Educational innovations have been presented at large shows since the Great Exhibitions of the nineteenth century. At the Great Expos, national system leaders would display the latest reformatory ideas and statistics of their performance to other government figures and the general public.

These international shows were designed to create desire for better futures, which were made to seem plausible and attainable through scientific, technical and industrial prowess. Expos persist as international utopian projections of progress through science, technology and innovation.

Today, huge exhibition centres and conference venues now host dedicated educational technology trade events to showcase the latest technical developments by edtech and big tech companies for huge audiences of educational customers, policy officials, investors, and the press.

Edtech exhibition events are literally where edtech and big tech sell their brands and products to schools and universities – but they are much more too. We can see them as “futuring events” where, like the Great Expos, the digital future of education is presented, made to appear certain and inevitable, and depicted in glossy and seductive visuals, discourses, and demonstrations.

In the last few months, as part of our ongoing work on “futuring” practices and methods in the education industry at the ESRC Centre for Sociodigital Futures, Carolina Valladares Celis, Arathi Sriprakash and I have attended three different large events in three countries, each one focused on education, technology and the future. We treat these as social, material and technical sites of future-making.

Here I report some notes from my recent attendance at the British Education and Technology Trade (BETT) show in London, “the biggest education technology exhibition in the world” – or a kind of modern-day Great Expo for edtech. Drawing from observation notes and photographs taken over two days, and building on the published observations of others from similar events, here I reflect on edtech exhibitions as futuring events.

Edtech futurism repeats itself

Edtech exhibitions are futurist discourse dissemination forums. The discourse typical of BETT is that schooling must be “smarter”, with technologies elevated as solutions to all contemporary problems of a “broken” system of institutionalized education.

The particular futurist discourse infusing these events is channelled through speculative claims, sales pitches promising transformative effects, and repetitive invocations of science-fiction-like tropes of seamless human-machine interaction and enhancement.

The smart discourse even extends to school bags and lockers, but is most spectacularly represented by the presence of smart screens and interfaces, which promise frictionless interaction with technologies.

It’s all great fun, staffed by friendly brand reps willing you to try out their tools and toys to see what the interaction is like for yourself, and carries an undeniably affective and optimistic charge.

Pravin Balakrishnan has written from a previous BETT experience that the show represents a “colonization of the future” and the materialization of an “affective ideology”, where the positive rhetoric of “interaction between learners and largely EdTech companies mobilizes broader affective conditions in the taking up of EdTech in schools and communities”.

The discourse of edtech shows like BETT is accompanied by compelling visual semiotic presentations. Huge screens adorn almost every vendor stand – some of them towering over the thousands of passing visitors. The stands themselves are like plastic fortresses of corporate typography and design.

The typical imagery often points to some better environment beyond the conventional classroom. As you walk the stands, it appears that the chalkboards characteristic of outdated schooling have become interactive whiteboards, which in turn have become touchscreens and then transformed finally into “immersive” virtual reality environments. This all signifies a more “engaging”, immersive and tactile “experience”. Such experiences are often “gamified” – there is even an e-sports arena.

The semiotic impression given by BETT is that the physical school walls have dissolved, giving way to experiences more akin to high-definition video gaming and simulation environments.

Teaching machines 2.0

AI and robotics are not new presences at edtech exhibitions, as Kalervo Gulson and Kevin Witzenberger previously observed, but recently they are ever-present as technical-material instantiations of “the future of education”. Startup edtech companies are given time on stages to present and platform their innovations and make claims that (as I observed) “school sucks” but AI promises to “unbox education” from its structural constraints.

AI is attached to every possible aim and purpose of education, with “pioneering” innovation said to be “transformative” for “enhancing” learning outcomes, “empowering” students, addressing inequalities, “upskilling”, providing “opportunity to life” and driving up student employability.

In other words, edtech exhibitions have a kind of incantatory quality when it comes to the latest trending technologies, designed to naturalize the idea of their introduction into educational settings through repetitions of their transformative potential.

Reporting recently about the Consumer Electronics Show, David Roth wrote that its “overwhelming theme, which various attendees I talked to said was basically a rerun of the previous year’s version, amounted to turning your life over, bit by bit and moment by moment, to artificial intelligence technology that would do ever larger amounts of that living for you”.

BETT seemed to suggest, repetitively, that more and more of education should be turned over to AI too, to do our teaching and learning for us.

The twentieth-century pioneers of “teaching machines”, BF Skinner and Sidney Pressey, would be nodding approvingly as they admired the latest “personalized learning” and “automated teaching” innovations, if they had lived long enough to see their mechanical dreams on digital display at BETT.

Move fast and break schools

Naturally, the transformative potential of tech and AI is supposed to be realized as fast as possible. And this also means a rapid de-institutionalization of education, represented repeatedly as a shift from “schooling” to “learning”. Demonstrations of new technical developments are accompanied by plenary discussions with sector and industry experts who insist we must not only “shift from schooling to learning” but also do so at speed, immediately, moving in a more “agile” way like a tech startup than conventional educational institutions can.

Edtech exhibitions, then, depict a kind of accelerated, nimble startup-ification of the historically conditioned structures of education. The message is “move fast and break schools” following the logic of social media and the venture capital industry.

Edtech shows are also spaces where various forms of expertise are invoked to add authority to industry expectations. For example, psychology-lite slogans about “learning” are mobilized to suggest that technology has the power to affect students’ minds. The brain, cognition, and mind are invoked in presentations and imagery. Brains “light up” like light bulbs, amenable to electrical stimulation. Minds are presented as electrical circuits to be activated. Learning futures are to be “engineered”.

Edtech and AI, it is claimed, are in touch with how learning really happens – while schooling is in need of upgrading if not smashing down completely to be “restarted from scratch”. The sense I got was of a kind of scientization of edtech and AI to support a techno-deschooling agenda, though one that rarely gets at the massively complex social, cultural, economic and political factors involved in school reform.

The discursive, semiotic, scientized and assertive repetitions of edtech exhibitions are, however, also repetitive of much longer lines of educational criticism by industry figures. Throughout the history of computers in schools, entrepreneurs have asserted the superiority of new technologies for “speeding up” or “personalizing” learning or “saving time” for teachers. When the desired transformation does not happen, recalcitrant school structures and reluctant teachers are singled out as impediments to change, failing to adapt to industrial expectations of how education could or should be. 

Exhibiting the political economy of edtech

Besides the industry exhibitions, edtech shows are also sites of political work and policy activity. They are spaces of educational diplomacy, where national ministries go to showcase, demo, and share innovations.

Travelling trade delegations consisting of government reps and selected industry partners set up stands to demonstrate their national industrial prowess in edtech. They aim to show other countries how the future should be done, by claiming they are already there, as Michael Forsman and colleagues have recently shown.

Edtech exhibitions are like travelling edtech caravans of enormous trade stands and sales diplomats, doing for edtech what the OECD’s PISA does for assessments – encouraging competition and the lending and borrowing of ideas. As Catarina Player-Koro, Annika Bergviken Rensfedlt and Neil Selwyn observed from a similar edtech exhibition, “these events function as sites of policy interpretation – ‘sharing’ (or more accurately ‘selling’) global ideas and imperatives to local schools and teachers”.

Edtech exhibitions also provide spaces for industry, investors and governments to encounter each other. At BETT, the “Government and Investors” meeting room was positioned next to the edtech startup “Innovation theatre”. Edtech startups, investors, and government are put into contact at these shows. Market oppotunities are imagined, promoted, made to appear plausible and worth investing in for all parties.

Beyond these cross-sector encounters, edtech shows also function as political forums for government ministers to make epochal claims about the tech transformations of schooling they hope to oversee. At BETT, the government Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson made keynote pronouncements about how the AI-powered future is going to unfold that would not have been out of place at an edtech product launch in the “AI Zone” of the exhibition.

“So here’s my vision for the future”, Philipson announced. “A system in which each and every child gets a top class education, backed by evidence based tech and nurtured by inspiring teachers. A system in which teachers are set free by AI and other technologies, less marking, less planning, less form filling.”

She added, “We’re deploying AI to make that vision a reality, recognising it as the game changer that it is”. 

Edtech exhibitions, then, are not only industry parties and sales pitch venues, but spaces where political commitments to the technofuture of education are made, in highly speculative language of “game-changing” that mixes policy ambitions with industry projections and market aspirations.

These encounters between government, industry and other sectoral experts reveal that edtech is not merely a technical matter but entangled in a political economy of public-private relations and reciprocities. In particular, as governments seek to capitalize on the opportunities of AI as technosolutions to problems like teacher overwork, they also offer reassurances to industry actors that the education sector is open to business, paving the way for industry to sign lucrative public sector contracts and sell licenses to schools and universities.

The hidden business of edtech exhibitions

Behind every product demo and sales pitch at BETT is a business plan intended to secure the vendor economic benefits, particular from long-term subscription agreements and contracts. Many such products are also designed to extract data as an additional source of value, and are capitalized by investors who expect lucrative returns when those public data are transformed into privately owned and monetizable products.

Both the big tech and edtech industries are seeking a bigger share of the education market in a political context that often implicitly preferences school spending on private techno-solutions over political spending. Though such political economy considerations are not explicitly exhibited at edtech shows, they run through it as a kind of energizing current of electricity, invisibly infusing every handshake, sales demo, slidedeck, and lounge-bar after-party.

Edtech exhibitions like BETT, then, offer a seductive and glossy representation of the digital future of education. They are contemporary Great Expos for envisaging and naturalizing desirable technofutures and making other forms of education seem unimaginable. In this sense the show reflects how the AI industry itself seeks to make AI seem like the only possible path.

What is exhibited far less, but underpinning it all, are the business models and market-making activities that are intended to fuse the education sector with the edtech industry. I left wondering what an alternative edtech exhibition, informed by different sets of values and others ways of imagining the future, might look like.