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The part about what you call the rejects in the creative industries and the media and
technology industry programming is cool to day, ten years back programming. Programmers
were almost the rejects, polite word to put it. But you talk about the change part of
it, change is the only constant as something we know, how does that work if you think about
the way, you showed a very interesting correlation between music industry and the world you came
from, how does that correlate with the change that youíre having to go through not just
in Bali the school but in the education world and how do you think the education world is
dealing with change and where are they doing well and where, including Pearson, please
go ahead and tell us what you think weíre doing wrong.
I donít have enough information, I put some observations and simply Iíd say it looks
like youíre doing a whole bunch of stuff great but it also feels that maybe thereís
some things that youíre still maybe holding onto that maybe you need to let go too and
I think thatís a really, donít suffer the same issues that the music industry did, youíre
sitting in this room a market leader, multi billion dollar company that is right at the
beginning of what is going to be an absolutely explosive industry.
So now it is up to you in order to be making a decision about what you want to do and it
is painful. Iíll give you a great example this, when I first moved to England with Electronic
Arts, I was over there myself and the Managing Director of Europe we went back to go visit
the headquarters and we said, and we were a tiny little company at that time, and we
said you know we need a football game, if thereís anybody from North America soccer,
we need more PC games and we need things localised. And literally the management, the top management
in all the Electronic Arts are some of the smartest people I know they said footballís
too complicated a game, it will never sell on video games, PC games will never sell on
Europe and all Europeans speak English so you donít need to localise it, so what did
we do? We didnít listen to them and we went and
we localised FIFA our soccer, our football game on the PC into ten different languages
and it was the first half a million unit seller for Electronic Arts ever, FIFA went onto be
a billion dollar industry on an annual basis for Electronic Arts in world copiers and we
absolutely know now that you have to be localising content for the industry.
But we could have walked away from that and said you know youíre right. I can give you
example after example after example and you know within the education world part of my
move to Bali with my kids was to be in a model where at least we were talking about it. What
I love right now is whatís happening in the technology world; it is hammering at just
a furious rate whatís going on in the world. So you come from Viacom right, you come from
MTV and Comedy Central and now youíve come into this education world and I know you donít
have strong views or opinions on things and
what have you seen as youíve come from those industries coming into this world of education.
I mean Iím 11 months in so as far as Iím concerned I donít know how to spell education
but its fascinating on one hand and its scary on the other hand, the fascinating part being
exactly what youíve said its just like the scale of explosive growth that you can have
and the contribution you get back is just mind boggling you almost want to get up ion
the morning and say what do I not want to focus on because its almost like you can start
anything anywhere and you can just run. Whatís scary is the level or retrenchment
on holding onto views not necessarily within our company so much but within the wider eco
system and I guess you alluded to the point earlier about if you work in the gaming or
media industry you can pretty much go ahead and do what you want to do, the ability of
stakeholders to stop you or put barriers there is much more limited, much more peripheral
whereas here because its so personal its more like hell to get right and everybody has a
first point of view and the ministry decides what you do and licences and things like that
and that I think is the biggest bottle neck if you like so thatís why I also think that
if you can come with an online technology way which is exactly the point youíre saying
you can bypass the entire thing and the consumer is ready so its almost like, what was the
phrase, I canít remember who said it, its almost like the futureís already here its
not evenly distributed , thereís a very famous quote from somebody I canít remember who
and that is so true. The technology is here the consumer is ready
the pricing mechanisms are there or even the free options are there its just the bottleneck
of the institutions not being ready and sometimes you want to say why donít I just leapfrog
the institutions and go and the institutions will follow and Iím not sure we have a choice.
But look at all the companies who are making noise, Oudacity, PTP, Coresara, Con Academy,
look at these companies what theyíre doing how theyíre shifting this paradon that none
of them, most of them donít come from the world of education.
How did Apple take such a premier spot within the world of music do you think they were
sitting there ten years , well maybe Jobs was, he was quite a smart man, maybe he did
have a plan to be getting there but you canít be looking at your normal competitors and
looking at the world of education and I think you need to be looking at changing the model
of education, give people an alternative within the state systems across Europe or anywhere
in the world are going to say oh my god that is so much better than what weíre doing weíre
going to adopt it or at least it gives kids the opportunity to be doing something a little
bit differently . Its almost like you were quoting earlier about
the television industry and even the television industry, my struggle internally was always
to tell people not in the television business, weíre in the contemn business and even here
I kind of feel like weíre not in the education business weíre in the learning business,
the minute youíre in the learning business youíre in the education business, one youíre
not confined to a input versus output constraint, two the subject domain changes and three the
frame work of what youíre saying is a life long journey and not it's a means to an end
, Iíve got to get grades because I will do better you know its almost like I really wish
I was born thirty years later and went to your school and scored Ds and was fine , I
got beaten up and I was in trouble. And I do think that that, we are in a minority
today in terms of the people who think like that, minority being a lot of people here
think like that and theyíre the minority and we need to get to enough critical mass
who think like that and quickly I think thatís the big, you almost need like a scale velocity
and we donít have that yet I donít think I mean I hope we get it soon thatís really
my view on where we get to. I want to ask you one more question which
is really around the use of technology because I think one of the things the gaming industry
did it was technology used to understand the consumer behaviour and patterns and changes
were just phenomenal even I would think across the media industry theyíre the best of breed.
How do you think or where do you think we as education as an industry not Pearson not
the Green School are missing a trick. Well again thereís simple statistics on this
and I think in North America 54% of kids want more game, 50% of kids want more gamerfacation
in the class room, it's a fact so its not even a view theyíre saying bring it into
the class room that doesnít mean that youíre playing Angry Birds in the classroom although
the physics around Angry Birds are some of the most unbelievable that youíd ever imagine
in the world but most people will kind of go your taking the Bird and youíre knocking
down the Pigs but the physics to create it the mathematicians and the scientists they
made that darn thing. Why does gamerfacation work because it does
it for a few reasons, one its not telling the kid that youíre stupid, games are successful
because a child gets to one level and no ones saying at the end of it if it doesnít, OK
you only go a B in French or you got a C in Economics either you did it or you donít
do it and the game typically adapts to it and then they progress through it.
Qualify something here Iím not, I spent a long time in the gaming industry I know the
issues with gaming Iím not purporting that gaming is the solution to everything you know
and I think that you know I like my kids to have a variety of different things so I want
you to understand that Iím not here pushing games at all, at all but there are some things
in there that really do work and that connect with children. And if youíre able to bring
that into the classroom and children are able to adapt to that and learn through that and
really Viacom had a massive impact on that the MTV generation massive fire visuals, massive
information processing little bits, kids have grown up with a completely different world
than what was happening just before that and its just where it is and so why donít we
go and meet them where it's a good place to meet them instead of sitting up, lecturing
them in the front of the room or waving a little stick and pointing to the board or
having Mr. Smith tell you how good you are at Math, I just donít think it works.
Thereís a lot of examples of this and this isnít anything new, you can back over twenty
years and they did comparable tests between kids learning exactly the same curriculum,
it was done in the California school system, learning through video it wasnít even interactive
and learning through a classic system but this one theyíre able to watch the videos
and learn, exactly the same level of information, the kids that were watching the videos performed
better on test and it was very simple they just responded to it better so why do we fight
it? Go find the best gaming people in the industry,
go find them and figure out how their UI how their User Interface works and how theyíre
able to make that connection and how you make things simple and easy, the Con Academy doing
it, go back and look at where the Con Academy was and now look at where they are, look at
how its presented, look at how the information is presented, look at how people interact
with that.