Chris Betcher

The following is from an email I wrote to someone who asked if I was going to be presenting at the EduTech conference in Brisbane this year. As you can see, my answer is no, but I think what's important is my reason for saying no. If you're planning to present at EduTech, I hope you consider the effect of saying yes. To be honest, I am not a big fan of EduTech, mainly because I really don't like their policy of non-payment for Australian speakers. I find it quite insulting that they are willing to pour outrageous amounts of money into getting overseas speakers but are not willing to pay anything for local speakers. I think they need to approach this with greater equity and offer ALL their speakers some form of payment, even if the locals just get a token amount. As I've no doubt pointed out before, this is a (very) commercial event run for profit by a professional conference-running company, and yet they expect the vast majority of what they are offering to their cus...

Some of you might have seen that I've been working on a daily blogging project this year called My Daily Create. You can visit it at www.mydailycreate.com (or click the link in the menu bar above). The basic idea is that I'm attempting to create something every day of the year during 2014. It could be music, a video, a drawing, a photo or a poem. It could be something practical and usable, or something retinal and frivolous. It doesn't matter what it is, I just plan to make something each day. So far it's going pretty well and I haven't missed a single day yet. Earlier this week I presented a keynote at the EduTECH conference in Brisbane on the topic of creativity at the invitation of the organisers. I find creativity an interesting topic to talk about, but it's usually one of those things that's easy to talk about in general terms but much harder to talk about specifically. I felt even more challenged by it because several of the other speakers were also t...