The futures market

It was very refreshing to see the set up of LearnTEC in Karlsruhe, Germany this week. Billed as one of the largest learning technology trade fairs in Europe, it dwarfs the likes of mega conferences such as Online Educa Berlin, with well over 7000 visitors over the three days of the exhibition and conference. I was honoured to be invited to give a public keynote within the trade fair arena (see yesterday's post for more on this), and afterwards was inundated by requests for interviews and discussion. Several of the vendors also button-holed me to discuss my previous blogpost Upstairs downstairs, where I gave a critical report on the previous week's Learning Technologies Conference London exhibition. The ensuing discussion heated up the blogosphere for a while, with vendors defending their various positions, and practitioners giving their own views. To their credit, the vendors at this exhibition seemed to be a little more in contact with their training and teaching colleagues. I deliberately went around to the stands to question vendors on their approaches and examine their wares. I was pleasantly surprised by their candour and their openness.

The exhibition stands were very innovative (check out the human avatar above, who was not just entertaining to watch, but also informative when you talked to him) but also very much in touch with the zeitgeist - the current trends of learner centred training, user generated content, technology enrichment and interactive forms of education. I was impressed also by the way many of them wished to engage in discussion at the end of my keynote. Several vendors left their stands to crowd around the edge of the Bildungsforum where the public talks were held, so they could hear what I had to say, and perhaps make their own contribution to the public forum. Some were very concerned about the image of the conference exhibitor (they had already read my Upstairs downstairs blog post and knew who I was) and wished to quiz me on what I considered to be the needs of the learner right here, right now. I had several frank and fruitful discussions with them about learning needs, technology trends and emerging pedagogies. It was also interesting to see that many of the major vendors were notable by their absence from the event. The only major players I saw were SmartBoard and QuestionMark Perception - perhaps this is a clue about the success of the trade exhibition. It seems to me that the smaller companies have an eagerness to connect with the users to establish a foothold in the industry, and maybe this makes them a little more open to discussion and consultation.

LearnTEC certainly seems to have the balance right between academic discourse and vendor demonstrations. The way they were mixed within the same space, in a public and freely open environment seemed to work well. The discussion was rich and productive as a result. On a final note, the image on the left was taken of a stand in the middle of the exhibition - it was a reminder to everyone who walked past about where we have come from, and where we should never, ever, return to, because learning is about looking to the future, not the past. Take note, conference organisers - all of this is the future of the learning technology conference.

The futures market by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.