 Cristobal Cobo, welcome to Eden for the second time, because you actually spoke at the Oxford research workshop, didn't you? So rather than a keynote, I understand it's a conversation, so at the beginning I wasn't really convinced with the idea of bringing a bunch of ideas that could be relevant, much more open to conversations, but I guess if you push me and I have to summarise on it, I guess I would like to focus on some of the processes of transition that our education is facing, in terms of education, in terms of contents, in terms of technology, but I guess as an overall transition understanding, the changing understanding of what means to know. And knowledge, I suppose, is a rather contentious term, isn't it? What is it about knowledge that is so contentious? Why is it such a minefield of discussion and disagreement? Well, I guess because my impression is most of the focus on technology and education, the technology bit has been focused on stressing the transfer of information, but the knowledge is much more complex and it's much more difficult to manage and you might not be able to put that in an education platform. So my take on that is if we don't make a wiser use of the context, the content, particularly the knowledge, won't flourish. So I love technologies, I think they're really useful, but you cannot export context with technologies and context are really key in order to enable the development or the flourishing of knowledge. So I think it was Bill Gates that once said content is king, but I suppose what we're now saying is context is king, is it? Absolutely, yeah. In a way, and luckily because of the OER and all the open access initiatives, really high quality content is becoming a commodity. We have access to that. Even if you live in a poor country, you have limited access, but what really is something that is much more difficult to scale are those contexts in which you can connect with people that could be interesting to you and explore ideas and all these sort of things. And that bit sometimes is not always in the discussion of how to see the future of the universe. I mean, could the problem partly be because of the proliferation perhaps of user-generated content, which obviously is not peer-reviewed, is that part of the problem, do you think? Yeah, but even in the user-generated contents, when you have a look at the amount of people generating contents on Wikipedia or the amount of librarians working on it, it's a really small community. So the pyramid is really showing the kind of misbalances. And I tend to think that the people creating contents in a consistent way is a small community. Most of the rest is just generating discussions, retreating, re-exchanging, remixing it. So we have this misbalance between the opportunities, the possibilities, and the real production of content. I mean, I have these colleagues at the Oxford Internet Institute who always said we have more contents about the Antarctic pole than any country in Latin America or in Africa. And that doesn't mean that penguins are treating, of course, all the other content, but that really shows the misbalance of who is generating content for which purpose. I'd like to turn to your theory. Actually, you call it a meta-theory of invisible learning. Can you explain this to the audience? Sure. I guess we are in this process of transition and the idea that John Moravec and I kind of embraced when we were exploring this idea of the invisible learning is one based on Polanyi, for instance, on Onaka. Most of the knowledge that we have is tacit, it's not explicit. And again, linking with technology, it's much more easy to broadcast tacit knowledge than the tacit one, sorry, explicit than the tacit. But also, most of the ways and experiences when we apply knowledge, they take place out of the classroom, out of the university, out of the schools if you want to. And you are in exchange with other content, with other communities, with other environments. And it's interesting that most of those learning outcomes are usually not taken into account from formal education. So in a sense, invisible learning is saying, hey, guys, a lot of the interesting knowledge that is taking place today is being invisible from the formal education. And the other bit of that is suggesting that because of technologies have been in the landscape for a while, they are also becoming invisible. And I think it's a good idea to do not put a lot of discussions or focus on the technology, but much more in the negotiation of knowledge. How can we re-understand knowledge? I've heard it said that actually if we make technology mundane and just general run-of-the-mill experiences, then obviously we will then stop focusing on the technology and start focusing on learning. Is that something you would agree with? Absolutely. One of the things that I would suggest in the talk will be the question that I have is what part of learning is not blended? Because we learn in this continuous, messy way, where you combine the things that you read, the conversations you have, the information that you connect with your mobile, but also we learn in an individual, collective, formal, informal. All these things are completely mixed up. So even if you have a face-to-face class, you may end up reading all the things online. So this idea of blended learning I think is an obsolete concept because technology is part of the ecosystem. And of course it's not just the blending of the face-to-face versus distance, which we're very interested here at Eden about, but it's also I suppose the synchronous versus asynchronous and I suppose other aspects of learning which take place in other parts. When you say blended, what do you actually mean by that? I guess the boundaries between formal and informal education are way less evident. MOOCs is an illustration of that. What are MOOCs? Formal education, formal education. Even if you take the courses to provide some credits later on, you are learning things that are driven by the interests and not because of a curriculum. So this idea of learning has been on place for a century. But now, because of the technologies again, the boundaries and these distinctions that we used to have very clear on and off, formal, informal, individual, collective, now are completely messed up. So it's more like a continuum than a, it's a blend rather than either or because all of these things are possible with technology. Exactly, and that's why we call it a meta theory because that linked with other approaches which are absolutely irrelevant. Can you tell me what you think about the theory of connectivism? I really like it. It opens a lot of questions. I'm not entirely persuaded. Maybe George Simmons is going to kill me for what I'm going to say, but I'm not entirely sure that it's still a theory. It opens questions. It provides frameworks. It kind of changed some of the old paradigms. Not sure that they pretend to build a theory, but it's really useful to say we might learn and explore in a much more messy way that doesn't match with some of the learning design structures that we may have somewhere. But anyway, it's a really valid learning. I think one of the stumbling blocks for some people about this theory is that it claims that knowledge exists outside of the head as well as inside the head, doesn't it? It exists in the network. I mean, how would you explain that to a layperson? Well, George says this phrase that I really like. He said the network is the learning. And I think it's so powerful because when you think that the really possibilities of connecting with others, connecting with other contexts, connecting with other communities, and in this negotiation process is when you really learn, then you say, formal education is amazing. But if you don't find and build new bridges with other spaces and other opportunities of learning, you're really missing part of the point. Once again, Cristobal Cobo, thank you very much. My pleasure. Thank you for that.