The five most important ed-tech trends at SXSWedu

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I’ve been on the ground in Austin for the South By Southwest Education Conference & Festival 22 hours. In that time I’ve interviewed six people, chatted with many more, and hit the Java Jive in the Hilton four times. Here’s what I see as the biggest trends coming out of the conference.

1. Data and analytics. There seems to be a consensus, which Bill Gates will no doubt highlight in his keynote tomorrow, that the most important potential–as yet unrealized–contribution of technology to teaching and learning is the ability to extract meaningful insights from the myriad information that students generate as they travel through life on their learning journeys: diagnostics, individualized goals and plans, demographic information, performance evaluations, and on and on from cradle to mortarboard. Companies like InBloom and Engrade envision a teacher working like a doctor, synthesizing reams of test results and other information with the help of tech tools to arrive at the proper intervention for the proper moment.
2. Games and adaptive learning. What makes video games fun is that they get harder as you get better at them, keeping you in the right “proximal zone” between bored and frustrated. “In the gaming world, when you don’t get the right outcome, you don’t feel like a failure, you say how do I adjust,” says Dreambox CEO Jessie Woolley-Wilson. This is what is meant, at its simplest, by adaptive learning. Game-like learning platforms range from Dreambox, a math program that “puts the learning in front,” in the words of Woolley-Wilson, to Kuato Studios, which later this month is debuting a fighting-robot coding game made by designers who worked on Call of Duty. Games and adaptive learning are intimately related to #1, data and analytics. In some sense, what defines a game is simply that the players are keeping score, so a key feature of online learning games is the constant generation of data that can, in theory, be used by teachers and parents in coaching mode to help direct students. Taken together, #1 and #2 form the megatrend/buzzword of “personalization”–the “mass customization” of learning.
3. MOOCs. While many in the education space might be sick of hearing about Massively Open Online Courses, Coursera, Edx, et al, they are still adding users and still shaping the public imagination about what is possible when classrooms open a window on the world.
4. Makers and creativity. I was pleasantly surprised to see a Makerspace onsite at the convention center, where you could drop in and play with Legos, circuits, and homemade play dough. This hands-on, amateur, DIY stuff taps into a deep need for learners to accent what is most fully human even as we are increasingly overwhelmed by virtual worlds. In addition, John Maeda, president of the Rhode Island School of Design, hosted an influential panel on STEM to STEAM–putting the arts into STEM education. He’s argued that the forward march of technology will lead to a higher premium being placed on the personal, well-designed, and handmade.
5. Going back to the classroom. “Where are the districts?” “Where are the teachers?” Aside from a few leaders of charter schools I’ve run into, most of whom were presenting, my impression is that there are few full-time educators here, let alone people who make IT purchasing decisions for school districts. Many sense a fundamental disconnect on both sides between the innovation conversation going on here and the real needs of teachers in classrooms. Hopefully that will change soon.