Eight thousand people showed up for the Texas Computer Education Association Fusion 2013 Conference in Austin this last week. I’m the last one here, because good old American Airlines canceled my original flight for Friday and then my newly booked flight for Saturday. But this gives me a good chance to compose a recap.
First of all, the fun stuff. Alan Stern and I found a great wine bar, Cru, on 2nd Street. If you’re in Austin, they have very economical flights of wine tastings, and great appetizers to go with them. We then headed over to Pete’s Dueling Piano Bar on 6th Street for a great show. And tonight, I’m going to Antone’s on 5th Street for a Carnaval of Brazilian music.
Getting back to Education, Charles Blaschke, of Education Turnkey Systems, probably knows more about education funding than any person in the US. At the SIIA member breakfast, he noted that districts have slammed on the brakes for all purchases, and that there is $2 billion of uncommitted Title I funds, because of fear of sequestration. Districts can allocate up to 25% of their Title I funds for the following year, and since they have no confidence that there will be federal funding next year that is comparable to what they have this year, they are holding on to as much as they can. This has made for a terrible November through February time period for education publishers, a spending desert that will continue at least until districts get a better sense of what they will receive next year. Even then, if federal education levels are cut (a good possibility), the education technology publishing community can expect a terrible next 12 months.
But you couldn’t tell that by the looking at the number and
size of the booths on the exhibition floor. There seemed to be a lot of
relatively new companies with a lot of money to spend on conference booths.
Educator traffic in the exhibition hall seemed to be down. Many vendors
reported a fairly healthy number of visitors on Wednesday, but significant dips
on Thursday and virtually no visitors on Friday. Still, with TCEA as the de
facto winter education technology conference of the winter, it’s an essential
place for education publishers to be seen.
Peter Sheahan of Change Labs in Australia was the opening keynote speaker at the conference. He related the changes in the US Education sector to other sectors that have experience seismic changes. One key underlying factor is that in none of these transformations were people before the change able to predict or explain what would happen during the change. Thus, if you encounter someone who says with any certainty, “this is what you need to do” the only thing you can be certain of is that that person is wrong.
Because there is no algorithm that you can apply to improve the education system in the US, the best strategy is to make sure you surround yourself with people who are knowledgeable, professional, and flexible.
In schools, this means that change has little to do with the technology, and everything to do with the teacher. It’s not going to work from top down, but has to be achieved through two way communications. Allow teachers some measure of control, and help them make some simple first steps to change, and you can start driving improvements.
For education technology companies, maybe that means working with Farimah and me at Academic Business Advisors.
Seth Mattison of BridgeWorks was the closing keynote speaker. As if the huge changes facing education aren’t enough, we also have to deal with three generations of educators who just don’t get it. Of course, which three don’t get it, and which one does, depends on which generation you’re in:
- Traditionals: born before 1947, look at the other generations as lacking loyalty, too consumer oriented, and not willing to stick with a plan long enough for it to work.
- Boomers: born 1947 – 1962,see the other generations as pessimistic, not willing to try out new things and take chances in order to make things better.
- Gen X: born 1963 – 1980 just don’t trust the other generations, and they just want to be told what they have to do, when they have to do it by, and then be left alone to do it their way.
- Millennials: born 1981 – 2000 don’t see the value of face to face communications and demand want a say in what is going to be done; they don’t want to be told what to do, they want to help shape both what is going to be done and how it’s going to be accomplished.
There are a few people, irrespective of birth year, who do not feel entirely comfortable with any one of the generations, but can often be used to help fuse the four generations into a functioning team. Mattison’s advice was to find these people, and have them help push your teams to evolutionary, not revolutionary change.
Of course, no tech conference would be worth its weight without a few website and app tips. Here are a few I gleaned from the conference:
- Endless Alphabet is a very cute early reading app that teaches kids the alphabet and vocabulary.
- Thinglink.com allows you or students to post a picture and then annotate sections of the picture with explanations, sound, animation, or video. For example, if you were teaching Spanish, students could post a picture and label parts of the picture with the word in Spanish.
- CopyPasteCharacter.com offers all the special font characters so you can copy and paste them into documents, presentations, chats, or web pages.
- EZBib is a free bibliography maker. If you scan in the bar code of a book, it will automatically give you back the information for an MLA citation.
All in all, a worthwhile four days, but I can’t wait to get back to my own bed.
