Chris Betcher

Here’s something I’ve noticed about people. Most people love the familiar. They find something that they like and they get used to it. On the surface that would seem like a logical idea, and while it’s certainly ok to like having favourite things - after all, that’s what makes them our favourite things - the problem is that we can get so attached to those things to the point where we never discover alternatives to them. And this means we sometimes become blind to the alternatives, the potential opportunities they offer us, or the idea that we could perhaps like other things even more. It’s good to be able to identify the ideas, objects and things we are most attached to, and then deliberately make an effort to look around and see what other alternatives exist.  For example, if you normally go to a church, you could try visiting a mosque. If you normally choose McDonalds, try a Hungry Jacks instead. If you normally drive, try walking. If you don’t like to dance, take a dance class....

I recently gave this keynote talk at the EdTechTeam Cape Town Summit, titled "Imagine the Possibilities". I've actually given this talk a number of times at Summits and other events all over the world, and this is likely the last time I'll use it, so I'm posting it here just for posterity.

If you’ve been in education for a while there is a phrase you'll hear regularly if you listen for it. It’s just seven little words but the impact of those words can be enormous. The people who utter this phrase often mean well, but it rarely leads to much that is positive. This phrase can kill a potentially good idea, ruin a worthwhile initiative or demoralise others who want to make a difference. It may just be the most dangerous phrase in the world. The phrase is “That’s the way we’ve always done it.” You may have been on the receiving end of these words. Perhaps you came up with what you believed was a brilliant, clever, innovative or time-saving idea. You honestly feel your idea can improve an existing outcome and make a huge difference. So you approach your colleagues with your idea, knowing that by making just a few simple changes the world will be a better place. And while they might listen and thank you for your interesting suggestion, they inform you of all the reason...

On TV tonight I saw an ad from some group that calls themselves the " Marriage Alliance ". I looked at their website which seems to be a thinly veiled attempt to be open minded when really all they want to do is oppose same sex marriage and maintain the unfair status quo... Their site poses a number of open questions about marriage, and while they purport to being just trying to encourage a healthy discussion about the value of marriage in general, it's pretty obvious what their agenda is. They are clearly in opposition to same sex marriage. So, since they asked, here are my answers to the questions on their website... Should children have the right to know their biological history? Yes. As an adopted child myself, I should have the right to know my history if I choose to. Some choose to and some do not. But what's your point?  So what if a child of a same sex couple knows their biological history and where they came from?  You thin...

It's interesting that as you get older you become increasingly aware of your own influences. Aside from my parents and my direct family, who obviously had a major influence on my life, there are only handful of people whose ideas, thoughts and perspectives about the world have been so influential, so pervasive, so far reaching, that I can honestly say they have shaped the person I have become. We all have them. They are the people you would invite to your ultimate fantasy dinner party. The ones who are so interesting, so fascinating in their ideas and the way they think about things, that you would give anything to spend time talking with them, learning from them and being in awe of them. I only have a few people in that category, but one is Marcel Duchamp. For most people reading this, your reaction is probably "Marcel who?" I don't want to turn this into a history lesson, so if you want to know more about Duchamp, you can no doubt look him up . It's quite like...

Predicting the future is challenging. I remember reading Nicholas Negroponte's book Being Digital many years ago, and it's been amazing to see so many of his predictions come to pass. In particular, I remember reading about his "trading places" idea, or what become known as the "Negroponte Switch". It's basically the idea that we used to have static devices that don't move, like televisions, getting their signal delivered wirelessly through the air, while other devices that should be mobile, like telephones, required the use of cables in order to connect. The "Switch", predicted by Negroponte back in the 1980s, would be that telephones would one day get their signal wirelessly and televisions would get theirs via cables.  It took about 20 years for that to happen, but happen it certainly did.  Looking back now, if you understood the technologies that brought the changes, the signs were probably there and it made sense but it took someone l...

I was recently in Hong Kong for the excellent 21st Century Learning conference, where I had the very great pleasure of running some hands-on workshops in Google stuff, and also giving the closing keynote. As I mention at  the start of this talk, it was quite intimidating to think that I could say anything worth hearing after an amazing couple of days of learning from so many other amazing educators. (Having people like Stephen Heppell and Gary Stager in the audience didn't make it any less intimidating either) I actually didn't even realise these talks were being recorded so when I spotted this on Twitter today it came as a bit of a surprise. For what it's worth, here is a video of my talk, called Babies and Bathwater. http://youtu.be/d127FRlxVuY I go to quite a few conferences, and I'm always a little surprised at how few of them bother to video the presentations. Given the amount of time and energy that conference organisers put into running these events, you'd th...

With Google turning 15 last week, I've been pondering  about just how much friction has been removed from our lives because of technology (and web technology in particular).  Thanks to the web, many things that were once difficult, expensive, complicated or time-consuming have been made less of all of these things, and much of the inherent friction in these things has been dramatically reduced, and in some cases even eliminated completely. This removal of friction hasn't always been painless, and many industries have been decimated by the massive disintermediation that  digital technology has brought to them. Take the music industry as an obvious example.  In the space of about a decade, we've seen a huge shift from the idea of buying music on plastic disks to that of downloading music from "somewhere on the Internet", hopefully by still paying for it with some sort of subscription model like Spotify or Google Play All Access, but all too often pirated for free ...

It's clear that there is quite a lot about this thing we call "school" that probably needs to change and that there are many schools around the world that are embracing and leading that change with some really innovative ideas about teaching and learning. However, from what I can tell, innovation and genuine change for the better in education is still rather patchy and relies greatly on the passion and drive of individual teachers, many of whom fly "under the radar" in order to make positive change in their own educational circumstance. There are certainly schools that are, as a single organisation or even a whole system, making giant strides towards reinventing what modern education should be about, but if I was able to randomly drop you into one of the many millions of classrooms around the world to observe what's taking place inside it, I think it would still be fairly hit or miss as to whether you'd find teaching and learning that was modern, contemp...

In 1963, when I was born... Television was delivered over the airwaves. In black and white. We had four channels to choose from and we had to get out of our seat to change them. And we hardly ever heard a swear word. Radio was only available using an AM signal. In mono. If you didn’t like the song that was on, you could switch to the other station. If you wanted to listen to music on the go, you had a small transistor radio with a tinny speaker or a single earpiece. And if you wanted to hear “your show”, you had to listen while it was being broadcast. Newspapers were printed on paper and printed every 24 hours. The time between a story happening and us finding out about it was often several days. Which stories made it into the newspaper was decided by an editor somewhere. The text on the page was made by rolling ink across the tops of slugs of lead in shape of letters, assembled to make sentences, and then pressing those inked letters against paper. The paper was then folded, cut, bund...

A couple of years ago, I coauthored a book about teaching and learning with interactive whiteboards. I'm not going to debate the pros and cons of IWBs here, but believe me when I say I can see both sides of the arguments for and against them. Regardless of your opinions about the worth of IWBs, I was pleased that the book was able to focus on the importance of quality teaching, and I think we made a pretty solid point in the book that any classroom technology is only as good as the pedagogical expertise being applied to its use. It was an interesting exercise, as I'd never written an actual book before. As this type of niche book goes, it's been reasonably successful. It sold out of its first, and then second editions, and has now been reprinted several times. It got some excellent reviews. The company that published it, ACER Press , tells us that it's actually their number one selling book, so it's rather nice to know that it's been well received by so many pe...

There always seems to be a lot of talk about the need for more teachers to embrace "21st Century skills". Of course, there's a lot of discussion about what these "21st Century skills" actually are. Many people have debated and discussed this issue, asking the question of what exactly should today's learners know in order to function in the "21st Century". I'm sure there are a whole lot of really good answers to these questions that dig deeply into effective pedagogy and the deeper philosophy of education. This post is not about those things. Instead, here is a list of simple, easily-learnable skills that I think would make life as a teacher in the 21st Century simpler and much more productive. While they're not exactly earth-shatteringly profound in terms of the big issues of education, they are greatly useful skills to have... and in my experience they are also skills that all too few teachers seem to actually possess. I find that posse...

I wrote a blog post a little while back called This is Not Amazing , and the basic thrust of it was that, after more than 30 years since "the personal computer revolution", more than 10 years of living in a post-Google World, and now almost a full decade into the 21st century, that we should stop being so amazed at things which are simply just part of our normal world.  The post gave a few examples of things that are, quite frankly, pretty average tasks that can be accomplished on a personal computer and it relayed the story of how I had a day where I kept getting told how "amazing" these rather mundane tasks were, by people that were, in my estimation, too easily impressed.  I tried to tie that all together by observing that we probably do our students a great disservice by being easily impressed by technologically ordinary things, since this is pretty much just the world they live in. I think when we 'ooh and ahh' over things that are simply just a regular...

Amazing (adjective) astonishing, astounding, surprising, stunning, staggering, shocking, startling, stupefying, breathtaking; awesome, awe-inspiring, sensational, remarkable, spectacular, stupendous, phenomenal, extraordinary, incredible, unbelievable; informal mind-blowing, jaw-dropping Sometimes I find myself dealing with people in circumstances that are completely unconnected, but which seem to have some kind of bizarre synchronicity that causes them to mirror each other. The other day, I found myself in one of these situations... Firstly, I was asked by a colleague to help edit some video footage from a recent school trip.  I don't mind helping with such requests because I quite enjoy the process of video editing, so I attached the camera to my MacBook Pro, sucked the footage onto the hard drive and began dragging clips together in iMovie. My colleague looked on as I dragged clips around the timeline, clearly never having seen non-linear video editing before, and, with a littl...

I wonder if Karl Fisch knew what he was starting when he made the original "Did You Know?" PowerPoint file for his staff at Arapahoe High School back in early 2007.  Fisch just wanted to share a few thoughts about a fast changing world with his fellow teachers, but by posting a copy to his blog it got picked up by others who found it fascinating, it went completely viral, has been made into several versions, has been remixed and modified many times, and its many incarnations have now been viewed many millions of times on YouTube and other online video sites.  All of this really speaks about the power of the web to help spread ideas... In case you haven't seen it here is version 4.0, the latest incarnation of "Did You Know?" Nice work Karl. Technorati Tags: karlfisch , didyouknow

One of the side effects of the new web is greatly increased disintermediation , or cutting out the middleman.  It seems that everywhere you look, entire industries are being turned upside down because the web makes it so easy for people to completely bypass the traditional "middlemen" that we all used to rely on so heavily.  Musicians are bypassing record labels and releasing their music directly to their fans.  Authors are bypassing publishers and using services like lulu.com to self publish. Homebuyers often know just as much about the real estate markets as the agents.  Ordinary people can buy and sell shares without the need to go though expensive stockbrokers.  In all of these processes (and many others like them) unless the middlemen add real value along the way, they face eventual extinction.  Why would you continue to pay someone to do something that you can just as easily do yourself? This disintermediation seems to be obvious in three main areas.....

Someone once said to me that if you do something once, it's an accident. Do it twice and it's a coincidence. Do it three or more times and that's just the way you're living. The underlying message is that if you repeat something enough, then the patterns of use start to tell their own story. Your repeated activity starts to build up into a pattern of use and looking at those patterns can often give insights into the activity that are not apparent by looking at the individual instances of the activity. This idea of allowing data to "rest where it lays" and deriving insights from it is essentially the idea behind tag clouds, whose patterns reflect repeated use of words, tags, keywords or ideas. If you look at someone's Delicious tag cloud and see the patterns emerging in the form of highlighted, emphasised words, then you see a clear indication of what interests that person. The more they bookmark using tags, the more evident their interests. The numbers...

If you’re not blogging in this day and age, are you at a disadvantage? I can see a day in the not too distant future (if it's not already here) where your "digital footprint" will carry far more weight than anything you might include in a resume or CV. It's perhaps not so relevant (yet) in the public education sector where the criteria for employment is not always  based solely on a meritocracy, but in the independent sector there is a definite awareness of an individual's digital footprint as a way to gauge their involvement, passion, engagement and understanding of their chosen field. It may not yet be happening in the public sector because of unionisation and the existing promotional structures in place, but in the outside world where people are employed, promoted and recognised by their actual contributions and not just by the amount of time they have been in a given role, the notion of knowing about an individual because of the trail of ideas they leave behin...

Our school is just about to provide Netbook computers ( Lenovo S10 s in case you're interested) to all of our Year 6 students.  This is part of a project to provide an immersive technology-rich year at an age where we think it will do the most good.  Lots of Web 2.0 and open Source software tools, use of Open Office and Google Docs as their main productivity environments, access to school hosted blogs and wikis, etc.  We are trying to make use of these tools to promote creativity, productivity and higher order thinking. We want to expose them to the many great digital resources out there, while teaching them the information literacy skills needed to navigate through the massive amounts of information available.  The kids and their teachers are SO excited and, to be honest, so am I. So when I stumbled across this video this morning I really had a giggle.  The students who made this clip did a great job of pointing out the limitations of non-digital media in a very funny way.  It...

We hear a lot about the notion of Digital Natives and Digital Immigrants, a concept originally suggested by Marc Prensky in a paper by the same name .  It makes a presumption that those born after the widespread introduction of digital technologies are somehow out of step with the world of technology, while those who were born and raised in the digital age are naturally able to function within it.  Prensky contends that these younger folk - the "natives" - are born into a technology rich environment and are therefore akin to those who grow up natively speaking a given language, immersed in its use and able to converse fluently with it, while the "immigrants" are like those who come to a foreign land and need to learn to speak a whole new language. He argues that the immigrants will always have a digital "accent", and therefore their non-native heritage will always be conspicuously obvious. To be a native implies that you are not only comfortable, but know...