 I'm delighted to introduce Etill and thank you very, very much for coming. You all have their lunch right now, so I will try to be considerate and speak softly not to bother those who are taking the rest right now. The digital divide that many people are talking about is very important in the sense that we want to make sure that the society that we are building, we don't have some people who have access to the great technology, who have computers, who have laptops, can see the podcast, they have mobile devices that they can do mobile learning. And a lot of emphasis has been around the issue that we don't want a society where some people have access to the technology and some people don't. What I'd like to put forward to you is that we're missing the point. I think the problem is not the division, the divide between those that have technology and those who don't have access to the technology, but the divide between the technology and the learners themselves. Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying technology, the access is not important. It's a necessary but not sufficient for success. And you know what? It's good that some people don't have access because before we make sure that everybody has access, let us try to get it right, to have the technology work and be effective and efficient because the problem really is about the effectiveness and the use of the technology and let's get that right and then it starts worrying that everybody will have access. Those of you who have kids will know what I'm talking about when I say you can bring them to the table but you can't make them eat because you're kids, you can get them quite easy to the table but it doesn't mean they're going to eat what's on the table. Even if they eat what's on the table, they don't use utensils. They use their hands. Those who don't have kids and will have kids and let me prepare you to the adventure. And then when they start using utensils rather than using a fork, they'll take a knife and stab the sausage to pick it up so they don't use the utensils properly if they use the utensils. Even once they master those arts, the question is how can they choose which food to eat? If you have for example a buffet and they have a lot of food to choose from, how do they choose what food they're going to eat? You brought them to the table and how much are they going to eat? They're not going to eat enough food. Maybe they're going to eat too much food and they're obese. So we have to ask ourselves and deal with the amount of food. And of course a critical question, do they eat healthy food? Because they say, do they eat? Yes, you can make them eat. Give them chocolate. They will eat the chocolate and they eat it until they'll puke. Right? So the question is, are they eating the protein and carbohydrate and minerals that they need to eat? Perhaps as a parent you want them to learn how to cook themselves or you want to motivate them so you get them involved in the preparation of the food, in the cooking or setting it up. And if you're a restaurant, you may be interested that they're going to pay for the food, they're going to like the food, they're going to come again and again to your restaurant, they're going to tell their friends. These are the kinds of questions that we need to deal with. These are the real obstacles and challenges we have. And exactly the same goes when we're talking about technology. Because with technology, you can have access to technology, but do they use it and is that technology effective? I can sit here all day and give you examples in e-learning, interactive system and IT systems that have been developed by universities, by industry, by government that are not used, they raise dust, and I assume all of you have experiences with every new IT system and you say who developed it, you know you can't use it basically. So there's a lot of technology that is not used because it's not usable, not because the technology doesn't deliver the technological specification. First of all, do they know how to use it? So do the users out there when they have the access, do they know how to log in? Do they know how to use the mouse? Do they know how to surf the internet? Now, many of you are dealing with higher education, so the students that we get are very competent, but then even if they know that, do they use it properly? Do they use the technology properly? Do we use it properly? Take email. Well, I assume that we're all in the same boat. Lots of emails, we slave to emails, and email is not used properly. Many companies are starting now, especially in America. One day the email system is off. You can't receive and you can't send email, so one day a week people are going to get some work done and not spend all day receiving and sending emails. Other companies are starting to have a currency. You get a thousand emails in a certain time period and once you send us, you can't send anymore. Or you have to prioritize your emails and you have a currency. You get a thousand points and you can put ten points or one or a hundred points. How important this email is, but when you run out of your thousand points, you can't give any points. Nobody will read your emails to try to use that technology properly. Can they select that technology? Can they select what to use? The problem is too much information. Right now, when you have access to technology, there's endless stuff. Why should a student listen to me give a lecture when they can hear on iTunes Nobel Prize winners, because MIT and Stanford, Daniel and Harvard are putting all their lectures on iTunes in any topic. So they have huge resources. It's not a matter of access. Can they choose from all the huge amount of e-learning and resources? Or when they do a search on the web and they get 120,000 hits. How do you choose? How do you work with it? And the big question is how much do they use it? They use it a lot, right? Our students text to one another. They text all the time. When you walk around campus, everybody's texting. They don't know how to talk anymore and they have a conversation because they're texting all the time. Is that bad? No, it's not necessarily bad, but they use it a lot. My family is scattered all over the globe and we try once a year to have a family reunion and we bring everybody together. And the last family reunion, I went into the room where all the young generation were sitting. And I went in, there were eight of them, all of them sitting with their laptops, working on their laptop. So I couldn't help myself and I said, can't you disconnect from your friend's back home, get off MSN and Bebo, Facebook, and so on, and be with one another? And you know what they said to me? We're talking to one another. They were all sitting there, connecting across the globe, talking to one another on their laptop, sitting next to one another. Is that bad? It's not necessarily bad. They were sharing pictures and movies and a lot of interesting stuff. But you have a question about how much they use that technology. And I'm guilty myself. If a student comes and talks to me in my office, if it's not important, I'll talk to the student. If it's important, I said, don't talk to me, email it to me. Because then it's in my inbox, I will deal with it. If not, then you come and you talk to me out of my office and your student comes in, my brain. So I talk to me versus email, because I live and die by my email. The network was down in my office, I said it would take a week to fix it. I said, okay, I'm going on holiday, because I've got nothing to do if I don't have access to the technology. So it's not only the younger generation. Now let's talk about the content and the format. So you talked about Wikipedia yesterday, if it's good or bad. Well, a few months ago I was in court on a murder case. No, not that I'm accused, thank you very much, I know what you're thinking. I was an expert witness. And one of the other expert witnesses used Wikipedia and the high court judge was furious. You wouldn't let him talk to you. Wikipedia, anybody can write, it's not peer reviewed. I'm not saying she was right, I'm not saying she was wrong. Wikipedia, what about other content? Phenography, if your kids are intelligent, they will surf the net and panic and control or not is going to help. So do you sit with them and surf to the good pornographic sites? I don't know if you and I will agree which one are the good ones and which one are in bad taste. So the content is critical. The format, just like you can make your kids eat by giving them chocolates or not make them, have no problem, you can have games. They can play games all day but what do they get out of them? I try to get my kids to do homework, it's a struggle. It's a fight to get them to sit down and do homework. I hope my kids are watching on the web, it is a problem. They sit to do the homework, five minutes, daddy can you help me? I can't do this, I don't understand the question. I work for two hours to get them five minutes to focus. They finish your homework and they go and play computer games and I'm interested. They come up and say show me the computer game, let me play. It's so complicated and I said, how did you figure out how to play? I figured it out, they couldn't figure out the most basic things in their homework, but in a computer game they turned from what I call a dead horse to a racing horse and what amount of knowledge? No daddy, you have the wrong gun. This gun shoots very quickly but doesn't have long range. You need to change to this model. What did they learn that I couldn't get them to do their homework? They didn't understand and here one is for the computer game. Is a computer game like chocolate will depend because you could, if you know what you're doing, nest the learning in the game. But it could be like chocolate that could get addicted to it. And of course, user generated and people enroll, do they come again? You can set up technology, you can have discussion groups in contrast to games. And the students don't go on the discussions, they don't participate. So we talked about it in some talks yesterday. So you can set up that technology but do they use it? They may not participate in the discussions as much. These are examples, it's not a whole list. But this is an example of the questions, the issues that we need to deal. Not the access to that technology, but do they use the technology? Do they use it efficiently? Do they use it properly? Do they get what they need out of that technology? These are the real challenges, these are the obstacles. One more word, games. I'm in for games, I'm for animations, but you have to use it properly. And you may not need very fancy, because look at a game like Sudoku. No animation, addictive. People played for hours and hours, figuring the numbers. So you need to think what makes people use certain things, learn, motivated, and engage to use the technology. This is the key. This is what the digital divide is between the technology and the actual users. We want the technology and the users, the learners, to fit like a hand in a glove, and not to have tension between them. They need to work together. Too often the technology doesn't fit the learner. The technology is against the learner, they struggle with it. Not only in content, but navigation. Sometimes you see learning technologies and the learner is spending all the time, frustration and cognitive resources, figuring out how to navigate in the e-learning module. That is not very good. What we need to make sure is that they fit, the learner and the technology fit. What is the learner, the cognitive and psychological underpinning of learning? And we can talk about what learning is, but I'll mention right now, learning is not only acquiring information, what we try to think about. It's remembering it. Have you tried taking your students after you taught them, and they took an exam, and they did well? And two weeks later, give them the same exam without notice, and see that they can't answer anything or not very much. Because they revised to the exam the experts in revising, the experts in getting good GSEs and A-levels in university, knowing how to answer, giving us what we want, and they forget about it. So we want relearning, only not only to acquire information, but to be able to remember it, and very important to use it. And that's not only in university, it's in industry, in the government to apply it. We want it to modify behavior, to get a skill that not only they have here, not only they remember, but they're going to apply it. So this is learning. Technology too often is driving what we're doing. Technology needs to be servant to the learner, servant to the learning, and not by itself. And we know in universities we have e-learning committees, e-learning strategies with its own entity, rather than it's a tool. It's an important tool. I'm not against using technology. I'm a fan of technology. But we have to use it and remember why we're using it. Rather than the new technology out there, let's use it. Or we have some programming skills, so let's put everything in this technology, transcribe our normal lectures or workshops or books into the electronic medium. So I want to go back to the basics, to the learner. I have a paper called It's Not What You Teach, But What They Learn That Counts. Where I try to transform people's thinking because they have new database, libraries, and you go and say, it's beautiful, it's great. Doesn't matter. What do the learners take from it? What do they learn from it? That's what counts. It's not a university professor that comes. The students learn nothing. It's not my problem. I know the knowledge. I lecture it. That's my job. And the student's job is to learn. If they don't learn, it's their problem. No, you need to think it's not what you teach. It's not the graph that you make. It's not the database or web-based using Flash or animation or gaming. What matters is what the learners take from it. Not what you teach and not what you've done is insignificant. And this is a transformation of how we think about it or how I say and I believe we still need to think about it. And you need to think about question. How intuitive and user-friendly is the technology? How engaging and motivating is the technology? How cognitively demanding is the technology? How effective it is? And again, we're talking about learning in terms of acquiring but also remembering and using it. And of course, it's not the technology, but how we use the technology. Technology is like a pen. You can write Shakespeare and poetry and you can write rubbish. Or it's a pen and technology is the same. And it's not access and to use technology that end of it. Great. That's only the beginning. This is what the troubles and the challenges are starting. Now, to answer these questions and other questions, we need to really understand the learner. So who is the learner? Well, I brought a picture of the learner. What this is all about. The learner is right here. That's a brain. That's what is going to see the information or not see it. Pay attention or not pay attention. Get engaged or not get engaged. Encode it, represent it, or forget about it. Remember it or not remember it. Use it or not use it. Now, the brain itself is like jelly, basically. And what we're really interested in is not in the biological entity, we're interested in the mechanisms that the brain employs in processing information. So underpinning the brain is information processing. And those mechanisms, the blue ball represents information and we store them, we delete them, we consolidate it with other concepts. We need to understand what goes on here because that's where we want to get our knowledge. We want technology to help us encode the information, remember it, and use it. And we must understand the brain and the mechanisms. I'm not talking about learning theories. There are huge learning theories. There are many learning theories, big pyramids, towers of theories about learning. First of all, which one is true? I definitely don't know. You can pick anyone you want. And what do they have to do with learning when we want to improve learning? They're too abstract. What I'm talking about is undisputed building blocks of how the brain encodes and processes, memorizes, retrieves, encodes information. This is what we need to know. It gets a bit problematic because many people know a lot about the brain. We have a lot of knowledge currently about the brain in the last 10 years. But knowing how the brain encodes information, how the brain remembers, how the brain learns, is one thing. You need to translate it to how that can affect practically how you design the technologies. That is the tricky part. That's where we need to be sophisticated and clever is bridging, bridging the gap. This is the digital gap to take what we know about the learners, the cognitive architecture. What does that mean in designing and utilizing technology to optimize the learning? This is the divide that I put forward is a big challenge. It's a gap. And you may disagree with me. Overall, e-learning has failed. But it has a huge potential. It can be great, but it's not delivering because it's a missing link, a missing loop, and that you did. I will show you some practical examples of what I'm talking about. Why don't you try and count how many Fs you see up here? I'm going to ask you in a minute. OK, how many people saw 10? Pick your hands up. 9, 8, 7. Pick your hands up. 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. Those who didn't pick up their hands didn't see any Fs. If you didn't see any Fs, you have a problem. And come and talk to me later. Most of you saw three Fs. Some saw four, some five. So first of all, let me show you the R6Fs. If you saw only three, four, five, you do not have a problem. You're not blind, and you're not an idiot, OK? At least not because of this. So everybody saw one, two, and three. But it's of, of, and of, three of here. Again? OK. One, two, and three, but of, of, and of. Let's see another example. Why don't you tell me if you can see here a man, a face of a man? Pick up if you see. 1% of you, 2% of you, 90% can't see. Right here. Are you blind? No, you're not blind. You don't have a problem that you didn't see that. And I can give you many examples of this sort. The learner, the brain, doesn't pick up all the information. It can be too much information like with a face. It can be information that the brain decides is not important. And I can pay you 10 pounds for every F you see, and you're not going to see, because the brain says to you, of is not important. I don't want to spend resources. So you need to start thinking. It doesn't matter how you design your learning technology. The question is, the learner, the brain encodes certain information and doesn't encode. We believe we don't see it, but you see it. The brain just decides it's not important. It's not allocating attention. It's not allocating resources. The brain may perceive it, but not encode it. They don't remember it. This is critical to know, because this is your parameters if you want to design technology learning generally, but technology is a very powerful tool to help learning if you know what you're doing. So you need to know all of this. You can't ignore the learners. That's their problem. I'm going to design something really cool. Well, it may be cool. It may look fancy. It may look nice to the vice chancellor or get your promotion, but the learners are not learning more. And we know that we don't test our e-learning very much, what we do. And if you want to, we have a paper right now on this that I've done. It's very hard, because you need to do proper science. So I divide my class into two, control group and technology, and I'm disadvantaging the people who don't get the technology. So there are a lot of ethical questions in really testing the effectiveness of e-learning. So there are obstacles in this. But this is what we have to do. We have to use this kind of information. Obviously, I'm not going to talk about the brain for 10 hours now and give you more and more examples, just illustrations, to enhance learning. Give the learners the information in the mental representation, whatever they learn is going to be stored here if they learned it. There's a certain mental representation. Why give it in a format that doesn't fit the brain? They'll not encode it, or they will encode it, but they'll spend a lot of energy doing it. And they're going to waste resources not learning, but transforming the information. Give it to them the way the brain wants it. Why not help the learner to learn effectively? Help them guide the cognitive resources which are limited to make learning efficient. I'll show you two very specific examples of how we do this. Give it in the mental representation. It doesn't matter if you have to identify tumors, or you have to identify health and safety problems, or you have to identify patterns in the data, or where a bridge is going to collapse in engineering, or where floods are going to happen. You have to identify a certain visual pattern, or it can be even a higher concept that's represented. So let's say you have to train people to identify aircraft. You have to train them to identify an F-15E. I've done a lot of work with Air Force, or this is my example. I do apologize. So is the brain going to represent it like this? If the brain is going to represent it like this, let's give it to the learners rather than them working, give it in the representation that the brain is going to use. But maybe it's facing down. The brain wants it facing down. Maybe sideways. Maybe the brain doesn't have one representation, the brain, when they learn to identify. And again, it's any type of knowledge. This is just an example. They want a whole range of orientations. The brain has multiple representations. Maybe the brain just likes weird orientations. Maybe the brain likes only this. There is scientific answers to this question, and let's design the learning to give it in the mental representation that the brain is going to use. If you want to know the exact orientations that the brain uses to look and identify this kind of object, well, you can go to my website and read this long, boring paper on learning presentation, object identification, the function of discriminability, and learning presentation, the effect of stimuli, similarity, canonical frame, alignment, and aircraft identification. I apologize for that. But there is a scientific answer in the paper we laid out. It gets, this is just an example, to give it in the right mental representation. And any learning that you want them to do, even abstract concepts, philosophy, literature, they're going to store the information. If they don't store it, they haven't learned. How are they going to store it? What are the representations? Let's use that information to hit a nail on the head. Help the learner learn efficiently. What happens when they learn? So let's stick with the example of aircraft. And this used to be an old example, but with the latest problems in Georgia. Maybe it's, again, we have American and Russian aircraft, and they need to identify these aircraft. And they're quite similar to one another. So what does the training do? You show them the aircraft, and you say, F-50. Once you know the orientation, so you need to know which orientations and how many. But excuse me, we figure that one out. And you show them the aircraft again, and again, and again, and again. And you know what happens after seeing it? Many times, they identify them. And they have to identify them very quickly, because if they don't, then they get shot out and they die. Or they do a friendly fire. So we need very quickly, when they're upside down and moving, and there's a whole science here. But what happens, they do learn to do that. But it takes a long time. What does the brain do? We're unconscious of the process. The brain picks up the important characteristics and features, the critical information, to make the identification. So if you want to identify an F-15E, and you look at the nose and the cockpit, it's a waste of time. You're not going to be able to identify an F-15, because the cockpit of the MiG-19 and the nose and the SU-17 and the F-15, they're almost identical. Or maybe the wings. No, the wings are too similar. But what the brain does, and that's how we learn to distinguish between identical twins that look the same after we see them time and time again, the brain unconsciously picks up on it. Then you would pick up here that the F-15, the air taker, is different. This, for example, is different from this aircraft from all the rest. It takes time. Until the brain figures it out, learning takes time. So we said, let's make the learning more efficient by a more civilized title, helping the cognitive system learn exaggerating distinctiveness and uniqueness. Let us artificially, during training, exaggerate, help the cognitive system pick up on it very quickly. So we morph, we transform the aircraft. We don't know what's, we don't decide what's important. We don't ask pilots. We have software that does it. And just like every politician that can have a real big nose or eyebrow and do caricature in the newspaper, the same we did with the aircraft. So for example, we made the air taker of the F-15 during training much bigger than it really is. And what happened? It increased training efficiently because the pilots and the people who were trained didn't have to figure out themselves what is unique. We exaggerated the distinctiveness and the uniqueness, the knowledge that the brain picks up because we know what it is. And they picked up on it very quickly. What's important is when they go out to the field, of course, they're not going to see aircraft as bigger air takers. And then we test them in air-to-air combat simulators and you find not only increase in learning, but memory and its application. And we test them six months later. And you see that the ones who learned the exaggerated distinctiveness remember better and shoot faster the right aircraft than those who didn't. If you want all the details, you can read in this paper, it's on my website. So these are just a few examples of what I'm talking about. And time is moving really quickly here. Let me talk about videos for a few minutes. So we use videos quite a lot. And this is the health and safety video that I've developed with colleagues, Tom Charrette and Joe Price and Gary Wills. And you can do it before you train. This is the health and safety laboratory that you train students, for example. And they see the video. And if it's after you explain to them the health and safety, you can say, now look, I want you to identify all the mistakes that this guy is making in health and safety. And write them down and we'll talk about it later. Or you can use it as an assessment. And they have to write down and they get score for it. Or you can use it as a training tool. Here, look at this and think what he's doing that's wrong. And then we'll discuss it. So I'm really happy to see you so engaged in this boring video. But the students are going to turn out. And afterwards, you start remembering the video when he was working, he had his watch on. Who got that? Who didn't get it? The students already forgot. Or maybe I will talk to you while I do the video. And then you don't have to look at the video to listen to me, because the brain is spread thin over this. And we use videos quite a lot. So we can do a few things. For example, one thing we can try to do is help guide attention, similar to the aircraft. We can guide their attention to the problems. Let's see if this is going to work now. So we can show them during the video what are the problems. So we guide their attention to pick it up. That's one thing that we can do. That may be too easy for the students, because we want it to be a bit challenging and engaging. If you spoon feed them too much, that's not good also. So you can perhaps make the video interactive. And there are many, many ways to make videos interactive. They can ask them questions and do lots of different stuff. So here is an example of an interactive version. So you look at it, and they need to click. Oh, yes, watch is worn doing an experiment. They look at it and do that. And it can be more interesting. You can have something like this, where you get multiple choice questions. You can do whatever you want. Technology is a tool. So they get what information should be provided. So you click. Oh, yes, you get feedback. That's good. That's good. Uh-oh, that's a bad answer. And if you notice what's interesting to make it challenging, we have novice and expert. So every time you find it, it lists it. And every time you do something good, it's taking you up to expert. And every time you give a wrong answer, you're going down to novice. So we're adding almost kind of a game to make it interesting for them. And here I'll make a correct answer. It's going up, correct answer. It's going up. But incorrect, it goes down, and it goes down. And then when you're done, it scores you right away. It gives you feedback. You've got 15%. The lowest one in five years. No one was so stupid until now. Or being positive because they're going to score better than me. So you have a challenge. Or you say, the one that will get the highest score is going to get chocolate or is going to get the first in the class or whatever you want to do. And after they do that, then it goes automatically. They do it individually at their own speed. It will list and show all the problems in the videos that you've missed. And the video is interactive because if you don't pick on a problem, it will show it to you again later in the video. If you pick up on it, it won't. So it responds and changes in its response. And finally, putting it all together, you will see the video combined with the problems right now at the end. It will list them and show you what the problems and list them as you go along. This is very, very briefly showing you interactive videos that you can make real huge change in terms of challenging, in terms of motivation, in terms of encoding the information. Something we use a lot, but we use it passively. They sit and watch a video. And then we talk about it or not. What do they gain? And try to see what the students do during the video. And many of us don't even stay in class. Half an hour of video. And we go and do email during that time. And so do the students. Let me very quickly, I want to finish to leave time for questions. You need to make information comprehensible because the cognitive system is limited. I'm not going to have fancy graphs like hunts. Nobody can compete with hunts moving stuff. But here's a graph. It's very hard to understand it. It's too much cognitive load. The cognitive system can't pick up. For us, it's easy when we teach something. It's easy because we know it so well. But you can make it by simplifying it, dividing it to two more simple graphs. Because you have too much cognitive load. The brain has limited capacity. The learner, no matter if they're pilots, the top of the crop, they have limited resources. What's going on here in this graph, in this data? Too much information. You can show the students a lot of data. This is too much information for to understand. So you can provide a meaningful pattern. And animation is great. Games is great, depending on how you use them. And yesterday with Hunts, you saw great examples of how to use animation. But here, no animation. I give a meaningful pattern by encoding it differently. And you can see here quite easily that the data means something. Here, when you look at the data, you see immediately, oh, younger voters always vote more, older voters vote more than younger voters, except something. Oh, what happened? In 1984, the older voters didn't vote very much. 1980, sorry, 1980. And now you can see that the line here in 1980 that's different from all the other lines. But when it's like this, you can't see it. I'll give you two more quick examples. Again, here. What's going on here? It's very hard. Too much information for the brain to encode, like the F, like the face with the coffee. Simplified by chunking. You can have the brain can chunk information together in meaningful patterns if you present it properly. And here, you can simplify the number of operations. Even though you can understand this, here, you have to encode the shape and the color and go back and forth. This is operations of the brain, your brain calories, that you should make it easier for the learning so they learn better. If you put the names right in here, they don't have to encode the color and go up and down in the legend. So daily cognitive load, or in a quantitative approach, will be reducing the quantity or what I call a qualitative approach where we package the information more efficiently because we know how the brain works. We know the capacity of the brain. And we package it efficiently without reducing the amount of information. You have to be very careful in what you do with representation information because you're making decisions. What information you convey. If you look at this example, same data. But it looks very different because here you plot the side of the stock market. Look at the US doing great. And here percentage of change. Look at Japan is doing great. Same data, totally different information. So when you represent the information, you'd make decisions because here it's percentage. And even though the US overall is bigger, the slope of the Japanese increase is over 200%. I know this doesn't bother you because you're British in the French or bottom in either case. That's all you're worried about. But there is information here and you make decisions when you convey the information. The last thing I'll talk about very, very briefly is modularity. Different parts of the brain do different things. It's not a new concept. We know this for a variety of reasons. First of all, we have selective brain damage. People have brain damage and they get selective deficits. Abilities, the cognitive performance, the abilities to learn and to process information, selectively go away. So we have agnosia, we have visual deficit, aphasia, we have language deficit, we have a taxia, motor deficit. And they're very specific. You can get post-op agnosia. You can't identify faces. So we learn what different parts of the brain do by how selectively it breaks down. But also we have the dual task paradigm. When you tap two different parts of the brain, the two tasks don't conflict with one another. You can load a lot on the brain. But if two learning tasks or two performance tasks are underpinned in the same brain area, they interfere with one another. So what we do, we have a primary task and people do it. And then we add a secondary task. And you find that sometimes adding the secondary task doesn't affect performance on the primary task with the different parts of the brain. But if it's the same part of the brain, when they start doing the secondary task, the performance of the primary task falls. Try this and then start this and you'll see you all know this. And finally, we have functional brain scans like PET, pothetron emission tomography, inject radioactive material and we can follow and trace consumption of oxygen, glucose in the brain. Again, I'm taking hours of lectures to 20 seconds and you can see that different parts of the brain are activated when you see and vision, when you hear, when you do use different memory stores and code information in different memory parts of the brain. And we know a lot about that. Again, it's not big learning theories. It's very practical building blocks of scientific facts that are not disputed. Who cares, you ask. Well, you should care because when you develop training and do technology, what parts of the brain are you targeting? Bet you never asked that before. But it's critical because if you know what parts, what are the characteristics of the part of the brain? What is the capacity? How much cognitive load can I put there? What are the mental representations in that memory store, in that perception score so I can build and deliver the training according to the most efficient way for the learners to accumulate information? We can spread activation and have a lot of learning if we encode information in different parts of the brain. And it goes on and on. We use our knowledge of the human brain of a cognitive system to make learning efficient and effective. This is the point that I'm trying to get across. It's not the access to the technology but having it effective. And effective that it affects the learner. We need to deal and close the digital divide. But the divide that I'm talking about it brings the technology and the learners. Once we have that, then let's make sure everybody has a technology when it's working. To utilize technology, it has to be subservient to the learner. We have to optimize it, not forget about the learner. Thank you very much. Well, thank you very much, Yatil. I'm really stimulating talk. We have got a short amount of time for some questions and I'm sure Yatil would be delighted to take some now. Delighted. Okay, gentlemen, got my eye out there. Was the... Thank you very much for your talk. Your talk reminds... Where are you? I'm here. Your talk reminds me of a book on website design called Don't Make Me Think by, I think it's Stephen Krebs. And would you like to comment on what's going on in terms of design and what you're talking about here? I want to comment specifically on that book. It's also a very good book by Steve Karzlin on graph designs based on the brain. What we need to make sure is that we understand how you perceive the information. You don't necessarily want to make it too simple and not make you think because we need the learning to be challenging. If it's not challenging, if it's not motivating, if you're not involved, if you're not interactive, then it doesn't work. But it has to do with design, but not only the design, but the overall approach, what I call the holistic cognitive approach of the system. And people ignore it. Let me give you one example in terms of security and passwords. We have, all of us have so many passwords to log into the university account, to the library, to database. Every time we submit a paper, every time we do shopping, buy plane tickets, hotel. And each one has a different constraints. We're not supposed to give the same password to everyone because, to all our accounts, because we're going to the library and to activating the nuclear warhead that they can control. I don't want the same password. It's one of the basic security breaches. But I'm not supposed to write them down. So I need to remember 25 different passwords, different, random. And now in the university, because we have such nuclear reactors, they're forcing us every six months to change the password. So I used to be smart and I used to say, change my password, one, two. Now they've picked up, no, your new password is too similar to your old password. So what do I do? I write them down. Now I ask myself, the people who designed, for example, this system, what planet do they come from? They expect us to remember 20, 30, 40 passwords. So here's an example in IT where you don't take into account these different kinds of messages. So it has to do with design, how you convey information, the amount of information, what information you convey, and how you motivate, how you engage, how you use interactive videos and gaming to get the learning across. So they understand it, they remember it, and they use it. And you need to understand the underlying cognitive architecture and remember it's about the learner and not about the technology. Thank you, gentlemen. Intuitive, you know. I'm interested in that word in the context of how computer systems are used, because people are always on about intuitive interfaces. I did come across a chap who said that all interfaces had to be learned, including a nipple. I'm interested in your views on that sort of thing. Which part? What he was really trying to say was that intuitive was in the context of a computer interface was a bit meaningless. In many senses, what he really meant was intuitive had elements of familiarity about it. I'm trying to cut along an answer very shortly. First of all, empirically it's very simple to note intuitive interfaces, built-to-interfaces, take people and run them and see how quickly they figure it out. One that they figure it out faster, regardless of why, is better. Of course, different people have different intuition. Men and women have different cultures. Also, depending if you have a real approach, technological, valid approach in the university, I know most of you are from university, you build all the interfaces, there is crossover, positive crossover. So you don't, every time you get an e-learning module, you have to figure out from the beginning. So once you learn a certain navigation, a certain conceptual approach, it transfers to other e-learning modules you're taking the same school in a different part of the university. So intuitive may be, first time you have to learn, but then it cuts across. So you want to make it efficient, you want the learners to focus on the learning and not on figuring out the technology and getting frustrated and not using it. One question here, and it says, which has come through the backchart. How can non-neuro scientists come to rigorous understanding of what learning materials have what cognitive levels? All notes, sorry. That is a very good question. Somebody's asking if I'm not a cognitive neuroscientist, how do cognitive neuroscientists, how do I do it? Let me tell you that even if you're a cognitive neuroscientist, you don't know. Every, the main reason is, and I had it in one of my slides, is the fact that you know that the brain works a certain way, it's not clear, it's not intuitively clear how you take that knowledge about how the brain processes information and translate it to the practical, tangible way when you go and you build the technology. This is the trick, this is the sophistication that is needed and is the missing gap that I think we need to close. And we're only just touching the surface because we are only talking, all I've talked about is the less interesting stuff, which is how do we deliver training and learning differently because of technology? We have to do it differently. But the interesting question is that how we deliver the training is what learning? Because what we teach needs to change. What are we all here doing? Taking the old material and trying to find new ways to deliver it. But this university challenge, the weakest link, who wants to be a millionaire? What do they test? People's knowledge. Well, I can find the knowledge, any knowledge can offload all of this onto technology. We need to change not only how we teach, but what we teach because technology in the face of society is changing. And if you have students memorizing dates and names, it's a waste of time because things are changing. And we need to talk eventually, maybe next day in the conference, not only how technology should change, how we teach, but what we teach and what learning is all about. Okay, thank you very much, Shatel. I think... Thank you, Wando. Thank you, Wando. Thank you, Wando. Oh, you have a question, sorry. Mark's got a question. Do we have a mic? I tried to finish on a good note. I started with the last question. I have to think of something clever to say quickly now. I'm just going to be awkward. You mentioned simplification quite a lot. And that's definitely relevant. But you also talked about learning needing to be challenging. And where's the boundary line between simplification and challenging? What should we do in those kinds of circumstances? That's a very good question. They go very well together, but we have to think what they are. Talk about simplification of things that don't contribute to the learning. So in the first level, it's a navigation, the interface. But then also simplification in terms of helping the cognitive system figure out how to identify the aircraft or what orientation. We don't want to spend energy. We want to simplify when you put the gas in neutral. When the students and the learners are spending energy and time playing the game but not learning the material. That's where we want to simplify. What we want to do is a challenge to get what we call depth of processing. We have a different level of processing on the learning material itself. So if we can concentrate the cognitive system on the actual learning material, we don't want to simplify it. We want to simplify getting to the core, getting to the meat of what they need to learn. This part, we make it challenging because we want to motivate them and make it interactive and interesting. So some parts you want to simplify and make easy. Some parts we want to do what's called desired difficulty. So we want to desire difficulty but not in figuring out how to log on or what my password is or the interface but in actually engaging them in the learning material. Your question is very good but in two different parts. One you want to simplify. No, you don't want to spoon feed the students. The students we all know are getting lazier and lazier. They want to be spoon fed and spoon feeding them is not the right thing when it comes to the learning material itself. They have to be challenged. They have to be interactive and engaging and they like the computer games. They only play computer games when it's challenging not when it's simple. Unfortunately all good things have to come to an end and the next meeting here will be the AGM at 3 o'clock. That's right isn't it now? Which is just in a few minutes. I found it a really fascinating and stimulating talk and what it's really done to me is to highlight that teaching is actually a purposeful activity. We probably all know that already but we at least have got some understanding for it and this is really I think the cutting edge of where learning is going to at the moment. I'm really indebted to ETL for coming giving a really stimulating talk and on behalf of everybody here I'd like to present ETL this small present of our appreciation. Thank you very much indeed.