WHAT KIND OF EDUCATION AND TRAINING AND INTELLECTUAL ASSETS?

STACY J. SMITH

CIO, Intel Corporation

Since we talk about education and knowledge sharing I think what I am going to do actually avoid my power point presentation because I tend to believe that power point is one of those things that actually hinders the sharing of good information with apologies to my good friends at Microsoft and I also want to thank you for your vision of technology in future, you painted very bright future for our products. I am going to talk about macro environment in which our children are growing up and I am here today to speak to you as somebody, is a business leader but most importantly as a father and this is not something specific to Turkey, I would give the same messages in similar speeches in US, in China, in Malaysia because I think this is something that impacts us all. There is something that is very important that has changed over the last several years, the world has moved from a world where the standard of living is dictated by the amount of knowledge that is being produced by an economy as opposed to the raw materials that are being produced by economy. That is very fundamental shift in how standard of living is derived and it is pretty fundamental shift in terms of the underlined infrastructure that needs to be in place in an economy to be successful. In the olden days your infrastructure tended to be rail system or things like that, in the modern economy the infrastructure that is important is the infrastructure that enables knowledge workers to do their jobs, the sharing of information and it also dictates a different skill set of the people that are coming in and entering the work force. The other fundamental shift that’s really happened over the last 10 years or something that I think is unprecedented in our lifetime, which is the entry into the world economy of China and of India and Russia. If you just look across those three economies and you go back 10 years ago they really didn’t play on the world stage, today they very much do and between just those 3 countries we’ve had somewhere in the order of 3 billion people that have entered the world workforce. We had something in the order of 100 million plus engineers and mathematicians that have entered the world’s work force and that is really changed the whole macroeconomic environment, which we live. If you couple that with the Internet that connects everything together and which enables knowledge to happen anywhere and be transferred seamlessly into another place, the result of this is that competition for jobs, competition for wealth, competition for knowledge has increased as 100 x over where it was just a decade ago and this is the environment in which our children are growing up and in which our children have to compete.

Just couple of data points comparing China to the US. China is putting out two times of undergraduate from university then as the US, they are putting out 6 times number of engineers every year that are graduating from the US and these are the skills that really are relevant in the knowledge economy.

So if you then look at the implications of that on the education system, the implications are pretty significant, we have to change how education is happening and there is really two aspects to that. First of all we have to change how teachers are prepared to go into classroom. Teacher preparation is key, there’s been some studies in the US that number 1 predictor of student success in a recent study in US is the amount of training and preparation that the teacher had and whether or not the teacher was able to integrate technology into he classroom. It showed 40% difference when a student was in a classroom with a well-prepared teacher then when they weren’t. This was a much stronger correlation to anything else in the education system. It was a stronger correlation to the amount of dollars that the school was getting, it was a stronger correlation then the size of the classroom and student to teacher ratio, and it really all comes down to teacher preparation. One of the key things that I think has been lacking in the education systems is preparing teachers to integrate technology into the classrooms. One of the things that we see is that it is very often that 10 & 11 year old students in the classroom are much more comfortable with technology then the teachers because they’ve gown up in this digital world and they are comfortable with technology so that hinders the teacher’s willingness to start to integrate technology into their curriculum, to use technology as a learning tool.

If you then look at it from the standpoint of the students the key really is in enabling the students for 21^st century skills. First and foremost that’s enabling the students to be competent and proficient in math and science, it is enabling the students to learn in a project-based environment because that is really the workforce that they are going to enter. So if you take that and you start talking specifically about how you make the changes necessary to get the people prepared into the workforce of the 21^st century, it is really around how do you integrate in these new skills into the classroom. I talked about one of the keys here is enabling the teacher to be comfortable with technology. One of Intel’s significant efforts is around trying to turn that around. We’ve got a program called teach the future and we launched it here in Turkey little over a year ago, we’ve launched it in 30 countries around the world and what we do with that program is we actually train teachers how to integrate technology into the classroom. We have trained over 2 million teachers around the world. Between this and some of our other educational programs we’ve invested probably close to billion dollars in terms of trying to turn this paradigm around where the teachers are very comfortable to integrate technology because the key is letting the students at a very young age, integrate technology into the learning process, some of the new learning tools that you are talking about I think are critical and giving them the experience so that they can become comfortable with technology and they can develop the skills necessary to be competitive in today’s hyper competitive work force of the 21^st century.

My call to action here really is around the investments that we can collectively make and Intel is absolutely willing to help to lead the way here to try to get technology into the classroom and try to enable teachers so that this can be integrated into the curriculums. Thank you.

Serdar Kuzuloğlu: Sözü Sayın Paul Atkinson’a vermeden önce Sayın Smith’e bir soru sormak istiyorum. Bilgi teknolojilerinin eğitimde olduğu kadar diğer bütün alanlarda ama özellikle eğitimde ekmek su kadar önemli ve belirleyici olduğunun altını çiziyoruz. Peki siz ticari bir firma olarak bunun sosyal sorumluluk ve bir kar modeli ölçeğindeki terazinin dengesini nasıl buluyorsunuz? Bu konuda nelere dikkat ediyorsunuz?

I think a company has to be able to do both of those things. Our CEO Craig Barret who’s been to Turkey many times, he’ll be our Chairman of the Board as of next week when the shareholders meet, he’s really set the tone for Intel and for us to be successful company we also have to bear our own share trying to make the world better place and our personal focus on that is a company is in the area of education, this is a topic where Craig is absolutely passionate and that passion you can see all through Intel being involved in the educational system. Teach to the future is by far is largest program as I said we’ve trained over 2 million teachers around the world and I think we trained 25.000 teachers here in Turkey just in last 12 months but if you also look at it, we’re doing things in terms of programs at the university level, we’re creating laboratories for the university students to work, we are the sponsor of the Intel science fair which is the world’s largest science fair where we bring students from all over the world together once a year and allow them to have competition around their science projects, it is just incredible to see the kinds of science acumen that’s being done by some of these students and to put this into perspective back to theme of the competition that exist in the world, I was recently in China and I was told that the way this works in China, they pick the best of the students and then they’re sent to international fair, any student that is chosen as finalist in China is given a full scholarship to any university anywhere in the world that they want to go, which is just an incredible supporting students that are coming thru and doing science. Frankly I wish the US was being more aggressive in that way as well. In short your answer is I think companies have to bear their portion as responsibility and for Intel our focus is very much on education.

Question (Onur Metin): Avrupa öğrencileri forumu İzmir lokalinden sivil toplum kuruluşu. Bilgi toplumundan bahsettik. Eğitimden ve öğretimden bahsettik. Atlamış olabilirim ama girişimciliğe etkisinden çok fazla bahsedilmedi. Türkiye’de özellikle Sokrates, Leonardo gençlik altıncı çerçeve programı ve bunun gibi AB programları son zamanlarda uygulamaya geçirildi. Birçok proje var ama başvurular özellikle bazı projelere çok az. Üniversitelerle ilgili bir istatisitik var. Üniversite mezunlarıyla lise mezunlarına bakıldığı zaman, girişimci oranı lise mezunlarında iki kat daha fazla. Bu da şunu gösteriyor ki, üniversitelerde bir nevi girişimcilik desteklenmiyor, uygulamalar çok fazla yok. Siemens Business Services gibi gençlik organizasyonlarını ya da üniversitedeki kariyer günlerine çok fazla gelen şirket yok. Dolayısıyla, öğrenciler teorikte aldıkları bilgilerini uygulamaya geçiremiyorlar. Bu konu nasıl çözülebilir?

The question stimulates 2 lightly different sets of thoughts in my mind, one is the mind set that we are talking about here, there is some enthusiasm on having entrepreneurship courses in the formal education system, sometimes even going down fairly low in the system, I personally am bit of a skeptic that this is actually going to do much that this is something that you teach but this idea exist in number of countries, EU countries are thinking about this and work has been done in this area. The second your question inspires I think I touched in my talk but going just a bit more in depth information society, a lot of what it is about is diffusing knowledge taking formal knowledge, scientific advances and somehow adapting them so they are actually useful and can bring economic benefit to businesses, to people and diffuse throughout the economy so that you get benefit to people who don’t have anything to do with it perhaps just by falling prices where the innovation hit the market place and in facilitating that the international agenda in the science and innovation area, grouping the two together trying to get pure academic side of it together with the practical use, you have the use, you have the innovation, a practical idea comes and then diffusion and use, and the on the economic level it is particularly important that the economic framework conditions in the economy do indeed facilitate moving back and forth from this ivory tower world of scientists doing their own thing and the business community and there is a research done in France that like 1% of workforce that ever worked anywhere else in their lives, they talk to each other, that’s it and benefits of their advances get cloistered so what you need is back and forth between the two and in particular allow scientific advances, people who take the property rights from those advances move into the business sector, look for ways to commercialize them and this is led to a lot of emphasis on start-ups, spin-offs from universities and so on. It is quite a complicated area, there is interest what some people call public-private partnerships, which is very bureaucratic way of approaching things but the idea is you should get right people talking to each other, they know what is going on on the other side of the fence and the idea is that facilitates some entrepreneurial stuff. Very simple thing, don’t make it against the terms of employment for a researcher in university to do something entrepreneurial which I think exists in some countries.

Question: Eğitim ve bilişim alanında faaliyet gösteriyorum bir girişimci olarak. Sorum Mr. Smith’e. Çünkü ortağı olduğum firma Türkiye ile offshore bir iş yapıyor. Merkezi Silikon Vadisinde. Silikon Vadisi bilişim için her zaman inovativ, her zaman yaratıcı fikirlerin doğduğu bir kabe gibiydi. Ben çok kısa sormak istiyorum. Silikon Vadisinde neler oluyor? Acaba bu olan durgunluk bitmeyecek mi? Bu yeni ekonominin de yeni bir vesion’ımıdır?

I think there are really four things that the government can do that drive innovation. First and foremost is absolutely relevant to this panel which is investments in education, the things we have been talking about here around creating an educational system that is project base, that is knowledge based, that has information technology at its core in terms of how people seek information I think is relevant to this. The second thing that government can do is to create infrastructure and infrastructure will breed innovation. The third thing that the governments can do what a CEO would term as “do no harm” which I think is your point, governments have a way of screwing this up when they try to put so many rules in place and I think it is really good role for government to be pro investment but your logic says just stay out of the way so I think these are kind of 3 keys and you can argue which of those has gone wrong now in California and that can be another conversation.