relics from the past.

Not one to give up, I attended the next keynote, an enthusiastic guy called Adam Savage. I had never heard of him, but he’s a TV presenter in the US and hosts a show called Mythbusters. In over an hour the only thing he said that was remotely interesting (unwittingly), was a quote from Wolfgang Pauli, who used the phrase "not even wrong" to describe an argument that claims to be significant but is, in fact, banal. I say ‘unwittingly, as this guy tried to claim that art and science were really the same thing, as both were really (and here comes his big insight) – storytelling. The problem is that the hapless Adam knew nothing about science or art. It was trite, both reductionist and banal. That's bad.

My own view is that these conferences need outsiders who can talk knowledgeably about learning and not just about observing their kids or delivering a thinly disguised autobiography. I want some real relevance.

Hat’s off to the DevLearn team…

But that was only two things out of many. What makes this conference unique is that it’s run by enthusiasts who are also experts. They do it on a shoestring and do it damn well. Sure I had a few beefs, like the keynotes and the boorish E-learning Brothers, who hollered their way in orange tee-shirts through all three days, as if they were on a stag party, making it impossible for people to hear the speakers on the side stages. On the other hand, I enjoyed talking to the developers, who were pushing the limits on adaptive learning, the woman who works in compliance who explained to me, patiently, how the compliance training she had to deliver was an illusory evil that deliberately ignored the very idea of ethical behaviour, compliant only to the idea that these things are a regulatory nuisance and don’t really matter. I enjoyed seeing some good British people out there selling their wares – Ben Betts, the Totara guys, the Learning Pool crew (who wowed their audience with their open source authoring tool ADAPT), the lovely Laura Overton. Lisa Minogue-White, Colin Welch from Brightwave and Julian Stodd, who gave us a running online commentary on the dodgy bars of Vegas. In the end, it’s all about the people.

Leaving Vegas

On reflection, I'd recommend this show for folk who want to learn about making this stuff. It's easy to point to weaknesses but I'd change tack on the keynotes, appeal to a more international audience, have a big debate around some key issue and make sure that the stages in the exhibition area were more functional. One last note - I’m writing this on a Virgin Atlantic 747. Foiled by their labyrinthine online check-in process. I tweeted my frustration and within 30 secs got a Tweet in reply confirming my seat allocation. It made me glad that I’m in the tech business. It’s so damn weird and unpredictable.