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EFF7 – Education Fast Forward – Debate on Access and Quality

EFF_LogoThe next EFF debate will take place on the 17th June 2013 and will be available to view online.  Here is a description about the topic of the discussion:

Quality and access to education continue to top the list of education priorities in countries across the world. According to UNESCO in 2010 59 million primary school-age children were not enrolled in school and 31 million primary school-age children had dropped out of school. An additional 32 million repeated a grade. These figures are truly shocking but is access to education enough? Students today live in an entirely different world to 10, even 5 years ago. The digitally connected world is bringing down boundaries and making education more fluid. Pupils are increasingly demanding a more personalised working environment with instant access to data and collaborative team work as the norm.

EFF7 will look at key questions such as How can we balance the needs of access? and quality and how do we measure quality? Can we achieve both? What will be the drivers and who will champion the students? What are we doing to address the issue of an education system that is still failing many students, leaving them poorly prepared for work or enterprise?

The event and Webcast will start at 13.30 UK time click here to view the agenda etc.

You can join the debate viewing the webcast and also making comments via twitter as the event proceeds.  Use the hash tag #EFF7 to contribute on Twitter and also to following the twitter stream.  The Twitter feed is monitored in real time and you many find your tweet being quoted in the live event.

Click here for access to more information about the event

Education Fast Forward Debate – EFF6 – coming soon.

I felt privileged to listen to the last EFF debate which had as it principal participants a group of young people from around the world.  You can read more about that event here EFF Debate 5 and find a link to a the recording of the whole event.

EFF 6 is now being planned when the panel will be located at George Thomas Room, Central Hall Westminster during the Education World Forum.  Put this date and time into your diary,  11am (GMT) on the 28th January 2013.  As usual the event will be conducted using Cisco Telepresence and also the video will be live streamed to the internet.  It is planned to have some of the delegates from the Education World Forum conference present with the panel so there will be event more then the usual influential and respected voices involved.

A bit more information about EFF.

Edu­ca­tion Fast For­ward (EFF), an orga­ni­za­tion, spon­sored jointly by Promethean and Cisco, that brings together lead­ing global experts and change agents from the world of edu­ca­tion to dis­cuss ‘the top­ics that mat­ter most’, wants to begin to change that by bring­ing together some artic­u­late and intel­li­gent voices from the world’s youth to dis­cuss issues that are rel­e­vant to young peo­ple them­selves and to their edu­ca­tion.

In July 2012, in the most recent of the five debates orga­nized by EFF to date, a group of elo­quent and youth­ful voices debated the topic ‘From Learner Voice to Global Peace’. The young peo­ple were located all across the globe and came together pri­mar­ily through the won­der of Telep­res­ence (TP), a high-definition video con­fer­enc­ing tech­nol­ogy. The dis­cus­sion that day was not only intel­li­gent and thought­ful: it was truly inspir­ing for every­one involved.

The full debate can be watched and lis­tened to on Promethean Planet.
And now, in Jan­u­ary 2013, dur­ing the annual Edu­ca­tion World Forum, to be held in Lon­don, another group of excep­tional young peo­ple (includ­ing some of the voiced from EFF5) will come together through the magic of TP to talk about ‘From Learner Voice to Emerg­ing Lead­ers’. Those of us involved in EFF have some hopes and expec­ta­tions of what might come out of the event, but we are also highly aware that there must be a gen­uine space in amongst our pre­sump­tions for the hopes and expec­ta­tions of the young peo­ple them­selves to come to the fore dur­ing and beyond the dis­cus­sion.

The pri­mary aim is twofold:

  • bring the voice of youth to the policy-makers’ table, to let the young peo­ple hear some views on the big issues, and to let them debate them openly and fully
  • to bring the policy-makers to the learn­ers’ table so that they have to face up to the issues that are crit­i­cal to the learn­ers before they make their pol­icy decisions

Issues such as the struc­ture of the cur­ricu­lum, how edu­ca­tion is deliv­ered (includ­ing dif­fer­ences in this across the world), the rel­e­vance of edu­ca­tion to their lives, how we might encour­age real change in the rela­tion­ships between peo­ple in edu­ca­tion sys­tems, seek­ing to realise the extra­or­di­nary value that can be sought by tack­ling education’s chal­lenges with peo­ple rather than doing it to them. We need all pol­icy mak­ers to take on board the knowl­edge that they are mak­ing deci­sions now that will affect the gen­er­a­tion ahead, and per­haps more than one gen­er­a­tion ahead.

And all of this will be hap­pen­ing across a truly inter­na­tional matrix of con­nec­tions, cross­ing coun­tries, cul­tures, and com­mu­ni­ties. I will be blog­ging again in the New Year with details of the date and time, and with infor­ma­tion about the key speak­ers, young and not-so-young, who will be lead­ing the discussion.