Full Text of Nigel Paine Chief Executive of SCET's Keynote Address

0930 - 10.30 WED 13TH NOVEMBER 1996

Wednesday 13th November 1996

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to this third SCET major learning technology conference and exhibition.

Each time we have run this conference and exhibition, the number of participants has more than trebled. We, therefore, calculate that if we continue at this rate, by 2056 we will have every teacher in the world present and that is something really to look forward to.

My job today is to set the scene and context for all the other speakers, our keynotes, our workshop session, the skills workshops, the teachers running the teacher activity session, the Special Needs sessions and everything that is going on here. It will be impossible for you to attend everything, but I hope we have put on enough for everyone to sample what we have on offer and to leave feeling they wished it had gone on for longer and they wished they could have done more. That would be a pretty satisfying from our point of view

I particularly welcome our delegates and speakers from overseas. We have people from as far afield as Russia, Turkey, Singapore, Israel as well as the USA and central Europe. A few even struggled across from Glasgow! A journalist from a Scottish daily told us yesterday that he didn't think that the programme was Scottish enough! So much for globalisation!

For those of you with access to the Internet, we will be putting information on the Web live as I speak, as well as in the days after the conference. We have a group of Special Needs pupils from Richmond Park school working now to assemble our pages using Quicktake cameras, text and all sorts of other ephemera that we can pull together to create an exciting Web site for those who can only join us virtually.

I was going to start by emphasising the fact that we are moving more solidly and faster into the information age as every month goes by. I could have illustrated that by pointing out that over 50% of people at work in the US are now working for the knowledge and information industry in some way; that the export of knowledge and information services is growing world-wide five times faster than manufactured goods. I could have said that the PC now out sells the television (which is obsolete analogue technology), but I think the greatest illustration is probably the one in the paper last Friday when we learnt that Douglas Adams' book "Hitch-hiker's Guide to the Galaxy" , as you well know, told us that the answer to the question "What is the world, the universe and everything?" came to 42, is actually, scientifically correct. He was right all along.

And if the answer to the mystery of the universe turns out to be 42, anything is possible in this world, in any technology and the technology change that we are simply tasting now, will continue and continue.

The problem that we face is quite simply that the pace of that technological innovation and development far exceeds our budgets and our ability to keep pace. Investment one year, appears obsolete the next. Certainties one year, appear irrelevant six months later. Technologies that you were told would set the world on fire are forgotten about. In the meantime, some people get fabulously rich and other people go spectacularly bust. And schools continue and pupils continue to need educating.

What I want to argue is that the best service we can do our young people is to help them leave education at whatever age, not just skilled in a particular subject area, but confident and competent in a technological world. The best thing we can do for our adults is to help them on the first steps towards coping and competing in that world.

The point is, we either wake up to what is happening around us, we equip our people to survive in that world or we die, not fast, but slowly the sad economic death of obsolescence.

If you go out to Summerlee, which is an industrial museum outside Glasgow, and look at the photographs of the iron and steel making activity that made that area the largest producer of iron and steel in the world per head of population, and see how it died within about 30 or 40 because of a lack of technological innovation and a disconnection with its markets. If you look at Clydebank and the shipyards and the failure to innovate technically, you can see that what seems to certain and so tangible now could crumble in front of our eyes just as it must have seemed inconceivable in the middle of the 19th century Scotland as the workshop of empire could ever fail. We do not want our children looking back at us and saying we responded too slowly. We failed to see the opportunities, we failed to understand how the world moved on.

Let me talk a little bit about SCET. We have a very simple role in many ways. Our job, focusing on learning technology, is to provide solutions for education and training. That little word "solutions" thrown around and used so glibly, sums up everything we should be doing. We might once have offered a menu of expertise that you could take or leave, but now if we don't deal with your problems, we are not going to survive. It is as blunt and as simple as that. Some of the problems that you are going to ask us to deal with will make us gasp quietly, while we say, yes, we can help, but help we will.

I am going to take this opportunity this morning to relaunch SCET and relaunch it around three words and those three words are "Making a Difference" .

During the coming year, every part of everything we do will be brought under the microscope and judged against that standard. We have done okay up until now, but to do better, we are going to have to be better. This will underpin everything.

I am also going to make a number of announcements during my talk which I hope will be of interest.

Let us forget about windows '95 and look at the words. There is still a myth that working on a computer is passively goggling at a screen. It is not, it is to be profoundly motivated and captivated and the ten small words on the advert sum that up.

Run Windows '95 video

Four key activities for the education or training environment.

Five processes that help us achieve the other four.

ONE word is missing: LEARNING and that unites the other nine.

Technology is going to change our world, but it is largely in the hands of those people in front of me. It is whether it will change our world for the better or for the worse, to increase in equality or to minimise it.

Tom Shields told the joke a couple of weeks ago about the teacher at a school in Easterhouse (and for those that don't know anything about Easterhouse, i.e. our guests from Moscow, Europe, America, the rest of the UK and Edinburgh), it is an area of high unemployment on the edge of Glasgow where a large number of people live with few amenities and fewer jobs.

Tom Shields tells of the teacher who asked the pupil to name two types of fish and the pupil replied Single and Special. What do you do with a pupil like that? How do you balance the very narrow view of the world that can't see further than the fish and chip shop? You could do it by lecturing at them, not very successful; you could do it by giving them a book which they probably will not be interested in reading; you can send them to the library to do research, or you can let them loose on the Internet. In half an hour that pupil could visit aquaria around the world.

She could learn about hundreds of different species of fish, learn about their physical characteristics, the way they see, the say they hear and could come back entranced, perhaps excited and perhaps motivated to learn more.

In that one single instant she could break out of the cycle of narrow focus and lack of interest in knowing more than she already does and seeing no further than the end of her street.

But in order to do that, there are a whole string of things that has to happen. Some of which are about technology, but most are to do with resources, training and expertise. Let's take that chain back the way from the pupil mesmerised by the computer screen in front of her. She has to have access to a computer at the right place and at the right time. Her computer has to be networked and linked to some kind of Internet connection, probably a permanent link to get the right value for money and to get the right speed of access.

The teacher has to understand the role of the Internet, probably has to have been onto the Internet and predefined a number of sites in preparation.

Some kind of worksheet would have had to have been developed or downloaded in order to ask the right kinds of questions.

Both the teacher and the pupil would have needed basic computer literacy skills in order to have got the best out of the opportunity which was presented.

How many of the 40,000 teachers, 10,000 FE lecturers, 5,000 Higher Education lecturers, 20,000 trainers in Scotland, 10 times that in the UK, have got those skills and confidence and competence to do that? I have no idea, but I know it is not enough.

The key element in all of this is not the technology really, we have plenty of technology, plenty of modern technology, not enough, never enough, but all the computers in the world cannot substitute for a motivated teacher.

So my first announcement is that SCET pledges to work with the Scottish authorities to get 5,000 teachers and lecturers Internet ready by the end of 1997.

As I said before, technology will turn our world upside down. I genuinely believe that information is fast becoming our fifth utility. I first used that expression at the last SCET conference and it has been picked up widely since then. The truth is that we do not sit around chatting about the electricity supply in Britain and expressing unbelievable amazement at the fact that 30 million homes, or however many there are in the UK, are all connected to an electricity grid that copes with vast surges in demand and declines in demand and sells all that power to us at a rate that at least most of us can afford.

The irony is that we will only know that the Internet has been a success when absolutely no one talks about it. When it is taken completely for granted and we just plug into it and the only time we complain is when it is not available for some reason or another. When it has the same reliability as our electricity supply, the same ability to withstand surges in demand and we will pay for it on a monthly or quarterly basis along with our bills for water, services, electricity, gas and telephone.

At that point, the computer will be one information appliance among many in our house and in our school and in our workplace and don't ask me to tell you what the other information appliances will be. I have no idea. I do know that one of them will probably resemble something like a television used to be, whether it is called a television or not is irrelevant. There will be something that will take the place of a telephone that will have video as well as audio, but all the rest, the things that we wear, processors plugged into our fridges, live communications with our cars. Nicholas Negroponte in "Being Digital" talks about the time when your fridge will notify your car that you are out of milk so that you remember to buy some on the way home. In theory we should go much further than that. It should be your fridge notifying the supplier of milk to make sure there is another pint on the step when you arrive home.

We live in the Ford Model T age of technology and the difference is that NOW we can we see the Mondeo on the horizon.

And to help schools and Colleges get closer to that future, SCET will work with the cable companies and telecommunications providers to offer FREE web pages to all educational institutions and a free Internet e-mail address. Scotland will be 100% wired during 1997. That is my second announcement.

If you want to think globally, let's just look at PC shipments in 1995 and 2000. There were about 47 million PCs sold in the world last year. It is going to almost double by the year 2000. If you look at North America leaping up to 45 million PC shipments in one year, Western Europe will increase pretty reasonably, the rest of the world will double as well, but the exciting statistic is that one in the middle in Asia.

What we are going to see there is an explosion in the growth of technology. It offers us huge opportunities and huge threats as well. Behind every one of the 35 million PCs that will ship into Asia, is going to be economic activity. Malaysia alone will have a shortfall of 27,000 engineering graduates per year from now until 2005 and the Vice Chancellor of the technical university of Malaysia is asking you to help him meet that shortfall. But don't say send your undergraduates to me for 4 years, because the country can't afford it, and will not do it. He wants more imaginative solutions. That is a technology solution. Australia, New Zealand, America, Canada will be queuing up. What about Scotland? What about the UK?

What I am going to do now is show you a little movie by Apple which illustrates where they see technology going. What this shows is that computers of the future will be aligned pretty closely to the technologies of today. The difference will be that they do things faster and more smoothly. Essentially the metaphors that we use on the desktop will stay constant.

I have illustrated a few of those on the next slide. The key differences are:

1. A much bigger degree of software integration. You do what you want, and let the software do all the work for you. So if you are gather resources together, they will be integrated automatically and not manually or by you having to put in complex codes and work things out.
2. Secondly, communications will be wireless. You will be able to speak to people, gather information, up and down load it without having to sift through an assortment of plugs and cables which will certainly be my learning heaven.
3. We will have a single virtual desktop or workspace which we use for planning and developing resources, communicating with our friends and colleagues and generally organising our lives. Although the fictional world of the future is not deliverable today, all its elements are deliverable and it does not appear bizarre or strange to us. As I said before, the key is not the technology, but competent people who can use it.
4. When Apple looked at the first 10 years of their Classroom of Tomorrow research project, they came up with 8 competences which ACOT students appeared to develop over and above non-ACOT students. They are listed on the screen.

If you add those up, what you end up with are eminently employable young people. I would like to have all my staff fulfilling all of those competences. We will get there, but we are not there yet.

People with those kinds of competences are not just positively oriented to the future, they are the future.

The difference between what we are discussing now and what has existed in the past is not actually technological development. Big companies communicated with each other across the globe, exchanged information electronically, had video-conferences, many, many years ago. The international 'phone system has allowed us to talk round the world for decades.

Satellite communications make it possible to have live television of events anywhere in the world.

As we speak, there are submarine cables, underground cables, above ground cables, satellite communications, all networked, all pumping information around us. The big difference between that, then and now, is that the current revolution is for the rest of us. It is not owned by AT&T, BT, Rupert Murdoch or anyone else. The communications revolution allows ordinary people, ordinary kids in ordinary classrooms to communicate effectively in that global marketplace as if they were top executives in IBM of 15 years ago, and that is a huge democratic difference and why it is worth talking about learning technology today and why it was not so important 15 years ago.

When you send a little e-mail message from here to Japan, what actually happens is that it is broken up into thousands of different packets and they are squirted round the network, we know not how, we know not where, we know not when, and at the other end, wherever they came from, they are reassembled in the right order for you to look at. All you have to pay for is that first branch of the connection. After that, the information travels on public infrastructure and private infrastructure and it is carried along routes where the common protocols prevail. This is enormously liberating and enormously worrying for those people who own the infrastructure.

The difference between an e-mail or even an Internet 'phone call to Japan and the live telephone call to Japan, is that if I 'phone up a Japanese student I open a line right the way from Glasgow to the switching system to London, across the globe to Japan to the switching system, to the 'phone the other end, and I pay for every section of that line for as long as it is open. If I send an e-mail message or a video message, the only live link is the momentary one as data goes in bursts around the system and it is untraceable and, therefore, yet, now, at this moment, it is unchargeable.0

So the Internet's exponential growth has changed the world for all of us. Two years ago, at our last conference, we could not provide live Internet feed and SCET was not on the Internet. Today, we have live Internet feeds all over this building because that is what people wanted. We have a Cyber cafe run jointly by RM and ourselves where anybody here can spend the rest of the day on the Internet if they choose to do. Look at this exponential growth. A mere 100% a month, but look at New Zealand, 400% per month. However, the opportunities are still huge. There are still only a quarter of computers in America with modems. There are 61% of people, families with no computer at all and an interesting 1% who don't even know whether they have a computer or not.

We want to help more disadvantaged and disabled adults, more schools and community centres get access to computer based technologies. We are going to start negotiations with the major manufacturers to recycle recent but not the most recent technology into schools for disabled adults to use in their homes and we will do that as cheaply as possible. Third announcement.

I would argue that all technologies eventually become learning technologies. Speed of adoption is variable and the speed at which they are enthusiastically embraced is variable. You could probably argue that the photocopier is the one technology that has become ubiquitous and totally accepted amongst every single member of the education community. For every other technology, we are still trying. The point about learning technologies, and computers in particular, is that they are both subject and object. They generate ways of learning, they are in themselves things to learn about that makes it very complicated, they are also the keys to employment in a world of work. Not just in Europe, the developed world, but in Africa too.

When Plockton High School took their used computers over to Africa to recycle them in Kenya, they were told by Kenyan educators that the mere experience of using a computer by kids in school would double or triple their chance of getting work once they left the school.

The opportunities are huge, the structural change vast, but what is clear that to be a mere content specialist is not enough. You have to be a process specialist, you have to know about learning, you have to know about what you are involved in, in order to be professional in this day and age.

There are enormous opportunities for informal learning through CD and the Internet. What we have to make sure is what is informal can be bridged into formal learning should the opportunity arise or the desire arise in company, in school, at home.

There are six crucial issues which I believe should fuel these developments, but to do that there are a number of challenges that we all have to face.

We must get every subject area using technology effectively. It is no longer the domain of the specialist.

We should use learning technology to build learning environments: that is how people learn. Content comes second.

Our virtual communities will be communication and discovery orientated.

They will also focus allowing people to build their own messages and become publishers.

There are so many challenges which we all face:

• Build lifelong partnerships with students
• Don't let employers advise: but drive
• Diversify the faculty base
• Be wired and think digital
• Redefine your right to exist
• Build strategic partnerships
• Think about 2010 as well as 1997

How can SCET help. We believe in our technology and how it can transform learning. We are the first non US company in the history of Apple computer to be trusted in developing a launch product for a totally new technology, the eMate 300, which Jeff Soloff of Apple Computer Inc. will be talking about next. SCET will have a product ready for the spring launch of the computer. My fourth announcement.

And my fifth announcement: we believe so much in our technology and in particular in our new schools MIS product SCET Works that we are prepared to make the ultimate gamble on its success and its viability. For those Authorities that commit to us, we will give the software away FREE to them. Details of the partnership agreements will given at the product launch this afternoon at 5.30 pm.

Here are my seven conclusions:

• IT is a learning technology
• We have to blur formal and informal routes to learning
• The content will look after itself
• Lead from the top
• Use what we use anyway for learning
• See everything as two way: Faculty and students
• Keep a vision that locks educational development with social change

What I hope I have proved is that IT is, above all, a learning technology and that as organisations (whether economic, social, educational or political) unless we learn at the pace in which our environment changes we will ultimately wither and die. We learn and we teach others to learn. This is our unique role. It is an almost Darwinian statement, but it has never been more true.

Thank you very much.