The Role of Technology in Revolutionizing Education

Thurow ¢ The great promise for the revolution in education is in primary and secondary school levels in the developing world. A place like Thailand cannot wait the 75 years needed to train teachers , build classrooms, and focus the resources required to give everyone a basic education. You need to use electronic systems combined with teaching assistants to speed up the process of educating people.

The second place is in the business firms. How do you train people in Otis Elevator Company to be able to fix all makes of elevators all over the world? Give them a laptop. Then mechanics can have on-location assistance if they have to repair an elevator that is 100 years old. In business, most on-the-job training will be done in a virtual classroom.

In universities, it is more complex. If you would like to provide for student creativity, then there will be the need for "rubbing elbows." Distance learning cannot completely substitute for those relationships. At MIT, we run a master's program in systems design and management. At the beginning, it was completely done electronically . What we do now is bring the students in for three weeks in the semester. We found that the electronic interaction with the professor was pretty good. But the students would not interact online with each other. Once they met each other physically, then they would be more comfortable to interact online. So the future for university electronic education will probably be some mixed mode of electronic and classroom learning. The big problem at this time for university electronic education is that nobody has figured out how you pay for it. In the U.S., people are not willing to pay high tuition for electronic education.

The Promise of Technology to Serve the Greater Public Good and Change Needed in Light of the September 11 Terrorist Attack

Attali ¢ There is an enormous capacity of mankind to forget. I would not say to forgive. I hope that we may be in a position to forget if there are no other incidents of mass destruction and we can look at September 11 as a past nightmare.

But if we forget, we might not take the right lessons. My forecast is that people will forget and go back to normal life. This is the most probable outcome of everything, and it is silly. But we live in a world where "the show must go on."

The main lesson is that you cannot win the war against violence if you don't try to win the war against poverty. Our enemy is not Islam. Our enemy is poverty. No one can win that war alone.

I am involved in a large project to use the new technologies to speed up the process of the poor to create their own jobs. We have created an NGO based in Paris, that uses an Internet platform to assist in the development of micro-finance institutions, which are banks helping the very poor to finance their own businesses and create jobs. This is climatefinance.org.

What the net can do is plug in the very poor to access finance, training, and institutions so they can participate in the world economy.

Special Perspectives: Governments Can Help Make Regional Wealth in the Innovation Economy: A Dialogue Between Kailash Joshi and Davidi Gilo

To conclude our quest for perspectives from entrepreneurial champions , we present a dialogue between leaders in the Innovation Economy, whom you may recall from Chapters 1 and 2.

Kailash Joshi is from India, and is the Silicon Valley president of TiE (The IndUS Entrepreneurs), a multinational NGO, with 30 chapters and 10,000 members , dedicated to entrepreneurial advancement. He started his career on the research faculty of Cornell University in New York and had a distinguished career with IBM that spanned 23 years . He was the general manager of IBM Lexington, which is now Lexmark. Now retired , he devotes his time to TIE, which he helped found in 1992.

Davidi Gilo is from Israel and founded DSP Communications, which pioneered software development for the answering machine and other communications devices. He sold that company to Intel in 1999. In recent years he has been part of a high-tech international consortium advising the Israeli government on government policy on technology.

While both reside in Silicon Valley, each has maintained close interest in and contact with his native country's government to help them be more competitive in the global economy. They provide their perspectives in the hope that governments around the world, and the institutions in their countries , will work to make regional wealth increase everywhere.

In their dialogue, they discuss several areas that are essential for developing world governments to address if they want to be competitive in a free market environment: tax structures, employee stock options, company stock buy-backs, opening up telecommunications, company privatization , and the need to eliminate corruption and special interest protection.

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Saperstein J., Rouach D.

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