 So, I'm here this morning with Tom Wambeka and he's going to be giving a keynote this afternoon on technology enhanced learning and how it's influencing our, how technology is really influencing the way that we teach and that we learn. I guess my first question is kind of a general question. How do you see technology enhanced learning impacting education in the broadest sense? Okay, well it's an interesting entry point because if you're at a conference here like Eden diving through all the different sessions, what I actually did in the last two days, extracting almost 120 different signals of the future and I mean the future of technology enhanced learning going from learning analytics to micro credentials towards all kinds of let's say futuristic terms of where actually education is driving us. What I think is more difficult for organization institutions, what do these future trends in educational technology mean for you as a professional, as a learning institute because as we are always aware we are changing a bit slower than let's say the fast technological innovation rhythm of the tools that we are currently exploring here and in my presentation I'm trying to give some foresight processes which are basically conversational tools on how you can together with your colleagues actually create a future for your own institution and that is happening through actually human conversation, not really through the technologies they facilitate, they accelerate but they're in function of the objectives that you want to achieve as a team. Okay, how do you see the role of teachers changing with technology enhanced learning? Do you see the role changing? Well, there will be a tool if you look at the big change in tools that in the last 20, 30 years moved from a kind of one to all broadcasting type of trend to many, too many interaction collaboration and communication and that all these tools actually are now nurtured towards how can we crowdsource collective intelligence in a very interactive way then my role is in parallel changing as the whole teaching paradigm, I'm not anymore the sage on the stage moving towards the guide on the side and trying to guide and facilitate my students in the proper effective and efficient use of these tools. So they become more enables facilitators, it's a parallel let's say relation on how we see now actually the profession of a teacher, the tools are actually following the same kind of direction, of course there's a gap between theory and practice, not everybody is a kind of digital native surfing on these tools facilitating these elements but you can see clearly a trend which is not new, I mean it's already in the last 20, 30 years it's only accentuated and emphasized more and more and also in this conference again. And the learner, where do you see the role of the learner? Is that also changing as a result? What I see there that the learner, I don't see less and less I see the learner as an individual kind of learner because I'm working in the international training center of the ILO, we're dealing with real life problems just to, if you look at, let's say the migration issue, if you look at climate change, these are profoundly complex problems, we call them, yeah there's a high degree of complexity, so if you want to address these kind of challenges, we also will need not only the one expert, we will need a whole multidisciplinary team of experts trying to grasp the complexity and as a learner, as an individual learner, I'm not there anymore to absorb anything from one specific subject matter domain but I will need the skills, the creativity, the communication, the collaboration to work with other like minded individuals to grasp let's say the issue that I want to learn about, so moving from individual learning towards more collaborative learning and there I see the role of students very much and hope that also translates into higher education and universities, they have also been slow in adapting these new trends but as I said innovation is a very slow innovator, sometimes for good reason but sometimes for reasons that they probably will have to run a bit faster in this quickly changing landscape. Okay, one of the things that we've often talked about at these conferences is the digital divide that often emerges with technology, do you see technology enhanced learning contributing to that divide, increasing exclusiveness or do you see it increasing inclusiveness? Yeah, it's a debate that you also can look at from different perspectives, you hear the classic discussion coming back between divides between digital migrants and digital natives, you hear coming back to the degree of digital literacy, you hear it coming to access to infrastructure, now you see some things democratizing, for example on the level of tools and infrastructure, thanks to the whole open source movement, thanks to the open educational resources, things became more accessible, does that mean that there's more, let's say, there's no divides, I don't think so, even some of the newest tools almost reproduce some of the inequalities that were there before, so that's why I say you can look it from two angles, I work a lot in the African continent where you would see this kind of traditional divides coming back the reproduction of the digital divide but on the interesting side sometimes these let's say groups or countries or institutions that you would say okay we're gonna reproduce the digital divide here, sometimes they're doing very quick loop holes and actually advanced in innovation much faster than others, the mobile penetration of devices and for example in Nairobi is really a good example out of that, again we have to look at it, it's all its complexity, there's plenty of opportunities which would reduce the digital divide and we need to look it also from a multi-dimensional point of view, not only in terms of digital literacy and digital infrastructure, digital new codes that are actually are generating, digital attitudes, so it's good that we can, I think these are debates that emerge and that will be redone almost on an annual base in these type of conferences and also there the complexity is rising, also it's not anymore there's no or there's yes digital divide, it depends also it's very contextual also. You've had an opportunity to attend a number of different sessions throughout the conference, correct? Yes. What role do you see technology having within the different presentations or how is it being presented, what are some of your impressions about how it's been positioned within the conference and the presentations? Yeah, what I like about the conference is that you know I'm jumping from innovation to innovation, I dived into the micro-credential sessions and explore all the potential and the possibilities there, I really enjoyed the blockchain session where we looked for new decentralized ways of actually building relationships, contracts, even assessment systems, now they inspire but there's still a gap between you know getting inspired by some of the new trends and really effectually also using them, so far I haven't heard anyone who actively used blockchain in an educational context, so that is also what I'm going to handle in my keynote, okay you get a good idea but how you really start, I think it's with one of the quotes if you want to do something, the best way to predict the future is to invent it, so basically start doing something on a small scale and then basically lessons learned from that and it's from many of let's say the new trends, I only named two but I can call also the learning analytics and that's from the kind of hyped buzzwords that you see in annual conferences, we also see very concrete projects, what is nice also that you see that some of the terms that were hyped ten years ago and I'm looking for example at the rise of MOOCs that basically they reached the kind of maturity that people are already talking about let's say big scale implementation, not everywhere again but that they're not projected as you know the newest innovation but that people now with a realistic perspective can say what is the added value of these kind of tools, the main lesson that's maybe also because of my educational background is that we're not talking about the tools to talk about the tools itself but what kind of pedagogical added value can they bring to the conversation and that's where it really becomes interested and then we're not talking anymore about pure technologies, then you see the different subject matter, expert backgrounds coming up whether it's from an educational, whether it's from a very specific subject matter, that's also the beauty of this conference that you talk with people coming from chemistry, physics, with educational specialist, with anyone else even people that you would not think that are active in the field of distance education, it's not just maybe that's a good thing in other conferences you would have a very specific profession with a very specific background while here in the field of distance education it's much more hybrid, it's much more complex so the diversity of backgrounds also contributes to the richness of the conversation I guess. You mentioned pedagogies, which pedagogies do you see having a stronger role within technology enhanced learning or within an environment that has more technology where technology takes a much stronger role? Yeah. Are there specific pedagogies? Yeah, what we need to get rid of is that we try to translate the pedagogy that we're used to from our traditional face-to-face learning and just apply it into the new let's say distance learning because then we're doing the old things in a kind of a new digital jacket and where we need to explore really the potential of new media and their new models of people, I mean experts are constructing the new models but it would be the same if I said I'm sitting here I was sitting yesterday in the aula there were about 400 people I was sitting at the last row I was saying this is distance education because there's almost 400 meters distance between me and the professor so that would be also a wrong way of using terminologies methods of one discipline and apply it in another discipline where we really start to think from the discipline itself come up with kind of new models where the added value not only of the pedagogy but also of the technology adds something for me it's really looking is there something we can do with the technology that we cannot do without which I would unable be to do in like in a physical classroom. What I liked also that some of the new trends for example on augmented and virtual reality we're not talking just for the immersive virtual experience but I've seen at least two or three key or keynotes or speakers talking about social augmented reality so also that we use these kind of new immersive experiences again in a collaborative communicative way and that's maybe also the beauty in one of the conversations as technology is advancing so much that we're almost unaware of the technology we're starting to completely view what is now the human side what is now the added value we as human beings can bring into this conversation and that is making it rich again not as again I said the technology itself. I have one last question and that is what did you enjoy the most about the conference or being in Ginoa? Actually I'll answer this with a very technical term it's called acceptance and acceptance basically means that you learn things again from a completely different discipline that you never have expected and you try to actually insert some of the lessons learned from that domain into your own domain and yesterday when we had this beautiful dinner at the aquarium out there where we were sitting next to the dolphins I had a discussion where there were 14 things you could learn from dolphins and it was one guy specialist in biology telling me all kinds of things that dolphins only use half of their brain while they basically sleep to be able to wake for predators so that means that they can run about 15 days without actually sleeping so looking at some completely different materials and trying to extract insights for the learning that we are doing is kind of inspiring and I think these moments of I mean it happened now in an informal talk at the aquarium but it also happened here at a coffee break with some people that I have the moments where you expected the least the kind of serendipity that's what I would nurture in conferences like even besides of course the interesting keynotes and the sessions that we have but we need more time where informal learning where unintentional learning could create it and of course Italy I live and work in Italy is a very enabling environment for that. Great well thank you for taking the time this morning to talk with me and to share some of your thoughts about technology enhanced learning and impressions about the conference and good luck with your your keynote this afternoon. Okay thank you. Thank you.