Readers of the Cluetrain Manifesto may wonder why a supposedly web-savvy company like Chalkface even bothered with an uncool ‘old economy’ event like BETT.
The answer is simply that we get a higher density of better-quality conversations with our customers, authors and suppliers there than at any other time of year. This year, particularly, I got some quite astonishing revelations about the nature of my own business.
In particular, I arrived at the show still believing that most teachers don’t really want to author their own online content. This was certainly true two years ago when we couldn’t even give away authorship privileges to Paperless School.
This year, almost everyone who saw Yacapaca (Flash demo here) wanted to know when they could put their own tests and assessments on it, and how much they would cost. I simply hadn’t realised the extent of the sea-change, and that by itself justified the extortionate cost of attendance.
The answers are:
- As soon as the programmers have finished their current project (QTI conformance), they’ll start modifying the existing authoring tools so they work for teachers.
- Free.
Yacapaca 