 Audrey Wattus, thank you for coming and joining us on Eden Channel today for the interview. You talked in your keynote about learning networks, not teaching machines. You're also mentioned as a rabble-roser, a serial dropout, a troublemaker. So let me just ask you the question. Do you think that education is broken beyond repair? I think that there are a lot of flaws in our current education system. I think that there are broader, more systemic issues across society itself. This isn't just a matter of having an institution that's no longer relevant economically or technologically or politically. I mean, I think that there are many aspects of our world that we are sort of in crisis. And I do think that education is in crisis. I'm not sure I would define that crisis the same way that politicians or certainly Silicon Valley investors would talk about the crisis in education. But yeah, I think that there are some things that are quite fundamentally broken about the education. Do you think it's fixable? I mean, I have to believe that there's hope, right? I mean, I think that Antonio Graham, she said that I am a pessimist. He said that he was a pessimist, but an optimist because of will. I mean, I have to believe that we can make things different. That's why I do what I do. That's why I write about and talk about and say the things and point out the problems that I see is I do think that there are things that we have to change. But I'm not sure that sort of tearing everything down and starting from scratch is necessarily the right answer either. You mentioned Antonio Gromsky. He was famous for his Hegemony theory. And I sense that coming across, you defining the net, the web, as being Hegemonic in its character. Could you elaborate on that? Well, I mean, I think that for many of us that the web is a model for a different way of thinking about knowledge, a different way of thinking about technology. I mean, I think that we're very fortunate that when Tim Berners-Lee sort of came up with the original sort of specification that he decided to make it open, that the technology would be open, that it would be ideally decentralized and distributed, that it would be something that ostensibly all of us could participate on, not just as consumers, but actually as creators and builders ourselves. But I think that over time, the web has, I mean, very quickly actually, but certainly over time, the web has become something else. It's certainly become commercialized. I heard someone say recently that Google helped build the largest surveillance network in the world with their advertising model is based on absolutely collecting, mining, analyzing our data. So it's no surprise that governments want to sort of piggyback on top of Google and build a surveillance network as well. So if it's free, you become the product essentially. This is what we're talking about. Right. I mean, and I think that this is, I mean, it's really challenging for education because on one hand, we don't want to be saddled with these, you know, with software and systems that have our huge, hugely expensive proprietary systems that have a lot of overhead. But on the other hand, the cost of free is high in other aspects. Tell us about hack education. So several years ago after I dropped out of my PhD, I was working as a technology journalist and I could tell that there was a renewed sense of interest among tech entrepreneurs in education. And so I kept saying to my editors, you should let me write about education technology. And they would say, nobody really is interested in education technology. So I said, well, to hell with it, I'm going to start my own website and I'll just write about it on hack education. So it's really in some ways my personal site to sort of think about, talk about, think through my ideas for what I see happening in education today that also sort of bringing in, I'm always interested in bringing in this historical angle as well. It's certainly a popular site, but there are also detractors. I've heard of horror stories of some of the flaming that's gone on and I suppose disagreements. How do you handle the haters? It's been very strange on one hand, I think, I mean, I'm writing about education technology. I mean, to me it doesn't, I mean, I think that the stakes are high, sure, because the future of teaching and learning is incredibly important, but I'm always, or I was initially quite surprised with the Venom that was sort of unleashed on me when I would critique quite popular technology, ed tech sites, Khan Academy, CodeCademy, for example. So the first thing I did was I took comments off my site, which is, it's sort of unfortunate when we think about being able to have a community, a blog is sort of a community-oriented place where we can exchange ideas that I just couldn't, I couldn't go through the process of sort of filtering through the nastiness. And some of the threats have escalated, some of them have been more than just sort of hateful comments, the threats have really escalated against me. It's just the price we pay in an open, the so-called open web, isn't it? And I think it's the price, I mean, I think it's certainly a price that women, women with a platform, women in technology who have a certain platform or have a certain amount of visibility seem to be quite, much more often the targets of these sorts of, this sort of thing. Yeah, there's a gender issue there. Audrey, thank you for taking the time to talk to us for the Eden channel, and best wishes with the rest of your endeavors. Thanks, thank you.