 Thank you very much indeed, aim, bless you. I am in my business, this is my old business, show business, you get invited back somewhere within a couple of months you must have done something right. So it's really, really nice to be back in in this room, and it's a genuine pleasure to be given the opportunity to speak on what is actually a massive subject. Many years ago in fact in the mid-60s I was fortunate enough to find myself in Paris having lunch with the late and very great French fashion designer Yves Saint-Leurent. Mae heddiw i ddechrau'r sofaed yng Nghymru ac yn rhoi'r sgwrt, oedd nid i'r gулиch oeddwn i gweithio'r iechydod, ond yn cyfan yr allan, ale oherwydd, mae rydyn ni'n meddwlios fras rydyn ni i'w ddim yn gwahanol a ch wrefio ar It was clear that unless he was somewhat overdramatic in illustrating what today we'd term the direction of travel then the journalists, those others he relied upon as his messengers, simply wouldn't notice and there would be no imperative for change. I never forgot that lesson. It certainly informed both the manner and the means by which I'll try to get my principal arguments across today. If politics has taught me any one thing it's that the stDuLtIfIic GrP, of the status quo Yokio â gen 추가 fry diwg. While you have to punch very hard to achieve the type of traction you need to affect real and lasting change. That's troubling because I believe the world is shifting on its access and that because of the impact of digital technologies that is happening significantly faster than most people seem prepared to acknowledge. In fact, is my belief that we have reached what I'll call a Radio-Caroline moment. Rwy'n rhaid i'r rhagleniadau gyda'r radio-staciadau a'r rhagleniadau gyda'r cynlluniaid yn oed yn gwybodaeth bwysig a'r rhaid i'r rhaid o'r lluniau iddynt o'r 1926 y gallwn i'r rhagleniadau. Rwy'n rhaid i'r cyffredin iawn o'r cyffredin iawn i'r gwaith deilio yn ystod i'r bwysig yn ei manfaenol yn ymgyrch i'r cyffredin iawn i'r cyffredin iawn. Rwy'n rhaid i'r rhagleniadau i'r rhagleniadau o'r dwylo cyffredin iawn. First occurred in the London advertising world between 1962 and 1964. Believe it or not in early 1962 most advertising executives still just came to work in pinstripes suits carrying f Ideally umbrellas that made them look remarkably like the stockbrokers have the same vintage and the clients liked it that way. By the end of 1964 such sartorial splendor would probably have lost them both their clients and their job. The world had changed and the advertising world had indeed changed with it. Similarly, when I first went to Hollywood in 1969, it was run by half a dozen men, all in their 70s and called Soul, who were married to each other's sisters, chewed large cigars and played poker together at the weekend. By 1972, just three years later, the easy riders had driven the last of the souls out of town, and Messas Corsesi, Coppola and Lucas ruled the roost. So both those early 60s ad or mad men and the movie mogul counterparts had in effect been caught asleep at the wheel. And I sincerely believe exactly the same is happening in this, our digital age, and to a far greater degree than most people, as I say, seem prepared to acknowledge. If we truly are prepared to take on the immense challenges of the mid 21st century, we significantly greater than the challenges of the early 21st century, then I believe we have no choice but to embrace the equally immense power of the most recent digital technologies, and to do so in a way that makes our present rate of progress look exactly what it is. That's a safe, putty inadequate. Let's face it. In many respects, life in Ireland, as in most other parts of the world, has been quite literally transformed in the past 20 years or so. Digital technology, mobile telephony, and the internet in particular, has fundamentally reshaped the way in which people of every age connect with, make sense of, and engage with society. And as this audience probably knows better than most, rightly or wrongly, people expect an entirely new form of relationship with the world around them, one that doesn't simply rely on accessing information, but on creating new knowledge, new products, and even on creating new resources. The pace, the scale, and the ramifications of this change have, I think, been quite remarkable. By way of illustration, let me offer a few statistics regarding consumer behaviour here in Ireland. Irish consumers spend approximately 3.7 billion shopping online in 2012. In fact, an estimated 5% of all Irish consumer spending is now online, to the extent that the average Irish adult now spends £116 a month online. Significantly, 70% of this spend, for over 2.5 billion euros, is effectively lost to the Irish economy. Unless we find a way of responding, that figure is only set to rise exponentially. One reason being that most Irish internet users, that's 81% of the adult population, use the web to find the best deals and to inform their purchasing decisions by searching among the best available choices. But these changes in consumer behaviour are not, at least as yet, being matched by changes in the way that many companies do business in this country. And that's worrying because this trend towards ever-increased online spending represents a very real challenge to Irish business. Statistics suggest that only 23% of our small companies are in any way engaged in e-commerce sales. This proportion is likely to be even less for those SMEs with less than 10 employees. Further research indicates that 23% of Irish businesses, at least of those surveyed, believe that they could achieve an additional 5% growth, that's over and above their current prospects, if they only had a well-founded online strategy and almost one in five of those businesses felt that they could in fact achieve as much as an extra 15% growth. The national digital strategy was set out to tackle online engagement by small businesses, by working with industry to drive awareness through what's being termed a trading online initiative. This has already been signalled as one of the disruptive reforms in the 2013 action plan for jobs. This initiative will pilot a trading online voucher scheme, specifically developed for small businesses and designed to encourage them to develop an active online trading presence. The scheme, if successful, will quickly be broadened out with the ultimate aim of having at least 2,000 businesses developing their own online trading capacity. The support of major players such as Google, PayPal, the banks, eBay, etc., along with the Irish Internet Association, and many if not most of the companies represented in this room, will be utterly critical if we'd have any chance of successfully delivering on this objective. Many of you already have a track record of successful engagement in this area, because we all know much, much more remains to be done. I'm looking forward and hoping to spend more time with more people discussing a variety of ways forward. Ireland has already become a hub for international ICT companies, both in software and content services. With our wealth of talent in this area, there is, of course, a real opportunity for serious digital entrepreneurship. New digital companies require new types of support. The young entrepreneurs who create and run them need flexible structures. They need networking capabilities, and very importantly, they need mentoring. It was a very, very good recent book by a man named Jim Clifton. Jim Clifton is the chairman of Gallup. He's done a book on the future world of jobs, and his conclusion at the end of this book, and this is the largest piece of research that Gallup have ever carried out. His conclusion is that all young people need mentoring, and that all of us, if we're serious, should have a mentee. We try to help through the early phase of their development. The Digital Hub Development Agency was established in 2003 with a view to providing a cluster environment in which new digital enterprises could develop and flourish. It's now the largest cluster of digital media companies in the country, and 90% of them are wholly indigenous. In 2011, the combined turnover of these companies was 34 million euros, delivering 25 million euros worth of exports. Had Ireland focused on this type of entrepreneurship two decades ago, we might now be in a position to generate the type of growth in jobs and revenue that we so desperately need. But this time, by, as it were, piggybacking the recent massive uptake in tablets and smartphones, and in markets that weren't even on the map in the early 1990s. By taking a look at the broadband speeds available in some of the more affluent areas of Asia, such as Singapore or South Korea, you begin to get a sense of the direction in which things are heading, and the nature of the opportunity is beginning to open up. These countries most certainly do. How about this, for example, of serious intent? About a dozen years ago, the South Korean government, including its educational system, became concerned that whilst its industrial base was growing well, the creativity element within which so much intellectual property and value-added resides was not developing at anything like the same rate. They decided to invest $1 billion over a number of years in developing and enhancing what was termed their creative capacity. The programme has been an unqualified success, to the point at which South Korea is now the powerhouse of the Asian entertainment products sector. Everything from music to movies to interactive games and television soap operas. And far from becoming complacent this year, their Ministry for Culture, Tourism and Sport has been given a budget of $3.5 billion of which $295 million is specifically earmarked for the promotion of what's called Hallyu, or the Korean Wave of Entertainment Products. Simply, it's promotion on the international stage. So far from becoming complacent about what they have achieved, they're using it as a platform for growth. As I see it, that's a very grown-up and serious competitor to even think about taking on. However, with so many international ICT companies based here and as a home for a relatively young, well-educated, naturally creative population, there's still an enormous opportunity to drive precisely the kind of digital entrepreneurship that we so desperately need if we are to compete. But obviously, serious challenges remain. For example, one in five Irish citizens have never, ever used the internet and there's any number of reasons that simply has to change. On-going research suggests that basic awareness and a lack of basic skills are the two key factors stopping citizens from going online. To be fully effective, the national digital strategy has to ensure that citizens develop that awareness and obtain those skills. Because awareness of the benefits of the internet, confidence and skills are without doubt the three ingredients that the government believes will drive digital engagement. In fact, the national digital strategy envisages a new benefit scheme being launched, one that will provide granted to community and voluntary organisations who can in turn provide local training in basic internet skills. And then of course there's the potential impact of digital technologies on education, a subject I've almost succeeded in boring myself with over the last 20 years. The EU has forecast that as we move closer to a fully digital economy, by 2015 only one job in 10 will not require a full complement of e-skills. One in 10 will not require a full complement of e-skills. The European Commission also estimates that there will be up to one million job vacancies in the ICT sector in Europe by 2015. To me these figures alone suggest the need to accelerate our ICT learning capacity and address the whole challenge of learning through the use of advanced technology. The government programme of rolling out high speed 100 meg broadband to all second level schools will provide the basic infrastructure tool with which schools can take advantage of ICT and the internet. 280 schools are so far being connected and a further 200 schools are in the process of being connected this year with the remainder being connected by the end of 2014. This is just part of the story. A great number of other new developments occurring all the time now in our school system. Just two examples. A new junior cert curriculum includes programmes to use technology in design and as a tool for collaboration and creativity. A new computing curriculum has been developed based on a digital media creation and a computational thinking module is also being piloted. Outside of schools, independent initiatives like Scratch and Coderdojo are growing both in popularity but my own son actually runs the Coderdojo workshop in Skibrin quite incredibly in the space of six months has gone from five young people attending every Wednesday night to 40. It's a small town, relatively small town like Skibrin and the other day I actually gave out the certificates in Clonwchillty, 70 young people between the ages of five and 15 came up and collected their certificates. This is maybe not quite a phenomenon but it's certainly a move in the right direction. In essence, the problems surrounding the adoption of advanced technologies as part and parcel of day-to-day teaching practice stem from two very different approaches to the technology itself. The first seems designed to support or reinforce existing or even outdated practices some of which are only changing frankly at a glacial pace. It's a little like putting that man with a red flag in front of each automobile and simply encouraging to jog a little faster. Mili digitising old practices is in effect simply seeking to get the same or similar results but a little faster which I think takes us to the real heart of the problem. If all you do with technology is use it to support existing methodologies and practice, then why and on what possible basis would you expect new or significantly better results? I've long been suggesting to just about anyone who'll listen that's what's required to drive educational improvement is a second far more radical approach. We need to consider what a major positive and creative disruption in learning and teaching might look like. That's to say, what advances could an entire digital pedagogy achieve as opposed to simply digitising and incrementally improving the existing curriculum? Now obviously much of what I'm proposing inevitably challenges what we teach as well as how it's taught and even in some cases why it's taught. We've discovered that learning's no longer something that needs to happen within particular hours in a particular place or even with a particular group of people. The immense power of the worldwide web means that a fantastic knowledge resource is always just a click away in schools, colleges, homes and increasingly on the move to the extent that anyone with an internet connection has the power to access this extraordinary treasure trove of knowledge within literary seconds any time and any place. These digital technologies have allowed us to store, share and search knowledge in ways that our predecessors could barely have dreamed of. I was brought up and I'm sure I'm not unusual in this in a home where my parents had invested in a 1937, they probably bought it in 1937 a set of every man's encyclopedias. When I taught my own levels the end of the 1950s these are the books I dipped into and it was fine, hardly anything had changed. I was not in any way disadvantaged by searching through a set of encyclopedias that were 20 years out of date. Today you'd worry if the knowledge base was five years out of date. That's the degree to which things are changing in every sense the world's digital library is always open. I heard Noam Chonski in London last week refer to today's digital library as the greatest assemblage of knowledge in human history. Although in some respects he remains something of a digital sceptic and in one sense he's right to remain a little sceptical in that the existence of this extraordinary cornyd copiar of knowledge only makes the need for teachers and curators of information in essence trusted learning guides more crucial than they've ever been. Young people in particular may be very smart about using the technology a good deal smarter than some of us I suspect. But in today's society access to communication is no longer confined as it was in the past to any one small elite. Today anyone can join a social network or set up a blog and potentially reach out to other interested souls no longer distance, no longer being an obstacle. What sharpens the case for Chonski's other downside because all too often on the net it feels as though the very is because all too often on the net it feels as though the very loudest voices succeed in drowning out the most reasonable most thoughtful the most moderate sometimes even to a point at which it makes you want to scream with frustration because today's cyber bullies have little to learn from the most rancorous and destructive fellow practitioners they have in the tabloid press. A digital society is or should be just that a society. A society in which we thoughtfully balance our rights with our responsibility to respect and most importantly to learn from others. Our need is to create learning environments in which informed responses to those immense challenges of the late 21st century are encouraged and nurtured. This would be a world in which prejudice and ignorance would hopefully become rather better understood for exactly what they are. Despite endless speeches about the degree to which our future global economy is dependent on the development of creativity and imagination can we honestly claim to be doing anything tangible to locate and release those talents? At very best I still have to say not enough. Tired as we are to our existing structures and presets I'm not sure we're even entirely sure how to go about releasing them. Students starting school this year will enter the world of work at some point between 2025 and 2030 and they'll retire around 2075 assuming they can possibly afford to. Now given that we can't with any degree of certainty predict what the world's going to look like in five to ten years from now we've certainly no idea what it's going to look like in 2075. So the very best we can do is prepare today's students for a world of increasing unpredictability equipping them with a necessary degree of cooperation, agility, compassion and intelligence to anticipate and deal with the many and mostly unknown challenges of the next half century. Which brings me if I may to one final reflection. A couple of years ago, shortly before his death I had the enormous privilege of awarding Dr Garrett Fitzgerald an honorary doctorate at the Open University's annual graduation ceremony on stage here at the Helix at DCU. You'll probably not be surprised to hear that Garrett Fitzgerald received what I can only describe as a sustained standing ovation. The lack of which I had never ever previously witnessed during my 15 years as a university chancellor. That same day in his column in the Irish Times he'd graphically written in what was one of his very last articles of the socially defective value system that had come very close to destroying the financial viability of our state. He concluded his article by asking whether the public anger of which there have been so many signs in recent months can be harnessed constructively to bring about a genuine ethical revolution in Irish society. Now he was a wise and honest man posing a question with which we are still all being forced to wrestle. As I see it the only possible answer to that challenge has of course to be a resounding and unequivocal yes. And I'm absolutely persuaded that digital technologies are the means that will help us to find the key to unlocking the future that Garrett Fitzgerald was holding out. It simply means frankly that people like we in this room today have to work that much harder to make it happen. Thank you very much for listening to me.