Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia, LWF Talk, London 2011

Knowledge, collaboration, freedom & learning

Jimmy Wales is the US Internet entrepreneur and wiki pioneer best known as the founder of Wikipedia. "Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge" Jimmy asks us in this talk and discusses how Wikipedia has grown, the impact it has made and the people who contribute to its creation.

Jimmy discusses future directions for Wikipedia and Wikia, Inc

Genevieve Shore, Pearson Plc, LWF Talk, London 2011

Is book publishing dead? Embracing digital disruption

Genevieve Shore is the Director of Digital Strategy for Pearson Plc and is responsible for their global strategy for digital technologies. Genevieve describes how she encourages Pearson to embrace the inevitable disruptions that the digital world brings to one of the worlds largest publishing companies and demonstrates how this is being achieved.



David Samuelson, Pearson Plc, LWF Talk, London 2011

Video games & Pearson Plc

David Samuelson, EVP and Director of Games & Augmented Reality for Pearson Plc discusses his organisations approach to digital which now accounts for one third of all Pearson's global revenues. David presents a number of key Pearson initiatives in the gaming space including Poptropica.

David is responsible, as part of Pearson plc’s digital strategy team, for exploring new global business opportunities across Pearson’s education, trade publishing and information businesses in the fast growing games industry, and leveraging emerging new technology such as augmented reality. Pearson’s current gaming-related initiatives include Poptropica, a very popular virtual world where kids learn as they explore, and an investment in Tabula Digita, a math game company, among others.

Language, Literacy & E-books, LWF Talk, London 2011

English as an additional language (EAL)

How a partnership between a digital publisher and educators approached the challenge presented by young learners in the London Borough of Lewisham for whom English is an additional language.

Featured speakers are Neal Hoskins, WingedChariot, with Tom Cooper and Jo Barclay from Lewisham Local Authority.

WingedChariot a pioneer in digital story publishing and Lewisham LA last year began a unique partnership on a project to fill a great gap in providing story based learning materials in a multilingual format for EAL and MFL classrooms.

With over 50 languages being spoken in many urban school programming a multilingual application in the top 10 community languages for students to use was an outstanding success.

The fantastic results and feedback from the initial pilot means that WingedChariot is pleased to announce today at LWF an expansion of this project into 6 schools across 3 London boroughs that will see more multilingual stories produced as well as a creative writing application for young people to tell and write their own stories through handheld devices.

Part funded by the Calouste Gulbenkian Arts foundation in 2011 this simple but innovative project will also form part of the Cultural Olympiad celebration of 2012 with an eye to going national in schools for 2013.