Plenary A
The Opening Plenary: Owning Learning
Tomorrow’s learning is about ownership and OEB’s opening session will examine how we can own our learning. We will soon control what, where, when and how we learn. We will access, link, combine, interpret and interact with knowledge. We will make learning work for us. But what are the implications? And how can we ensure that the new world of the empowered learner works for students, teachers and society? The opening plenary session of OEB 2016 will focus on the challenges and opportunities of taking empowered learning to its ultimate phase.
Andreas Schleicher
Director, Directorate for Education and Skills, OECD, France
Andreas Schleicher is Director for Education and Skills, and Special Advisor on Education Policy to the Secretary-General at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in Paris.
As a key member of the OECD Senior Management team, Mr. Schleicher supports the Secretary-General’s strategy to produce analysis and policy advice that advances economic growth and social progress. He promotes the work of the Directorate for Education and Skills on a global stage and fosters co-operation both within and outside the OECD. In addition to policy and country reviews, the work of the Directorate includes the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), the OECD Survey of Adult Skills (PIAAC), the OECD Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS), and the development and analysis of benchmarks on the performance of education systems (INES).
Before joining the OECD, Mr. Schleicher was Director for Analysis at the International Association for Educational Achievement (IEA). He studied Physics in Germany and received a degree in Mathematics and Statistics in Australia. He is the recipient of numerous honours and awards, including the “Theodor Heuss” prize, awarded in the name of the first president of the Federal Republic of Germany for “exemplary democratic engagement”. He holds an honorary Professorship at the University of Heidelberg.
Links
http://www.oecd.org/edu/andreas-schleic…
Tricia Wang
Global Technology Ethnographer & Co-Founder of Constellate Data, Global Technology Ethnographer & Co-Founder of Constellate Data, China
Tricia Wang is a global technology ethnographer and the co-founder of Constellate Data. She studies and advises organizations on the patterns of how people use technology.
She consults companies on how to integrate “Big Data” and what she calls Thick Data — data brought to light from humans to improve strategy, policy, products, and services. Organizations she has worked with include P&G, IDEO, Nokia, Microsoft, Kickstarter, the United Nations, and NASA.
As a researcher, she seeks to understand how technology makes us more human. Her research spans from China to social media and most recently, virtual reality. For nearly ten years, she has lived and worked across four continents, studying the effects of social media on people’s lives. Her immersive research has taken her to internet cafés in Beijing, urban slums in India, small towns in rural Mexico, and immigrant housing in Sweden. Based on her extensive fieldwork, she formulated a sociological framework for understanding online behavior, The Elastic Self.
She was the first Western scholar to have worked within the China Internet Network Information Center in Beijing (the equivalent of the FCC in the United States, and the nucleus of the country’s censorship policies). Tricia’s work and points of view have been featured in Slate, The Atlantic, Al Jazeera, Fast Company, Makeshift, and Wired. She guests lectures widely and has taught at New York University. Tricia is also the co-founder of Ethnography Matters, a site that features cutting edge uses of ethnographic approaches in design, science, and tech.
Currently, she’s an affiliate at Data & Society, and at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society. Tricia holds a PhD in sociology from UC San Diego, and is a Fulbright Fellow and National Science Foundation Fellow.
Links
http://triciawang.comhttp://ethnographymatters.net
Roger Schank
CEO, Socratic Arts & XTOL, USA
Roger Schank is one of the world's leading visionaries in artificial intelligence, learning theory, cognitive science, and the building of virtual learning environments. He is CEO of Socratic Arts, a company whose goal is to design and implement learning-by-doing, story-centered curricula in schools, universities, and corporations.
Links
Moderator
Nik Gowing
Broadcast Journalist, Broadcast Journalist, UK
Nik Gowing was a main news presenter for the BBC’s international 24-hour news channel BBC World News 1996-2014. He presented The Hub with Nik Gowing, BBC World Debates, Dateline London, plus location coverage of major global stories.
For 18 years he worked at ITN where he was bureau chief in Rome and Warsaw, and Diplomatic Editor for Channel Four News (1988-1996). He has been a member of the councils of Chatham House (1998–2004), the Royal United Services Institute (2005–present), and the Overseas Development Institute (2007-2014), the board of the Westminster Foundation for Democracy including vice chair (1996-2005), and the advisory council at Wilton Park (1998-2012 ). In 1994 he was a fellow at the Joan Shorenstein Barone Center in the J. F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University.
Nik has extensive reporting experience over three decades in diplomacy, defence and international security. He also has a much sought-after analytical expertise on the failures to manage information in the new transparent environments of conflicts, crises, emergencies and times of tension. His peer-reviewed study at Oxford University is “Skyful of Lies and Black Swans”. It predicts and identifies the new vulnerability, fragility and brittleness of institutional power in the new all-pervasive public information space. It can be downloaded free online after registration.
He was awarded an honorary doctorate by Exeter University in 2012 for both his ongoing cutting edge analysis and distinguished career in international journalism. From 2014 he is a Visiting Professor at Kings College, London in the School of Social Science and Public Policy.