BETT 2024

Dr. Lavinia Hirsu

BETT UK (London, January 23-25) did not disappoint! I had the opportunity to visit this impressive event and to join some exciting conversations, to find out about the latest trends and technologies to support a variety of educational areas. With more than 30,000 attendees, the scale of this event is dizzing but, even more exciting, is the energy and speed which remind you that, when it comes to emergent technologies and educational ideas, things need to move fast, involve experimentation and agile learning.

 

It will come as no surprise that the focus of many of this year’s BETT sessions turned to AI and its impact on education. As a researcher interested in emergent digital practices and their impact on professional development, I was interested to know how the discourse around AI is evolving and what new directions key stakeholders are taking as their next steps. An important consideration across industry and educational providers was to emphasize that AI will not take the driver’s seat (i.e., replace educators). AI technologies and applications, as many speakers pointed out, will make a long-lasting presence in our educational systems, but they will have to be integrated as support and transformative systems that enhance education. AI was not necessarily heralded as the one and all-encompassing solution. Instead, what we are currently seeing is a process of experimentation which will turn to maturation within the next decade. Alongside, we will probably see a diversification of AI solutions with much more targeted datasets and LLMs (Large Language Models) that will provide high quality results.

 

What I enjoyed the most is that at this point, when researchers, industry actors and practitioners are still trying to grapple with how to make the most of the AI wave, there is a productive space for discussion, interrogation and reflection. Many of the BETT sessions launched provocations and questions on how to best deploy AI to foster creativity, to support innovation and to facilitate the creation of new ideas. It is true that some of the showcased AI applications also promoted the notion of making teaching and working in the educational sector more efficient, easy, and speedy. However, beyond the discourse of productivity and efficiency, I hope we can spend a bit more time thinking about emergent possibilities for doing things differently. If AI is here to support education, what are the added approaches and capabilities that can help us support our learners? And, most importantly, how do we ensure that, in the process, we don’t leave some learners behind? Issues of access, AI literacy and teacher capacity-strengthening need to come to the forefront.

 

BETT also presented many other educational tools and products: from robots to educational games, digital storytelling kits, and interactive sandboxes. I was very interested in exploring new ideas around XR (extended reality) solutions and came across a few educational packages with STEM resources. The educational offer for XR is still emergent and I shared some of the current challenges and opportunities with colleagues in this sector, some of which have recently been included in a whitepaper and report that I contributed to with colleagues at the University of Glasgow (access the XRed: Preparing for Immersive Education documents here). To be productive in this space, we need to continue and work collaboratively, across sectors and with open solutions that we can tailor, analyse and update. – Dr. Lavinia Hirsu, School of Education

First published: 7 February 2024

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