The show was pretty amazing, and very cool for kids: Infrared camera-demo, lots of swag and talk to a real astronaut on video conference. Respect to NASA for spreading their knowledge freely to everyone – as they do all over the internet as well!
And we did learn a few things as well: The James Webb Space Telescope will “see” infrared, hence the gold hexagonal shield. The #JWST will not be orbiting the Earth, but follow Earth (in it’s shade) around the sun. And for comparison the size of the Hubble’s mirror is about the size of three of the hexagonal panels on the JWST.

Here is Nasa’s animation of the JWST unfolding in space:

Lots (and lots) more from Nasa on the James Webb Space Telescope.

BJ Fogg is the founder of the Stanford Behavioral Lab (seen here with The real stars of the show: Monkey & Frog) He’s researching how people make new habits – and his message is fairly simple: Make tiny changes to form new habits. The big life-altering “change-who-you-are-in-two-weeks”-solutions mostly fail anyway. So pick a tiny habit, do it often – and then pick a new one. Connect it to a trigger, and change your environment to help you:

Frog decides to “drink 8 glasses of water a day”
Monkey decides to bring a glass of water to his desk every morning, when he comes into work.

-> Who of the two will drink more water in the long run, you think?
If you want to change, try his free online program Tiny Habits.

BJ Fogg brought 3 of his former students on stage to ask questions and comment – and just shaking things up. They didn’t figure out what to do with their foam smiley faces and flowers, but their questions were good…

Turned out it was The #usemeleaveme bike Rackspace brought to town. So I jumped on a brown cruiser and pedaled off to the Radisson. And when I came out after my session, it was still there, so I rode up to get a burrito at the Taco Shack – and lo and behold, no-one else figured out yet that the bike was up for grabs, so I rode it back to the ACC again.

The SXSWiness is (apart from bikes being great) that the bikes are tweeting using the hashtag #UseMeLeaveME

My schedule is avalible here – please give me feedback @TSchlichting

Schools and Real Computer Science (Simon Peyton Jones, Jo Twist & friends: Roger Davies, Nicki Maddams, Charlotte Avery) tackled the challenge of getting more kids interested in programming. Visual programming languages was a way in: like Kudo Letting kids make games by combining visual elements (actions, parameters etc.)
To inspire the girls – who are desperately needed in IT: Geeky Barbie travels the world (along with her boss Nicki Maddams aka @GeekyNicki and talks to inspiring women in IT (on Facebook as well) – check it out and spread it to the girls out there!
The wifi had improved – so I actually had the chance to tweet for a while (and catch up on the situation(s) at work…)

Big ideas in Education was the heading of the next BettArena session (Not sure I found the name apt, but it was entertaining)
Now I’m not British (nor living here), so I hadn’t heard of “the country’s worst head teacher” (apparently something one could have seen on tv or read about in one of those paper things called The Daily Fail.) But Vic Goddard uses his “title” to promote teaching – and his energetic sales speech for the teaching profession was only topped by his own “YouTube guest speaker” Tailor Mali’s amazing Poetry Slam answer to what Teacher’s make:

Later on Robert Mullins (Raspberry Pi) and Bill Liao (coderdojo) were talking about invigorating the computer curriculum – so it was a day with lots of debate about teaching actual coding skills and what this means for teachers.

Personally I needed to recharge – so I got off the buzzing BettShow floor and it’s crazy noise level – AND got to plug in my dying gadgets upstairs at the Higher Education track. And there was a wealth of interesting inputs to be found:
I caught half of Richard Boulderstone‘s “Cross Platform support for mobile devices – about the British Library’s adventures in the world of apps.
Richard Hall had another tale from the trenches that is technology in educational institutions: Making-the-cloud-work-for-you-institutional-risk-and-governance (on slideshare) I especially liked this slide:
Finally someone talking about ALL the categories of services we use – including the ones on the left, which institutions tend to just ignore (and for some at least) hope they’ll go away, if we ignore them?

Marieke Guy from the Digital Curation Centre talked about a problem no one adresses enough yet: Improving access to research data. Important topic both regarding the benefits and problems of opening up data, but also more practical matters of storing and sharing data. Anyone with an interest in the topic, should look her up, as well as the DDC.

Meredith Henson from Catalyst pushed open source to the masses: Open-source learning: Encouraging academics to share content (should be on slideshare?!) – as a WordPress evangelist myself, I couldn’t agree more with her – also on her warning about customizing to death until you can’t upgrade…

All sessions I never knew I really should go to – and all because I was out of power… And well because the BETT app has rather sparse info on the sessions. No description, just the title for most sessions – which doesn’t always reveal the gloriousness of the content (there #bettshow, feedback for next year!)

Before my brain melted I toured the floor again, heard a bit of a demo with @stephenheppell - pointing out the sad lack of correlation between doing good on STEM topics in PISA tests and interest in pursuing the fields. Countries doing good in PISA has little interest – and Mexico being the odd one out: They do very badly on the PISA, but would love to go into the field Lots more from Stephen Heppell here.

(Next update from #Bettshow will be my photo series of fun stuff and WTF experiences (some overlapping!) from the land of gizmos, free candy and neverending leaflets)

But the Q&A-session later at a smaller stage was interesting, after the initial recap of her talk, the floor was open for questions. Hear her answer to my question here: what’s in it for the universities?

I’ll update with more from her answers soon – there was news on three lines of revenue and more…

The main event is the enormous tradeshow showing off everything you never knew you didn’t need for teaching with technology – demonstrations, show & tell, talks and in the #bettarena some very big names. Parallel to this there are the conferences: Higher Education, Learning at work, School Leaders Summit. Those were a bit hard to find – and I did get sent off to the galleries at the other side of the show, before I remembered I took a note-to-self photo in the hall coming in. That helped…

“Running your university like a business” wasn’t the fast-paced excitement I was going for, or even just un-snoozy (maybe one should have been there from the beginning?) so I went next door to the “Learning at work” conference.

Susan Greenfield: Future Learning trends for a digital age: How are people learning. She is a professor of synaptic pharmacology - and hence interested in what goes on inside our heads. Literally. When it comes to the internet, she definitely comes down on the skeptical side, if not downright negative.Her worry is, that our brains are highly adaptive, and will adapt to most any environment. So what happens to our brains, when more and more of us are living in a two-dimensional environment, and most of the time only using 2 of our senses: visual and auditive. Her answer: our brains will adapt. In stead of developing from sensitive to cognitive – we’re from now going back to senses and the underdeveloped pre-frontal cortex and hence bad impulse control of childhood, obesity, gambling, schizofrenia.
She claims: Our minds are changing – she actually compares this to the challenge of climate change!
…a source who shall remain unnamed to protect the innocent (that is not necessecarily the source) told me later in the day, that the more internet-positive crowd refer to her as Baroness Bonkers?!
Whatever the nickname – it is always interesting to discuss what the internet is doing to our brains…

Next up was Jane Daly, Head of Learning and Development at Marks & Spencer giving some very sound advise on Learning & development plans.

Shortest line: The free coffee!

Unfortunately the “Big Data”-session with Michael Wrightson was cancelled, but that left time for a coffee – and the shop had a looong line, but the lovely ladies in green had the shortest line, for what turned out to be the free coffee – bless those sponsors!

More highlights of day 1: Daphne Koller of Coursera (twice!) and the dynamic duo of Flipped Learning Fame – but more about that in another post.

I also had time to look at a bit of the tech gizmos and general craziness at the trade show – and catching the end of Steve Wheeler (aka @timbuckteeth): Motivating and engaging students: Delivering an active and participatory student experience.

Conclusions after day 1: If you’re intersted in learning and technology – and anywhere near London: The show is on until saturday, it’s free  - and there are more goodies to come, so make it to the ExCel if you can!