This is my own video on the future of education, that completes and extends what I was able to deliver this past Wednesday at LeWeb in Paris. Photo credit: Giorgio Montersino In this brand new video presentation I have recorded, I contend that we are about to see a deep change in how we look at education and learning in the coming years. The deep changes we have been witnessing in the worlds of mass media, advertising, marketing and communication in general, and much of what we have been labeling under the 2.0 title needs to be harmonized with our educational approach to schooling inside society. If we have come to appreciate the value of collaboration, sharing, co-creation, mashing up, bottom-up contributions and grassroots media creation, as well as those of listening to customers, of starting true conversations, of opening to critical feedback, and to suggestions from all your clients, we must also be able to see that these same principles and approaches can be transposed and utilized effectively in delivering a more valuable educational experience to our kids. a) Teaching is not learning, b) What are the things we really need to learn, c) What is the context and resources in which a new educational paradigm can emerge, are the key issues that I bring forward in this video presentation. I must thank once more LeWeb organizers Loic and Geraldine LeMeur for having provided me with this great opportunity. Here the video:

Love of Education - A Shifting Paradigm

Video presentation by Robin Good duration: 34'

My LeWeb Presentation - missed opportunity

I must admit it: At LeWeb I did a poor job of delivering this presentation. While I rehearsed several times what I wanted to present I did not pay enough attention to total delivery time and assumed without asking that there would have been some flexibility around this. My computer also unexplainedly hang-up twice during the presentation, causing extra pressure and loss of precious time. End result was, at least from my personal point of view, a missed opportunity to carry out the full message I had been working on for so long. I was quite disappointed to say the least, though I rather immediately realized it was all of my fault. As a matter of fact I apologized multiple times to Loic LeMeur, organizer of the event, for my bad performance and for having left the stage, after my early forced ending, expressing somewhat visibly my deep frustration and disappointment. Having had a couple of days now to think over this, I have come to accept my big mistakes in preparing a presentation without making 100% sure that it could be delivered precisely within the allotted time. I overestimated my ability to manage the topic and in my rehearsals I focused more on finding the best way to express each specific concept rather than worrying also about the specific time each one would have required. As I see it now, ridiculous mistakes, for someone who should know a lot better what it takes to stay within a clearly specified time.

Feedback Received

Notwithstanding my disappointment I received quite a lot of good feedback from those who attended or viewed my presentation via the Internet. The Twittering audience and the international friends I met off stage were generally more enthusiastic than I would have ever thought and you can trace most of the bad and the good ones I got through on Twitter Search. A bunch of strong negative reactions came from a post made by one of the official bloggers from Italy who gave great emphasis to my lack of touch in leaving the stage and accusing me of having rumbled the word "f**k" after having left the stage while my microphone was still open. Here is the original recording of my presentation delivery at LeWeb, and indeed (I myself had no memory or recall of having consciously said this) you can hear from the recording that I did complain to myself for having had to close my presentation early. After having heard myself the recording, my personal impression is that it is pretty evident that I did have an expression of disappointment right after having gone off stage. What is never said in the critical reporting is that it appears quite evident that my expression was said in a voice tone that clearly reveals the fact that I was talking to myself, it was expressed in a rather low voice tone, it was pronounced when I was clearly well off stage and it was heard only because my microphone was inadvertently left open longer than needed by the audio people. It seems clear to me, but I leave you with the freedom to evaluate yourself, that I clearly did not intend to make that statement public and that it was exclusively due to rather a late reaction from the audio engineer in closing my mike that allowed my personal disappointment to be heard by those who paid attention. At that moment I was clearly unaware of being still with my microphone open and the unhappy expression I used was clearly addressed to myself and specifically to my inability to carry out in full my presentation. I like to take responsibility for this and to apologize to all those who felt disturbed or offended by it, as, at least among the Italians present there, it seems there were quite a few who felt such incident really ruined not only my presentation, but also my country reputation at the international level and, according to what they have written, even the opportunity for other Italians to be called in to such major events in the future. (If you read Italian, you can check yourself such reporting and comments. I was pretty surprised on the other hand, that none of such people, found the opportunity or time to come forward and tell me their impressions in a direct and open way, and chose to express their feelings by sending me nasty, unfriendly comments (have Robin get a Valium injection in his neck) and by choosing to write their disappointment with no reference to the content or ideas being presented. In any case there was enough technology there for you to make up your mind about my behaviour at LeWeb without believing me or any other blogger. Check by yourself in the video recording here below. Streaming .TV shows by Ustream I really have no bad feelings with the organizers or the way I was treated. My time was clearly 20 minutes, and I didn't manage to stay within them. End of the story.

In the coming days I will publish an article that further explains and corroborates, via the use of video interviews I had recorded for this event, my full view on the future of education and what it is going to take to get to it. I must acknowledge also, which I had no time to do on stage, that my ideas were strongly influenced and inspired by the extensive work done by Ivan Illich in the 70's, and by Seymour Papert in the '80s. I also utilized ideas developed by Stephen Downes to whom I owe great respect for the extensive research work on the future of education he has already done. Further thanks go to Howard Rheingold, Nancy White, Gerd Leonhard, Jay Cross, Teemu Arina and George Siemens who have provided me with invaluable feedback and video material on this very topic and which I will shortly publish here on MasterNewMedia.