If you meet the King of Rock and Roll on the road…

I hadn’t been in the Walter E. Washington Convention Center in the nation’s capital for 10 minutes when I spotted the Elvis Presley impersonator stepping onto the escalator. He was dressed in a sky blue one-piece velvet jumpsuit and his hair looked, well, it looked like Elvis but, y’know, great. I hadn’t even made it to the registration booth and there was a velvet Elvis. It wasn’t what I had expected. The International Society for Technology in Education or ISTE (pronounced “Ice Tea” by all the cool kids) sounded like it would be a magnet for nerds. I mean computers and teachers? Please.

But there was the blue velvet Elvis, a little pudgey around the middle, getting on the escalator and there I was feeling a bit like Alice down the rabbit hole or Hunter S. Thompson in the lobby of the Flamingo Hotel… without the rabbits or the lizards.

A man on a mission

I was there to explore the National Educational Computing Conference, to get a sense of the state of eLearning in education. A simple goal. I shook off the effects of the Elvis sighting and made my way to the exhibit hall. I’ve been to quite a few conventions and trade shows in my time. I know my way around an exhibit hall. I know for example that you need to pace yourself and wear sneakers. A day in an exhibit hall is serious indoor hiking. You need to stay hydrated and stay focused. I also know that, usually, the exhibit hall layout is a not-so-subtle representation of the hierarchy of that particular industry. Usually there are a few huge booths in a central location, close to the main entrance. These are populated by the companies that have some absurd competitive advantage in the industry. The giants. At the outer ring you’ll find their opposite, let’s call them the irrelevant. Not to say they weren’t once relevant, or that one day they might become relevant. The exhibit hall layout is a snapshot of the industry that year. One day the giants may fall or the irrelevant may rise to greatness. But let’s circle back to the irrelevant and the giants in a bit, I was there to see the real innovators of eLearning!

Finding your innovation zone

The way to approach an exhibit hall in my estimation is to locate the sweet spot in that floorplan. Start at the land of the giants and draw concentric rings out from there. In a ring 20 yards or so away from the center, there are the companies that really drive the industry. At NECC09 I found that there was a vibrant and competitive ecosystem residing there involved in developing online learning objects and small supplemental courses. These companies are creating really beautiful little online destinations and teacher friendly course supplements that any kid would find fascinating. These companies have names like Brainpop, Secret Builders and Fiddlehead. Names that make you want to find out more, right? That’s the idea. They get that half the battle in education is to capture the students’ imaginations, to make them curious. They know that it’s hard to push raw facts at students. The better option is to make the student do the pulling. They’ve learned that the way to get the horse to drink once you’ve led him to water, is to walk him in the sun till he’s thirsty.

There in that zone of innovation were a few other booths that drew my attention too, not because they were creatively brilliant but because they were quirky or offered a product so different from anything else. The Cool Tool was there showing these great little wood and metal lathes that kids could control from their computers (Mac or PC). Draw a profile and the lathe trims the brass or hardwood cylinder to match. Art teachers, shop teachers… wouldn’t your kids love that? Lego was there with, y’know, Legos. These folks know another secret about teaching, that kids have a tactile craving for tools and shapes and materials. My son says that he sees the raccoon in my grandson sometimes. It’s in the hands, this need to build or take things apart. Students have lot’s of raccoon in them. Some of these companies know that and cater to it.

The supporting cast

Closer toward the center I found the hardware firms. Laptops and tablets and projectors, oh my. You’d be surprised how many interactive whiteboards there are in the world. Or maybe you wouldn’t be. It looked like there must have been a federal program for the purchase of interactive white boards in some recent spending stimulus. What else could explain this bloom of companies offering them? In this ring the company names were less imaginative, engineering sounding names. Adaptive Curriculum, M&A Technology, LG Electronics. The only people who need to be intrigued by these companies products are the school IT squads, but here too there are the small, enthusiastic firms with some cool gadgets. The AVerPen by AVerMedia was fun to doodle with on the big screen. I have to admit to being in the AV club when I was a student so maybe I’m a sucker for anything with an AV in the name.

There was a large contingent of content repurposers there. Big names with bigger media libraries that were looking for easy ways to get these assets out to schools and teachers. PBS had a booth that showcased media sampling from a broad range of PBS productions. Ditto for Discovery Education. All that media. I’d love to see how teachers are using it. I remember cutting and pasting a National Geographic article on squids into a report in elementary school. What would I do with iMovie and the PBS video archives? I don’t know but I’d love to find out. If you are a teacher and you’re working with these, drop me a line. I’d love to hear your stories.

Those are the highlights of my walk through the prime real estate, but I promised I’d get back to the irrelevant and the giants.

The Land of the Lost

Later in the day I took a stroll a little further from the center. There, on the outskirts of the hall, lies a really interesting category of exhibitors. This is the low rent district, the tin-pan alley of the exhibit hall. I like to breeze through these backwater areas at a good clip but keeping my eyes open. You never know what diamonds in the rough you’ll run into. This is where the garage engineers (think Steve and Steve and their breadboard Apple I, or Packard and Hewlett tossing a coin to see whose name went first) are showing off their shoestring budget businesses. Maybe you’ll see a cool little chroma-key software or a better way to drop video into moodle. Maybe you’ll see a neat little app for making SCORM conformant courseware from Word docs. Sometimes you’ll see a business that makes you think “ten years from now that guy might just be the next Bill Gates.” Not often, but every now and then.

It was back in these small blue velvet booths that I saw the saddest booth in the world. I came around a corner and there among the riff-raff was a small unassuming booth with a logo I’ve know since I was a child. The Smithsonian. Just typing it I feel a reverence for the educational power of the place. But this booth was a sad affair. 10 feet x 12 feet. A few posters, with visible fold lines, push pinned to the backdrop. I made a bad move of immediately hurting their feelings by saying “This isn’t really the Smithsonian’s booth is it?” I mean, they knew it sucked but they’d done their best. I talked to them for a while to get a sense of how they ended up here. How did the educational giant, the Smithsonian, not have a huge booth front and center?

Clearly the Smithsonian hasn’t stayed on the cutting edge of technology. Remember when an organization could think that technology might go another way? Remember all those meetings you were in when your organization decided to establish a strategy for leveraging the internet instead of ignoring it? Yeah, the Smithsonian clearly didn’t do that. They told me a tale of how each exhibit plans, and funds, their own web presence. They told me that there was no central organizing web strategy office in the Smithsonian. I looked over the booths toward the prime real estate at the front of the hall and said, “if there were any justice you guys would have a booth up there with the giants.”

When I was a kid I used to ride my ten speed to the Washington Mall and hang out in the brand new Air and Space Museum. Among other things, I’m a bit of a nut for space exploration. The Smithsonian was the best example I’d ever seen of interactive educational media. Their exhibits were brilliant uses of lighting and electronics and imagery. They engaged the users in a way that created the response I’ve often aimed for in my development efforts… the utterance of a single syllable… “cool!” There is no doubt that I’ve often used my memories of those exhibits to create new media educational experiences that were fun and effective.

They were the real deal. And here they were in the outer ring of irrelevance. It was a shame.

The Land of the Giants

I thought about that as I walked back toward the front of the exhibit hall as I made my way to leave. I thought about how genuinely cool the Smithsonian had been, and in truth, still was in the confines of their museums. But they hadn’t made the transition to the digital world. Their educational reach only made it to the edge of their Washington, DC real estate. As I passed through the land of the giants I realized that these corporations were the ones who had a much broader reach than institutions like the Smithsonian now. For better or worse they were the leaders of the educational technology industry, at least in the snapshot of this convention. I walked past the bigger booths. Pearson. SMART. Promethean. These are our industry leaders in 2009. Are we in good hands with these? Are we being served well by their stewardship? Perhaps. But I miss the real deal of the Smithsonian and organizations like them.

As I headed up the escalator I passed by the OKI booth. The blue velvet Elvis impersonator was launching into a rendition of “Hooked on a Feeling.” He swayed his hips a bit lethargically, being an impersonator of the later, somewhat bloated King. I laughed and said to no one in particular, “that’s not even an Elvis tune.”

It was a B.J. Thomas song in case you’re not a fan.