The speaker is a Bruce Dixon, an Australian educator who serves as the director of ideaslab and is the founder of the Anytime Anywhere Learning Foundation. His pie-in-the-sky dream, which he's been working toward for 20 years, is to harness the power of technology to make learning more-or-less a 24/7 activity, offering access to informational tools to everyone in the world whenever they want them. It's a vision of education reform that goes beyond incrementalism. Instead it nearly reimagines the entire construct, creating what he calls "A School for Everyone."
You'll get more from the video than me summarizing it, but there was one section about the need for self-motivated learning that I found particularly interesting:
I think the thing that slipped under the guard of most of us, many of us, is the role of what we call self-directedness or autonomous learning. I heard a quote the other day … from a CEO in a large corporation in America, who said: "I can no longer afford to employ somebody who is self-regulated. I don't have the time if I have to manage them." And yet our young people are in little blocks and little time frames and little bells are ringing. Are we really preparing them for that environment? ... We want reflective learners. We want to know about these young people beyond a simple learning style. We want to discover their learning DNA.
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