"Disruption, innovation and learning"
Festival & conference now complete - see the videos
Register for London 2012 as super early bird now (includes iPad 2)
Learning Without Frontiers - is a platform for positive change bringing together our renowned Handheld Learning, Game Based Learning and Digital Safety events and communities in three global gatherings. The first international gathering is in London before touring to regional gatherings in Africa & USA during 2011.
"Make no mistake: Our future is on the line. The nation that out-educates us today is going to out-compete us tomorrow." President Barack Obama
LWF brings together leading disruptive thinkers and practitioners from the education, digital media, creative, technology and entertainment sectors to explore, share and demonstrate how new disruptive technologies are driving radical efficiencies and improvements for learning whilst offering equality of access.
Featured speakers include:
- Jimmy Wales, Founder, Wikipedia
- Karen Cator, Director of Educational Technology, US Department of Education
- Evan Roth, artist & researcher, Graffiti Research Lab
- Saul Nassé, Controller BBC Learning
- Genevieve Shore, CIO & Director of Digital Strategy, Pearson Plc
- Theodore Gray, co-founder, Wolfram Research
- Iris Lapinski, Director CDI Europe & Apps for Good
- Ed Vaizey MP, UK Minister for Communications, Culture and the Creative Industries
- Lord David Puttnam of Queensgate, CBE
- David McCandless, Author & Information Designer, Information is Beautiful
- David Yarnton, General Manager, Nintendo UK
- Josie Fraser, Social & Educational Technologist
- Tim Rylands, Award-winning Educator
- Stephen Heppell, Heppell.net
Take yourself back to the turn of the Millennium, the start of the 21st century and remind yourself what your mobile phone looked like, who the leading software companies were, how you used the Internet, who supplied your entertainment and how you engaged with your digital world. Now bring yourself back to the present.
The last 10 years has seen unprecedented growth and development in consumer technologies at an accelerating pace beyond anything mankind has experienced. Exponential improvements in affordable digital processing power, storage, communications, computing, content distribution, reaching ever larger segments of the global population, are just some of the drivers of change in the way we now live, play and learn turning what we once imagined as science fiction into science fact.
The desktop PC with a bloated operating system and high cost maintenance is dead and laptops are on death row. Expensive shrink wrapped application software is history and anything that can be streamed will be streamed. The video game industry is now bigger than the film and music industry combined. More children use YouTube than watch television.
And this is just the beginning.
By 2030, at the current pace of change, it has been predicted that supercomputers the size of blood cells will be commonplace and that what today we call computers will appear almost sentient.
How are we preparing ourselves, our society and our learners for this world?
How will our learners be agile enough to compete?
What does a 21st century place of learning look like?
What are the implications on personal digital safety and privacy?
For the past 6 years our organisation has hosted some of the most provocative, challenging events in the area of learning and technology including the renowned Handheld Learning, Game Based Learning and Digital Safety conferences. The common theme between these communities and their events has been disruption and an appetite for positive change.
Now for the first time we are bringing these groups together with others in a cross-sector exchange about how the landscape of learning and teaching practice can improve as a consequence of exponential developments in these affordable technologies.
New challenges and tough financial pressure faced by many governments present a new opportunity to positively transform or reboot our education systems, forcing us to consider new methods for learning using the kinds of disruptive technologies already available to many learners and familiar to a new generation of parents, teachers and employers. Inclusive technologies such as mobile phones, entertainment consoles, consumer electronics, user-generated content, open source and collaborative platforms have demonstrated the potential to yield improved learning outcomes for less cost and with more relevance to the world in which todays learners inhabit and will need to compete.
Connected, "always-on" learning is now a reality for large segments of the population who are using some of the least expensive and most inclusive access devices in novel and often unexpected ways. Getting everybody else connected is a challenge that as a society we can rise to, stimulating innovation that can only lead to growth.
Join one of the worlds leading conferences about learning, teaching and disruptive technology.
For thought leaders, innovators and practitioners.
