IMS Global: Has technology during the past 25 years changed the way in which we learn? And if so, how?

MB: It's really clear there has been tremendous work done in the science of learning generally. You can look at developments today that emphasize the importance of helping students take control of their learning by helping them recognize when they understand or when they need more information, and how to transfer their learning to new settings and events. It is pretty widely recognized that technology can be a pretty important tool to enable more of a student-centered or student-individualized experience. If you step back and look at the reality of the last 25 years, the transformative power of information technology in the broader community has really changed how we live and work in countless ways. It's become almost impossible for some of us to even imagine how we could run businesses today and stay in touch with family and friends or be entertained without a technology component.

But, the one key part of our lives that remains largely as it was before the dawn of personal computing is really the classroom. Despite there being a tremendous amount of technology being used, education today isn't that different from what it was 30 years ago. In most classes, you still have rows of students in lecture halls, listening to the lecturer and reading from printed textbooks. The students are handing in written assignments and following a pedagogy that is pre-PC. And yet, the juxtaposition of that to students' daily lifestyle is really quite striking. We've done an awesome amount of research in this area and it's clear that today's students are what we like to think of as `digital natives.' They've grown up with technology fully integrated into every aspect of their lives, in a world that has become flat in large measure because of the connectivity and collaboration that is enabled through that technology. But we've really only begun to glimpse the vast potential that technology has to increase access to quality education and quality learning for all.

One of the metapoints that I would like to make, and which I intend to address in my remarks at the Learning Impact conference in May, is that we really stand at the threshold of an unprecedented opportunity to enable quality educational experiences for all through technology if we're prepared to step back and actually learn some of the lessons of the application in our broader society and to look at how it's being used to transform other industries.

Overwhelmingly, I believe, and Microsoft believes, that technology is one of the few levers in the world that can actually create access to education at scale. One of those challenges is to clearly embrace the phenomena of technology and instead of resisting it in education, unleashing it in education. In my presentation, I will talk about the importance of bringing digital lifestyles together with digital work styles, taking these digital natives and allowing them to move from the way in which they have embraced what they think of as their digital lifestyle and start bringing that more into the classroom. A great example of that would be around content. You know, if we just re-think the way in which we bring content into the classroom, and instead of it being static, sequential, book-based content, we start to see it as something that is explorative, that can be personalized, that can be captured and extended in formal and informal ways and can be used for active learning. Using it in ways that students love doing with it outside of the classroom. For example, the number one thing they want to do is buy a digital camera. Once they buy the camera, the next they want to be able to do is to connect it, to share it, to manipulate it, to weave it, and to personalize it. That's all content creation, content creation with real meaning for them. There are lessons to be learned there for the classroom. If you look at the way in which young people collaborate and communicate, they live on the Web. They live on their cell phones. The difference for them between digital and personal communication, they no longer bother making that distinction.