Originally written in January 28, 2020
Exactly fifteen years ago, my colleagues—Örn, Bjössi, Valli—and I attended the Bett show in London. The Bett show centers on software and hardware for learning and teaching. There, you can see all the latest innovations in one place, and I felt it was time to visit the exhibition again.
On Friday afternoon, after two days of trekking between exhibition booths at the ExCeL exhibition center, I sat down with a cup of coffee at a Jerusalem Costa Coffee somewhere in central London. I pulled out a worn notebook and a pen, intending to process what I had seen. Of course, much has changed in the fifteen years since I last attended this exhibition.
This time, I felt there was a significant emphasis on larger solutions for registration and the management of various aspects related to learning, teaching, and organization. These included solutions for recording assessments, managing parent communication, overseeing students’ digital learning environments, and so on. Regarding classroom instruction, I saw mostly equipment for creating virtual reality and tools for programming. In terms of hardware, touchscreens and Chromebooks were most prominent.
I must confess that as I trekked between the booths, I wondered who I would actually be buying this equipment for, if I even decided to buy anything at all. It has been proven that it is very difficult to get teachers to utilize technical equipment in any meaningful way. The Smart Boards we have at the school are a clear example of that. I have doubts that both the programming equipment and the virtual reality glasses would serve any sensible pedagogical purpose. I was far from being impressed.
Saturday was a free day, and I started the day early. I strolled to the train station at Great Portland Street and took the train over to Edgware Road, where I switched to the Yellow (Circle) Line to get to South Kensington station. There are several interesting museums in that vicinity—museums like the Natural History Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and the Science Museum.
I started by stopping at the Royal Albert Hall to try and buy a guided tour of this historic concert hall. Unfortunately, I had to turn away; the building was not open for tours that day due to a Cirque du Soleil performance. Instead, I sat down at the café inside the concert hall and rested my weary feet for a while. I poked my head into both Imperial College and the Victoria and Albert Museum, but stayed only briefly at both. I explored the Natural History Museum, where I stayed much longer, and then headed over to Westminster to see the Churchill War Rooms.
The Churchill War Rooms is a museum that shows the facilities the British set up during the war. The headquarters were underground, and from there they intended to direct British operations safely, even as German bombs rained down on London. In reality, they weren’t actually safe at all, because the underground bunker was not bomb-proof. The British were lucky that no bomb ever hit the bunker.
The museum is split into two parts. On one hand, you stroll between rooms and receive information about the role of each individual room and various tidbits about life down there. On the other hand, you can learn about the main man himself, Churchill; he was a remarkable man and in many ways an entertaining figure. He was a man of words. Once, a politician said to him that he would rather support the Devil himself than Churchill. Churchill replied: “But if he is not a candidate, can I then count on your support?”
I certainly would have stayed much longer at the museum if I wasn´t feeling so blody awful because of a cold. I decided to find a pharmacy to see if there was anything available that could somewhat alleviate my cold symptoms. Lo and behold, in Britain there are tablets called Sudafed, and after about half an hour, everything clears up and I feel like I’m ready for anything. Here at home [in Iceland], the only thing offered is nasal spray, which provides relief for just a short while but dries out the nose in the process.
Thanks to the Sudafed, I was now in a good enough mood to stroll around the area above Trafalgar Square. I really enjoyed watching the city life; here and there, musicians sat and performed their music, and most of them were actually quite good. In the Soho district, the streets had been decorated because the Year of the Rat is beginning according to the Chinese calendar. The crowds were enormous. I didn’t head back to the hotel until eleven o’clock that night.
