On the 25th of Jan, a group from the class and I visited the Bett show at the ExCel centre in Custom House. The show is a trade fair aimed at showing off the latest innovations in education technology with everything from 70′ touch screens to virtual reality headsets. This gives teachers the opportunity to continue the integration of technology into the classroom; a trend that has been seen over the last few decades support by research such as Hoyer (2005) and Christensen (2002). From the moment I walked into Bett, I knew I was not going to enjoy my experience there; I was greeted by an overcrowded room full of buying power inflated egos fueled by the armies of sycophantic overzealous corporate sales machines. After getting over the initial feelings of nausea, we walked around aisle after aisle surrounded by ground-breaking technology which could easily revolutionise most classrooms. Each stall would be run by a company and manned by sales teams of varying size with each sales person seeming to follow the same pattern: a warm smile, a swift look to the badge describing your status (see picture below) and then either a swooping sales pitch or, as was the case for us students, a look of disdain as they realise we have no money to spend.
It seemed to me that a very small handful of the people in that room seemed to actually care about the realistic useful educational applications (Coughlan, 2015) of their multi-thousand-pound machines; they were more interested in what they could sell you and how many of it. It’s an undeniable flaw of capitalism that corporations will make a profit wherever and whenever they can (Swanson, 1986); but does this mean that the world of education should be fuelling this? By welcoming these events, we in the education community are effectively saying to the corporate world that we in education will be just another spoke in their never ending wheel of profit. Surely, as a non-profit industry, education should be looking for more economically viable ways to better itself then spending half a school’s budget on iPads and VR headsets.
This may sound strange coming from a computing specialist and I’m obviously not saying that technology doesn’t have a place in school; the point I’m making is that Bett opened my eyes to the fact that education is currently rolling over and allowing itself to be engulfed into the corporate machine. It would be interesting to ask the CEO of Google or Apple if they ever wonder how much money they’ve taken from schools because, for me, it’s completely unethical that companies are making vast profits from one of the only areas of society that seeks no monetary gain. For me, Bett is a horrible place, it capitulates and welcomes corporate greed into education and isn’t there enough of that in every other walk of life already?
where is the show held?
tel u