 David, talking about higher education of today, you have a very important point stating that we are moving from a very formal, old-fashioned, traditional setting into another one, a social, a much more individual way of learning. Could you delve into that? Yeah, I think that people talk about the learning revolution which needs to take place. In a sense, I feel that it already has but it's not in the formal sphere. It's been the way in which that we share knowledge and learning socially and the technology has made it possible. What I think is always our natural desire. It's just that we've now opened it up beyond the classroom and so I think anyone who's engaged in formal education now has to recognise that this exists and therefore has a responsibility to say how can I harness the power of this for good and not see it as a threat. That's a good old story about teaching people on the basis of their future and not on the basis of our past. Exactly. What are we to do? It's a real challenge. For me, it's a little bit like the first time I was given a computer and I thought, what do I do with this thing? Moving beyond that, I remember the first time I bought anything on eBay and I thought, well, I'll never see that money again, it will just disappear. But I think the only thing that we can do is to recognise that it's there and we have to work with it. I think going forward now, educators who are not technology literate, that doesn't mean we've all got to be geeks and understand coding but we just have to feel comfortable with these tools because our students do. I really don't buy the Mark Prensky thing about digital natives and immigrants. I don't think it's an age thing. We're not exactly young but I think we've risen to that challenge and for me it's exciting to see the fact that now we have opportunities in professional learning for academics where your closest collaborator might be on the other side of the world. I go to conferences now and I meet people for the first time that I've been communicating with on Twitter and that's really exciting but we can't pretend it's not there to stay now. No, on the contrary. Of course you're right that all the young people today are computer literate but to which extent are they able to use their smartphones, their whatever in a learning context? Do they need help? Yeah, I think they don't need help with the actual tools for the technology. I think they still need help with the filter that needs to apply to this kind of stuff. I think they're getting better at it. I think we're all getting better at it. I remember when I used to work in a university we used to have these debates about whether you could trust Wikipedia but now it's a pretty much accepted authoritative source. So when I sometimes I hear educators say students will just the first thing they do is turn to Wikipedia. Well it's the first thing I do. It's a pretty reliable source. There are others of course and I think it's more than simply where we find that information. It's as much about how that can take us into fields that we perhaps didn't expect and that really comes through the learning designer, whoever that's going to be, whether that's a librarian, a lecturer, a teacher they need to understand that kind of ecology which is out there that no longer can they be the expert and there are lots of people out there who want to help. The question here is of course why do we have to realise that things change and why do we have to appreciate this change? There's two ways of looking at this. You could say it's an amazing opportunity which we'd be foolish to let slip but I think we also have to say that if we don't then our relevance starts to become questionable because when I went to school there were only two places. You could go to school or the library. They were the only two places you could really learn. Now you can go anywhere. And increasingly now when you have things like MIT putting all its courses online any lecturer has to say what is it that I can do that my students can't get elsewhere because that's how we stay relevant. Once you start to think about opening up learning then you think about the virtual world and the real world and you start to think okay we're looking much more at a kind of ecosystem so to use that analogy it's almost that the role of the educator now is looking after that ecosystem, is making sure that people are handling it responsibly that students know what they're doing, that they're doing things safely. It's much more nuanced role I think that educators will have in the future. The teacher today has to sort of go into such a social learning environment and be part of it in order for him to learn what to do. I think that's important because I wonder how many teachers are willing to take that step. Well it's true and I think there was a survey done recently that fewer than 5% of teachers actually use Twitter for example or social media. So I think in terms of our own professional learning we are failing ourselves if we don't take advantage of this. The setting of this social learning is often referred to as learning commons and I know that this is a concept that really is of importance for you. Yeah it is and the phrase itself has been used quite widely in North American universities to signify a library and I suppose in my mind it's something broader than that but it is to recognise that as in the commons movement in 17th century Britain where land was given to people and they had to share that use and they recognised that they had a responsibility to put in only what they were then going to take out. We have an opportunity now it seems to me to think about how we design learning, how we assess learning in a way which can open the participation to a much broader set of people but with that comes a responsibility for us. Not simply to say for example we've got business leaders in the community what can they do for us but to ask what can we do for them and if we do that then I think it goes beyond then the teacher or lecturer thinking that the learning has to revolve around them that it democratises that learning but it also enriches it too.