John Hibbs: Well, thank you John and I think as always it's an exciting beginning to Global Learn Day 10. It would be easy to spend the next hour on the accomplishments alone of our two guests, Vint and Sir John, but instead I think we have some of our questions that I know they're eager to answer and I think that the interaction between Sir John and Vint will surpass our expectations for previous Global Learn Days.

So to begin with, I want to give you some background on my own personal story. Ten years ago, during the first voyage of Global Learn Day, we did in fact select the technology and there are many stories behind what it took to make that first sailing journey. It wasn't that easy to hold the first 24 hour continuous around-the-world virtual voyage, however with the benefit of ten years of sailing behind us, the technology advances have predictably followed Moore's Law but one of the observations, and this is the crux of why we gather, is that the actual educational advances I think can be measured with coefficient of drag usually reserved for the most bureaucratic organization.

So to Vint, the first question, from your perspective, what non-technical factors do you think account for this dismal performance on what has truly become a truly outstanding technology that the Internet has given us? What factors can you observe that can shed some light on why education advances seem to be limited to how quickly we can get our courses paid for online or those kinds of things, to get the actual delivery to the people that need this, things that still be lagging?

Vint Cerf: It seems to me; this is Vint speaking, it seems to me that there are just a myriad of different issues that interfere with the successful use of Internet in educational settings. To give you a few examples, in the K through 12 regime, at least in the United States, and I'd be interested to know if Sir John sees a similar problem in the UK, the responsibility for those institutions is very distributed. There are locally elected school boards who have a good deal to say about content and practices in the schools and their area. At the state level there are certain standards that must be met by each teacher with regard to content that is taught at each grade level.

So there's a very distributed system there and introducing new techniques and new sources of content often come into conflict with these very distributed practices. So that's one issue.

The second one has to do with the facilities that are available. It's not necessarily enough to have network connectivity and some computers in the school in order to make effective use of this technology. In fact it's often the case that the students have better connectivity than the school does because they might have very high speed services at home, digital subscriber loops or cable modems, or in some cases even fiber connectivity.

The third reason that this is difficult is that not all teachers are comfortable using this technology and more critically there may not be very good content which meets the requirements so sometimes the teachers appoint themselves trying to produce their own and they don't have time to do that or they do it with varying degrees of skill.

I spent time when I was at MCI working on a program called Project Marco Polo, which became a non-profit organization that cooperatively produced content for use in schools with organizations like the American Association for the Advancement of Science and National Geographic and other highly credible institutions whose content was without question useful in classroom settings.

I could go on and on but I won't because we want to have a discussion as opposed to a monologue so let me ask Sir John if I could whether there are similar difficulties facing the UK educational system or maybe you're more successful than we have been in the States.

Sir John Daniels: Well, I'm not a very recent expert in the UK. I lived there in the 90s when I was at the Open University where we did have a very big program where we were teaching hundreds of thousands of teachers to use the Net and computers not to teach IT but to teach other subjects like music and geography. And I think what that lead us to really emphasize and I think one of the big obstacles in this field is not so much the technology and the connectivity and the organization but the fact that people are tending to use the Internet as they have used previous technologies with a model of education that is, to put it crudely, a bit like filling a bucket, whereas in fact people learn by communicating and what one has to do is to I think there are three components one needs in a learning system. One obviously needs content. One needs something to connect that content with the learner. But you also need communication because when the learner does things with the content and someone comments on how they've done it, I think learning really starts to take place.

So the trick I think is to move from the filling the bucket model of education to the watering the garden model and that really is the trick. I tell people, I work with developing countries where connectivity can be dire but I tell people who get worked up about the digital divide that they shouldn't worry because by the time the connectivity problems are solved, the rich countries will just about be in a situation that they're using this technology intelligently so they won't actually have lost a great deal of time. Let me leave it there for the time being.

Vint: This is Vint. I wonder if I could just mention something that comes to mind with regard to people learning by doing. There's a man named Alan Kay who is famous at least in my book for having invented the concept of the personal computer and the notebook or laptop computer way back in the late 1960s and early 70s. He used to work at Xerox Palo Alto research center and is very fond of creating software for young people to use, to let them experiment. And you mentioned John Hibbs voyage of discovery. That's what Alan sees the best way of learning to be, which is to try things out to do things.

And so it seems to me that a very important part of learning would be having an opportunity to experiment either in a solitary way or in groups using a computer as a way of facilitating experiments.

Sir John Daniels: I fully agree with that and certainly I think there's an emerging view that one of the best ways of doing that with children at least is that working in groups on the computer is actually more effective than working individually. I remember that there was a time when the developing countries felt that because they couldn't afford computers they'd group two or three kids around the computer to work together. But I think the person who's thought most about this is Sugata Mitra from the National Institute of Information Technology in India. I think he's now firmly convinced that actually to put groups of children around a computer is much more effective than having them work at it individually because of the communication, the experimentation and the mutual reinforcement it creates.

Vint: I wonder whether we could learn something from the way kids use video games that are network enabled. I know that many of them will play these role-playing games and they're interacting with each other through the network even though they're physically separated from each other, it's the group experience and the planning and the execution of various activities that produces an important element of learning.

Sir John Daniels: Yes, I mentioned Mitra. He's the person who's famous for the hole in the wall computing experiments in the slums of Delhi, which have now expanded significantly around Asia where he basically discovered that kids could learn about computing perfectly well by themselves in groups by experimenting without any knowledge of English to start with. And so he talks about non-invasive education, which is a very scary concept for teachers because he found that actually they didn't need teachers in order gradually to discover and make their own all the various operations that were possible through the Internet.

Vint: Just to drill down a little deeper, it sounds like you are in agreement that the metaphor for learning is a very powerful concept and perhaps is it fair to say that we need to link the metaphors for learning, that possibly from the very institutions that have helped us in the past and perhaps we need to redefine a new metaphor to help the path to the future?

Sir John Daniels: Oh I think that's definitely true. But it's taking on a big challenge because let's face it, for thousands of years there's been a model of education where one person stands in front of the group of others and talks to them and let's not knock it too much because it has some great virtues, one of which is flexibility. You can do it under a tree, you can do it in a classroom, you can do in large groups, small groups, and so on. But essentially for the world I live in, the problem with it is that it's not scalable but it's very expensive because you're having teachers all the time, for one.

For two, the quality is inconsistent because you have good teachers as well as bad teachers and so the business that I'm in is to essentially, to find the word; let's call it what it is - industrialize the process by division of labor and specialization so that you take the educational, the learning process, you divide it into its component parts. You specialize on doing each one of them as well as you possibly can and then you put it all back together again and you've then got a scalable model.

I think what's preoccupying me now is that I think we've taken through the conventional distance learning, and by conventional I mean clearly the Internet, we've taken the possibility of expanding learning to one level of cost and therefore one level of penetration of the four billion people at the bottom of the economic pyramid. But we've got to reduce the costs substantially further to reach further down. But I think there are technologies on the way which can help us do that, which we can talk about later.

Vint: This is Vint. There is an interesting little scaling problem which I feel compelled to mention. From time to time you'll see demonstrations of young children interacting with a famous scientist, an astronaut or a biologist or an oceanographer and it all looks wonderfully appealing till you start thinking about the number of kids there are in the world and the number of oceanographers there are and you try to figure out how many hours of the day could an oceanographer or a biologist afford to be directly interacting with small groups of school children and of course the answer is you'd get overloaded almost instantly.

So we have to be careful about the metaphors and practices that we choose to institute because we have to take into account whether or not the system so to speak can handle the large number of students that might ultimately be part of this online environment.

Sir John Daniels: Absolutely. That to me, you see from time to time this idea of the guru, if everyone could learn physics from the top Nobel Laureate and we'd all be well away but no one has asked, as you say, no one has stopped to ask the top Nobel Laureate whether they want to spend 24 hours a day responding to the same questions from different people. So I just don't think it's a sensible model and I think the whole virtue of the Internet and modern technologies that allows us to decentralize and distribute and empower at the local level while at the same time tapping into the global resources.

Vint: And so I actually have one example that might be relevant here. There's a guy named Ron Laporte at Pitt University in the US. He has assembled some 2700, possibly more by now, lectures together with PowerPoint or html presentations on a huge range of subjects, mostly focused initially on medicine and health, biology, but it now covers many more things, including Internet and Internet technology. Those courses are available online and he makes them free of charge, available free of charge.

The reason I bring this up is that although I recognize that the conventional lecturer model may seem pretty old, I think it's correct as Sir John points out that we shouldn't discard it entirely because it seems to have worked pretty well. So we can at least use the Net as a distribution and dissemination tool for the conventional kinds of lectures even if we need to and are correct that we want to augment those experiences with more direct group interaction, with problem solving and testing and the like.

Sir John Daniels: I think too the real trick is to be able to adapt. I've never found anyone's course lectures, course materials, whatever, that will transfer directly even between institutions in the same country let alone between countries. And I think the great development that I'm really extremely enthusiastic about is the development of open educational resources whereby people can create a resource whether it's a lecture or a series of PowerPoint slides or something with a finer grain, which other people can take, adapt and use for their own purposes and of course under the kind of model we're using for our virtual university for small states for the Commonwealth, and what they first of all attribute, they have to acknowledge where it came from and when they have done their own adaptation, they have to share that back with the system so what you have is a growing coffers of learning objects on a particular topic of interest for different countries and different circumstances so that each person coming in has a richer set to work with and can presumably with their adaptation challenges are less.

But I think one of the great things to me that the Internet has done is that it has largely broken away the "non invented here" syndrome, which has been such an obstacle to the sharing of learning material. There was a feeling ten years ago that it was undignified, it was improper, it was not immoral so much as embarrassing to be seen to be using material from somewhere else. I think the great thing that the Internet has done is that that has fallen away. When we want to find a photograph for our PowerPoint presentations or whatever, we go into the Internet without hesitation and Google along, usuallly putting Wiki in front so that we make sure it's not copyrighted and we get what we need and I think this is changing the attitude to sharing and adapting content very substantially and I think that's a great hope for the future.

Vint: So, I hope that our moderator doesn't mind our jumping in this way but I wanted to add one other thought having to do with equipment on the network. I had a very interesting experience in New York a few days ago at a thing called Next Fest, which wanted to look at advanced and new technologies with robotics and microelectronics and nanotechnology. And what I got to do is pretty amazing. From a little workstation in New York City at this convention hall, through the Internet, I was interacting with an atomic force microscope and my interactions involved dragging a cursor around on the screen which was actually causing the atomic force microscope to drag a particular molecule of I guess it was oxygen but I'm not absolutely sure; oh, it was carbon monoxide, it was dragging this little molecule of carbon monoxide around on a copper plate and I was using laser tweezers in effect remotely 3000 miles away through the Internet to carry out this task and the image that was coming back was the image of the molecule being moved from one place to another.

The fact that you could actually do that at all of course is amazing and the fact that you could do it through the Internet is even more incredible because it gives you an inkling of the kinds of equipment that could be put online and made accessible in classroom settings. So I get very excited about the possibilities of having remote access to important scientific instruments that school children would ultimately be able to make use of or scientists as well in the same way that we take all the data that comes from the Mars rovers and put it into databases online that are reachable by the general public and by scientific investigators.

So the idea of putting content and also equipment online and make it seem mostly accessible through the Net is another, from my point of view anyway, is another very important evolution.

Sir John Daniels: Oh yeah, and even at a much more sophisticated level. In Africa, the sort of scientific equipment in the laboratories are so degraded that anything which allows children to do even simple, simulate even simple scientific experiments is highly valuable because Africa is realizing as it tries to get a grip particularly on the renaissance of its higher education system, that it's really got to make a dead set at science and technology because that's the area that is particularly important for the modern world but also the area where things have been let to run down over the last 20 years in an absolutely appalling way.

Blain: That's excellent. And Vint, to answer your question, and this is Blain again, that we're absolutely thrilled with the interaction and it becomes a runaway train [laughter] with Global Learn Day and I know John would echo this sentiment. We would much rather listen to the interaction than follow a scripted dialog.

I do have to come back though to the point that Sir John made on four billion people and the questions of economics. I mean, perhaps both of you could help us understand where is the fuel, the money? Where is all that going to come from? Where should it come from is maybe the more appropriate question, but economics definitely plays a role in most large scale problems and this one not excluded.

Sir John Daniels: Well it certainly does. But I think there is an indication from the commercial sector. There's a book which I think is a very significant book by C. K. Prahalad called "The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid." Now he's not talking about education. He's talked about multinational companies and the point he makes is that whatever the antiglobalization people may say, the problem in many faster developing worlds is not that the multinationals have written them off, it's that the multinationals have completely ignored them and he shows how some multinational companies have decided that if they change their business model to cope with very large numbers with low margins, they can actually have a very successful business.

I mean, to take a very simple example, instead of selling shampoo in bottles of half a liter, you sell shampoo in a single sachet for one hair wash and this has made very considerable inroads and some companies have achieved not only success for themselves but also terrific improvement in living standards in villages. Empowerment of the many people, often women, who become the relays in making this new system work. So my concern is that we find the education equivalent of that.

Now, it may well be that the pioneers in this area will be the private for profit sector rather than the public sector. I think it's fair to say that so far it's been the public sector that's expanded and scaled up higher education at least in the developing world but they may be achieving a sort of cost barrier which it takes another leap forward to cross.

As far the technology is concerned, I believe that the combination of open educational resources, which should substantially reduce the very high costs of producing good open learning content, plus increasing connectivity. And this is spreading very rapidly in the Indian villages that I work and this could produce the kind of quantum drop in costs that will enable things to happen. But of course as I said at the very beginning, it's got to be accompanied by a system which is genuinely interactive and multi-directional because it's not just a question of pushing things at people. They have to be involved in the process but I think the ingredients are there for that. It just needs a new approach and possibly different organizations to really tackle that head on.

You know there's another interesting point about economics here. First of all it should be very obvious to everyone that the economics of communications and the economics of digital storage are improving almost visibly as minute by minute goes by, so the costs of transmission and the costs of storage are dropping pretty dramatically. One recognizes that in the developing world the costs, especially for communications, may not be dropping quite as quickly but there has been a phenomenon that's very important in that part of the world and that's the introduction of mobile communication. Although the data rates are not comparable to optical fiber, it's still the case that a huge number of people are being introduced to the Internet by way of mobile and we don't want to ignore that as a potential medium of interaction in the Internet world because that's how many, many people will first have an opportunity to use it, so that's point number one.

The second one is that initiatives like the one Nicholas Negroponte is engaged in called "One Laptop Per Child" is an example of a major attempt to drive costs down by careful design and by volume production. The target is somewhere between $100 and $200 per laptop, which is a very dramatic drop from the typical $500 to $1000 that you see today. So initiatives like that are very important, as is the use of wireless like 802.11 WIFI for mesh networks, which allow an access to the Internet to be expanded by simply the devices that other people acquired for that purpose and they become little forwarding engines on their own and therefore creating low cost and automatically configuring radio-nets.

So I think the physics are very much with this in terms of driving costs out. This helps to increase the footprint of places where Internet enabled devices become affordable because as the price comes down of course more and more people will have sufficient disposable income to pay for this on the private side.

We're also seeing of course a lot of Internet cafes being created where people share the cost of applications and equipment and then make use of it as time permits and as time is needed. And I think we don't want to ignore that as another important avenue for getting access to the Internet in the developing world. So I'm actually pretty optimistic that over time other costs will come out of the system and it will find an increasing number of users able to afford to pay a reasonable sum for their access to the Net.

Vint: Yeah, mobiles are already really a phenomenon in the developing world or in South Africa. One very simple but very effective technique has been to use SMS messages sent out on large numbers at the same time to essentially string from the link between learners and their institution. We're talking about University of Pretoria, University of South Africa, because simply by sending out reminders of when assignments are due or that the local meeting has changed from this time to that time or this venue to that venue, this has proven to have had a significant impact on increasing the number of students who return their assignments and so on, because obviously in the developing world people are very proud of their mobiles and even although one may see a figure for penetration which looks low, the fact is that each mobile is used by a whole lot of people so this has become a very powerful tool.

At the moment of course the kind of mobiles we're talking about don't allow for the transmission of very complex stuff, but just by maintaining the contact between students and between students and institutions, they're having substantial impact.

Sir John Daniels: Right. Vint, I wanted to amplify one of the points you made at the very beginning and that is the nature of the distributed education really is and I know that Steve Crocker is no stranger to you but to our listeners he's often overlooked in one very important contribution to the Internet and namely the invention and refinement of the RFC or Request for Comment process. It really served to harness the creative genius and herd if you will the technological cast that rapidly developed and approved standards and helped with principles of operation.

So around the question of knowing this is a distributed system and there are many players, do you see the absence of an RFC like process that possibly could help in herding the cast of education for a more coherent or more rapid pace or do we just let systems be organic and follow off that.

Vint: Well, this is a very interesting question because indeed other countries and the team that implemented what was called NCP, the network communications program, which was the predecessor to the TCP work that Bob Conn and I did, and he's been a major contributor on network security over the years. He's now serving as the Chairman of the Security and Stability Advisory Committee for the Internet Corporation for assigned names and numbers, which is an organization that I have chaired for the last seven years. So Steve has really made many contributions.

With regard to an RFC like process in education, I am actually not sure that it would make much sense on the content side, and the issue for most educational settings is the importance of local information, clearly with regard to local language and local history, and by local here it could mean state or city or even national information, but again in the appropriate languages and with appropriate utility to the local population.

If there weren't RFC like series at all, it might have to do with the technological standards that are used in order to make the information accessible to anyone who can meet those interface standards. And definitely it's going to have to be useful because you might very much want to be able to get useful access to other people's material. We do this on a regular basis as we surf the Net. If you want however to incorporate something into an educational experience, having specific standards the education community could adopt that would make it easy to share their materials, that might actually prove to be quite helpful. That could take one obvious if not easy task, which would be to identify content in such a way that translations of it could be made readily available and could be easily integrated.

So a small example of this would be the spreadsheets that could be labeled in all different kinds of languages and instead of having to literally reconstruct every single item on these spreadsheets, Power Point presentations or some kind of visual presentation. If the task that's used to label the material could be distinguished from the imagery in such a way that you could easily supply a completely different set of language text, it would be a little bit like dubbing in a film or captioning a film where you have multiple tracks and you select the one that's your local language.

Building educational tools around the understanding like multiple language speakers or expanding to use it might be a really important standardization effort and in that case I could see where an RFC like process could be quite beneficial.

Sir John Daniels: I think following on from that, the really exciting thing that's going on is the very fast passage through the different generations of the open content movement. I mean, it's only about four years ago that MIT gave us a kick start with its open content approach where essentially the faculties lesson notes were put on the Web and so you had a first generation for lack of sharing of information. In three weeks time, the UK Open University is launching its Open Learn project, which takes this one step further and as well as putting first of all self-instructional content rather than simply lecture notes, but also accompanying that with a lot of the social software that's being developed. There are programs that do space and flash conferences and so on so that there really is an environment in which people can work together because there, I think just as the MIT project, is a very useful benchmarking process for people around the world to see how MIT taught fluent dynamics but was probably more useful for other faculty than for students directly.

The UK OU is attempting to get to the students and I flatter myself but our virtual university small states project is taking this one step further again. It's not just access to information or access to learning. It's collaborative development of teaching because what we've got is 25 countries collaboratively developing online content which they can share and adapt for each other's purposes because I do think all the experience I have of people adopting and using costware from elsewhere, you've got to create communities of practice where people feel in some way involved in it. The fact it's there doesn't actually get it used but you've got to somehow make linkages so that people feel they have some degree of ownership, that this is their thing, that this is their space, but I think that's moving on very rapidly and doesn't actually require super-duper sophisticated technology.

John Hibbs: If I may, this is John Hibbs speaking, on that note, on the collaborative note and being involved and I've invited three very smart people that at least try to ask one question and/or comment on this and if I may, Blain, well, because time is running out, I would like to hear let's say from Moriere first in Paris, what she has to say. I talked with her about the bureacracies of France but I'll let Moriere ask the question or ask her for comment on any of this and then we'll follow that around for a moment, even though we do like to hear from the gurus, we do need to encourage our disciples out there that they get a chance to weigh in as well. So Moriere first, please.

Moriere: Thank you, this is Moriere speaking. And in fact I'd like to ask this question, which comes also from me but my students who I saw this morning and maybe nine o'clock in the evening, students in a school of engineering technology, and who have questions to ask for the future because they're the future gurus in engineering. So my question is the following, in France there's a saying that "too much information fuels information."

As we see this, as you've said, the Web 2.0 as we call it now enters the mainstream, it's starting to enter the mainstream, is the semantic Web the solution in the future? So coming back to, Vint just commented about standards and standardizations, bringing all of this information together, and what type of next generation services do you envision in the future?

Vint: This is Vint. That's a really interesting question and probably one that we won't do justice to in the time available. The semantic Web is an idea that Tim Berners-Lee as you know has been pursuing for a while now. His idea, which I concur with, is to find a way to label the contents of the Net to give more clues to us about its semantic intent. This would be terribly helpful to companies like Google because we're trying to index information and help people discover that which is relevant to them.

To give a tiny example, the term jaguar is ambiguous because it could refer to a car or it could refer to an animal. And unless we know what the user, which of the two the user is asking for, and unless we have a way of knowing whether the use of the term was intended to be about cars or animals, in the content of the Net we won't necessarily match up the correct query for a particular user who might be interested in the cars rather than the animals.

That's a rather crude example of a more general idea of being able to mark the semantics of the Internet's content. I don't think there's anything magic there. Its' just that it would help us increase the relevance of search returns. The thing which would get even more interesting of course would be to have a rich enough semantic vocabulary to be able to make much more automatic, all kinds of transactions on the network, but I have the feeling we're still some ways away from being able to pursue a successful implementation of these ideas. It will remain part of the research world for at least my foreseeable future.

John Hibbs: Thanks Vint. And Gabriel in Argentina.

Gabriel: Good afternoon from Buenes Aires, Argentina. It's 3:48 here. Going back to some of the remarks at the beginning, we are very familiar with the literature and the experts have long discussed why technology hasn't made it all the way through to schools. On the side of the schools, there are very traditional instructors at schools, etc. Having worked many years in the growing development of online collaborative space innovations. I've often wondered what happened with industry in terms of the non-development of the killer aps, the kind of educational applications that have been promised for so long that would deliver the significant impact of technology. What is it for? The gaming industry, the software industry, to develop the kind of applications that would make teachers ultimately embrace technology and deliver the benefits of that?

Vint: John, do you want to try to have a crack at that?

Sir John Daniels: Yes, I mean, it's a tricky one. First of all, I don't think one should perhaps be too depressed about; education, like many human things, is not for evolution rather than revolutions and it's obviously a complex thing that involves socialization on the whole and a whole bunch of things. I think one of the things I've learned in a long practice in the general area of distance and technology mediated education is there is no magic medium and there never will be. Somewhere in my slides I've got a series of quotes going back to the blackboard in 1840 where people say that this is going to create a revolution in education comparable to the printing press. It's interesting that they always go back to the printing press and you've got these kinds of statements for the blackboard, film, TV, radio, computers, programmed learning and the Internet and so on.

But I think at the same time that significant progress is being made but all the evidence for instance in the early CDs study of performance across countries of 15 year olds in science class and reading all suggests that the success, the countries that seem to come out best in this light, Finland and so on, it's a question of organization and intelligent use of people and resources, sure, backed up by technology where necessary but technology I don't think is every going to be a magic bullet that can come in and solve systemic problems in the education system. It's probably much more useful to focus on the older, the adult learners where you don't have this whole problem of socialization and discipline and so on built in and where you're much more flexible and creative.

But I think I've seen where substantial progress in my life time, in getting people access to education. Let's not forget that there's a huge proportion of humanity which is not getting that access and to give them access is already a terrific leap forward, even if they don't all become Einstein's over night.

Vint: I wonder if I could just toss in again just one little observation about the continued flow of digital information into the Web and generally into the Internet. One of the big problems I can foresee is that the formats of these digital objects are subject to interpretation by some software and if we don't have a way of preserving the software we may actually have an accumulation of digital content that we don't know how to interpret after a long period of time - 10, 15, 20, 100 years from now.

So one of the other technical challenges facing us is to find ways of making sure that anything we put on the Net is still interpretable 100 or 200 years later.

John Hibbs: This is John Hibbs about that and the Clock of the Long Now of that illustration comes up about losing things that are on microfilm are no longer available because nobody has a microfiche reader because they've all been tossed out.

Let me go quickly to Annette Stock and then I promise Blain I'll give this back to you. I do have one more question.

Annette Stock comes to us from the North Highland, New Zealand. Annette?

Annette: Good morning. It's morning here and my question I would like to focus on is around route to competency. I've listened to what Vint and Sir John have to say to children in this conference and I'm asking myself what community I'm thinking putting up the money or try to be compatible I would like to have some comments on this from you on how which level of competency are needed.

Sir John Daniels: Well my comments would simple be I think it very principally depends on the age of the very children we're talking about. For young children surely the most important competences for the teacher are to be able to socialize the children, to excite them, to get into learning and they don't, in my book they need a huge amount of content by the time you get to secondary education then I think it is important to have teachers who are competent in content but again we've seen very successful experiments where children in rural secondary schools, where they don't have a very good physics teacher or a physics teacher at all, can study self-learning materials and another teacher with training can actually be a facilitator and help them through that without having to be an expert in physics and of course this is one of the great principles of distance learning where you use people as facilitators who can help people learn with good materials and help them on subjects where the facilitator herself is not an expert in.

So I think it does depend on the level and I'm not sure the technological fixes come in support of the teacher and the system rather than starting at the technological fixes it seems to me that things get easier as you're dealing with older and older learners.

Vint: This is Vint. Just an interesting observation, that I've see time to time that the students are often better equipped than the teachers are to deal with the technology. We keep hoping that as the new students graduate and become teachers and they'll bring with them some familiarity with the use of some of these technical devices.

In the end though I think that technology doesn't do anything if you don't have the content there with which to teach, although I must tell you that at least in one instance there is a piece of software called "gapminder" which is free and you should just do a Google search on "gapminder" to find it. It's the most stunning dynamic animated presentation technique I've ever seen to take dry as dust statistics and turn it to something that you can actually see patterns from. So, sometimes technology really does count.

Annette: Thank you.

Blain: If I may I would like to, first of all, to thank Vint and Sir John for taking the time with us today and I feel like an interest holds this closure and the fact that an engineer I work with and then as college one go to college and Sir John and you word like helping children progress [laughs] are actually encouraging because I think again as a father from my perspective I've lived a speck or two of unexpected changes, some ways it is a little disconcerting the rate of change in education.

But what I would like to do, with your permission, is to wrap this up with one final question. What I would like to do is to ask first Sir John. I'll ask the question to both of you and then let you interact. If Vint Cert could grant you one technological wish and you have one that is currently unfulfilled, and Vint, similarly, if Sir John somehow could magically mobilize the entire education community around just one improvement, is there one that comes to mind that you would suggest that one should undertake?

Sir John Daniels: Steve, that's very easy broadband quality Internet worldwide.

Vint: Well, that would be something wouldn't it? I think that managing to make that useful is not so easy although I'm an engineer too and I don't want to take what Sir John said too literally. It might be required that there were some hardwired connections that would help wireless components to actually be part of the connected Internet. Assuming that would be a very useful technological step, from my point of view, the thing that would make the biggest difference would be to have enough, in the way of common standards, so the product produced by anyone would be useful and accessible and incorporatable by anyone else into lesson material. The worst thing in the world is to see things that you know you would like to incorporate in a teaching curriculum only to discover that you don't have quite the same tools that know how to interpret the data so coming up with common standards, which is a subject that was brought up earlier, might actually go quite a long way towards helping the teaching community to make better use of the content which they have collectively produced.

Sir John Daniels: Can I just chip in that common standards should also include common standards on intellectual property and I think that the Creative Ccommons model is extremely important.

Vint: What a good point. Thank you for bringing that up Sir John and another non-technical but very, very important element in our digital environment. Our understanding of intellectual property in the digital ages is still very murky and terribly encumbered by old models which don't adapt well to this new environment.

Blain: So with that, John Hibbs, I know that you have more than one wish and I turn my pillar back to you [laughs] to wrap this up.

John Hibbs: My wish has been granted. I got two heavyweights in the same ring and at one point in time, I can tell my Don King story, at one point in time these two gentlemen will help us figure out whether and how to better evangelize and get the word out far and wide. Sir John affected me and infected me a long time ago and said, "Don't forget the community radio stations." 80,000 community radio stations around the world that broadcast in English and we will in fact have more people hear these voices by way of both podcasts and by way of the community radio station that we will ever know.

So my closing comment and closing remark is this Saturday will be my birthday. The two of you and to the other three of you who joined me, now you gave me the best birthday present I have ever had [laughs] and I want to thank you all for it very much. It's heartfelt. It could be a discussion that could go on forever. I would hope that we would have a blog where addition questions could be submitted to both of you and in time - and that time would be very short - you would answer that. With that comment, again, deepest thanks from me to all of you and from all of us to the rest of you. Thank you Sir John, thank you Vint and those in New Zealand and Argentina and Paris, thanks very much to you.

Vint: Happy birthday John Hibbs.

Sir John Daniels: Yes, happy birthday John and thank you very much.