BETT is a gargantuan annual learning technology trade show.

With digital literacies in mind I spent a few minutes at the Lynda stand – Lynda is a library of short, focused courses for different technologies and practices. Did they offer courses for open source applications? GIMP as well as Photoshop? Yes. OpenOffice as well as Microsoft Office? Yes. Audacity? Yes – and these are just a sample. Nice one.

Avoiding lock-in is a tic of mine to do with fears of obsolescence and conservatism. Adaptable, generative technologies have most appeal for me – smartboards that work as ordinary whiteboards and projection surfaces, voting handsets which allow natural language. Narrower business models are prone to fail or be overtaken. For example I spent an interesting ten minutes looking at a some audio note-taking technology aimed at students with dyslexia and/or English as a second or other language. It was explained to me as primarily designed to work with PowerPoint. It responds to natural pauses in speech to visualise talk as strips which a student can attach to a lecturer’s slides, adding colour codes for future reference. The audio annotation looked very helpful but I wondered about the orientation to slidewear – without a concept map slides often fail as representations of complicated subjects (this is an important capability of concept-mapping presentation software like Prezi or Sozi). Along with seemingly taking slideware for granted, this software anticipates the kind of didactic real-time lectures which may be prevalent now but are increasingly challenged by lecture-flipping pioneers – it depends on one person speaking to a silent audience and would struggle to handle the ambient hubbub of several discussion groups. The niche for this technology is shrinking and I wondered if it could easily pivot to realign itself.

That said, the lecture remains a feature of higher education institutions. Depending on how it’s conceived, it can be an event where students are required to turn up together in person – but then listen in isolation to a presentation where their intervention and contribution, if invited at all, requires unusual levels of self-confidence. Alternatively, a large in-person group can be an opportunity for contact and exchange. While there are plenty of low-tech opportunities for the latter, there are huge benefits to involving students’ own devices. Examples include persuading reticent or self-conscious students to ask questions or contribute ideas, and electronic voting which allows on the fly visualisation and tutor response. I think it’s worth trying to incorporate the wealth of technologies students own, on the basis that students actually have them on their person, they look after them carefully, and can operate, bend and modify them as the inspiration takes them.

At the same time, students (and staff) who do not own technologies should not be disadvantaged. It’s true that resistance on students’ part to institutional exploitation of their personal technologies is strong and understandable – but  it may be worth investigating this desire for separation. If there’s a perception that an institution is imposing a hidden cost, might this be assuaged by offering plentiful power supply, for example, and avoiding appropriating students’ free SMS allowances? User groups exploring some of the less obvious applications, efficiencies and other benefits of different smart-phone models, helping each other upgrade and so on would be another avenue. And thinking about wear and tear, a stand at BETT – the only one of its kind, which is pretty telling – was called MendIT. If institutions could offer students coverage for speedy repairs, a good deal on replacement batteries, memory upgrades and so on, for the duration of their course, then the arrangement is more reciprocal.

Due to meetings back at work I think I missed most of the best presentations from BETT’s Higher Education Conference and LiveLearn. I was sorry to have to duck out of Sarah Sherman on the celebrated cooperation between the e-learning specialists in the smaller specialist University of London colleges which comprise the Bloomsbury Learning Environment, who on their own would be spread unbearably thin. There was a utopian 25 minutes from IBM about the benefits of wrap-around student monitoring which prompted the chair Claire Bolderson to raise the question of ethics. Relatedly there was one I was particularly glad to have caught – Simon Buckingham-Shum (the Open University’s Knowledge Media Institute) on Learning analytics: unlocking student data for 21st century learning? Learning analytics is predictive modeling applied to student data (e.g. on things like assessment, attendance, and social integration, from online learning environments, student record systems and other institutional services) to flag students who “may not be performing to the best of their abilities“. The future of Coursera and EdX are predicated on turning these kinds of data into patterns for course and activity design, and for this reason I’d say that a turn to analytics to appraise and reform institutional practices, not least teaching, is in the offing. The implications are quite momentous so it’s worth taking notice and involving staff and students from the start.