BILL GATES’ KEYNOTE ADDRESS TO THE GOVERNMENT LEADERS FORUM EUROPE 2007
eGov monitor, UK
Feb 5 2007
In his keynote address to GLF Europe 2007, Bill Gates talks about
how technology is revolutionising the way children are being taught
in schools, from new forms of interactivity to software that can
empower people.
Well, good morning. It’s very fitting that we’re here in Scotland,
and we’re certainly appreciative of the incredible hospitality that
we’ve had here. But I think it’s appropriate in many different ways.
Of course, we have the example of Carnegie, who was not just a great
philanthropist, but also believed in education and empowerment. His
example of funding libraries has been a great example for Microsoft
and my foundation as we’ve gone out to libraries around the world
and gone from just having books to now having PCs that connect up to
the Internet.
Carnegie was also incredible in terms of reforming education, both
graduate education and undergraduate education, and realizing that
it wasn’t just quantity, it was also quality.
Perhaps Carnegie is most famous for a rule of challenge for me,
which is that he who dies rich dies disgraced. And so I’m working on
avoiding that. (Laughter.) But it’s a high responsibility.
Also from Scotland, of course, we have Adam Smith, and even though
he’s best known for his pronouncements about the benefits of trade and
capitalism, he was also a great philosopher talking about philanthropy
and caring for your fellow man.
In fact, just last year in June, when my good friend Warren Buffett
made a commitment of most of his fortune to the foundation that my
wife and I run, a rather unbelievable gift, actually the biggest ever
in the world, I gave him a first edition of Adam Smith’s book that
talked about our responsibility for caring for your fellow man. So
he was a great thinker thinking ahead in many, many different ways.
Certainly the things going on here in Scotland today really fit the
themes of our conference. I had a chance yesterday afternoon to go
and tour the University of Edinburgh, and see some of the things
they’re doing in what they call regenerative medicine. That’s taking
stem cell technology and using it in new ways to cure some of the
toughest diseases. And the way they’re going about it, the level of
investment, using the new tools, also working in close cooperation
with small startup businesses or existing businesses to draw their
skills in, I think it’s a great paradigm for how advances really will
take place. And so there’s a lot of great reasons that we’re here.
I’m also very honored to share the podium with Chancellor Brown. He
and I have had a chance to partner and work on a lot or things,
because we have a lot of beliefs in common. In fact, everything the
Chancellor said about education really I want to second that. It is
the key investment that governments make, it is the key thing that
determines the future, and there’s a lot of reasons we ought to be
optimistic about that.
Gordon and I were recently down at the World Economic Forum
working on issues of government involvement in these global health
activities. And certainly the last several years have been fantastic
because of partnerships like the ones that we’ve had together, people
like Bono coming in. We’ve managed to really not just tell the sad
story of what’s not being done but also to get more resources and to
start to really make a difference. And that’s why the story of the
vaccine fund GAVI is a great one because governments have stepped up,
and it’s provable that that’s making a difference.
So, having people understand that aid done well can really work is
critical, because we want broad support for these things, and in many
countries that’s missing because of the cynicism about the image that
people have had of aid in the past.
And so there’s some exciting things that we are working on together,
and we both bring a huge level of optimism to what can be achieved.
Of course, this week is a big week for Microsoft. We’ve been working
many years on some new products that just got launched officially
yesterday, worldwide availability in 39,000 outlets and online of
what we call Windows Vista and Office 2007.
And I don’t want to focus on those, but they’re a great example of
the pace of innovation that creates new opportunities. Windows Vista
has a particular focus on things like safety so that parents can have
their kids go out on the Internet and they can feel comfortable about
that. The reason why is that you can determine what type of software
your kid runs, you can determine when they use the machine, you can
also go back and look at their activity log. Now, you have to decide
up to what age that’s appropriate for your kids, and every family
may have different policies, but I love the idea of being able to
see where my daughter has been going and have a chance to discuss
with her what sort of things she’s seen on the Internet, and make
sure that I’m always aware of those activities.
An advance in the operating system also lets us do revolutionary things
in terms of communications. And the impact of these communication
advances are quite fundamental. I mean, after all, the traditional
newspaper readership in rich countries is dropping quite rapidly, and
in some ways we could see that as a scary thing, because after all,
why are people informed voters, why do they understand the issues,
participate in the debates in an intelligent way? Well, historically
that’s the print media or media delivered on paper has been a key
part of that. Now, more and more that same media, and new media that
has emerged delivered in digital form is a key element.
And so the opportunity of people with a common interest to find each
other, the opportunity that even if you don’t own a printing press
that you can share your ideas, that is really changing the world.
And so every time the software moves forward, this idea of empowering
people to create new things is quite amazing.
And once upon a time, if you looked at a typeset document you could
say, oh, this must have come from a government or a big company.
Well, today, we don’t think that anymore, because anyone with a PC
can make a great looking document.
With Windows Vista now you have high-definition movie editing
capability, so your kids at night can make the same sort of special
effects and transitions that you would have thought that only a huge
Hollywood budget would allow to be possible in the past.
And so these kinds of releases move up that next level, and certainly
the young people are embracing these things in an incredible way.
Communications and collaboration is changing, and it’s changing for
the better. Distance matters a lot less than ever before. That’s a
statement that I’ve made in many speeches, but it was brought home
to me in a pretty strong way; I was meeting with the leadership from
Iceland yesterday, and we were talking about, well, distance used
to be a big problem, but now I actually play bridge with people from
Iceland as much as any country in the world, and I certainly couldn’t
have done that before.
Also I was meeting with leaders from Armenia, and we were talking about
their borders, and we were realizing that the Internet connection
is the thing that allows them to reach out and really not have
geographical issues or border issues be as limiting as they would
have been in the past.
Today, when we think of communication, we think of the phone, but the
phone is changing rapidly. It’s gone from being just a device of voice
communication to now one where you have information on the screen, you
can connect up to many people, and telephony is giving way to where on
the screen we can look at documents together, edit those together. Even
things like phone numbers will be laughable and obsolete the same way
that a record is today, because we won’t need to work in that fashion.
The PBX that you buy today to do voice communications will completely
go away as we use the Internet and the personal computer with the
magic of software to do that in a better way. When you go back to
your office, you’ll be able to look at your screen, see who called
while you were gone. Depending on who it is, you can give them the
right to look at your schedule and find a time when you will be there,
and connect up.
And so communication that’s been so difficult won’t be that way
at all. In fact, the promise that we can do meetings at a distance
and share documents and work with each other in a better way, that
videoconferencing dream has not been realized, but it will through
the hardware and software advances that are just rolling out now.
The Scottish Parliament here is a good example of using these modern
approaches. They take the debates, the committee meetings and they put
those up on the Web, so you can watch them as they’re taking place,
and go back and look at them later. As we apply advanced software
to be able to take the voice and automatically build a transcript,
you’ll be able to go and search those meetings and find exactly the
part you’re interested in. In fact, accountability for politicians
will be at a whole new level because you’ll be able to search and
look at everything they’ve said on a topic, and so the ability to
say one thing to one group and another thing to another group won’t
be quite as effective in the future, and perhaps that’s a good thing.
One of the breakthroughs that we’ve been investing in for a long,
long time is this speech capability, interacting with the computer
through speech. And where the quality of that keeps going up, there are
some groups and cases where it is starting to be used. For example,
if you’re in your car and you want to navigate through music or who
you want to talk to, or if you’re somebody who the keyboard doesn’t
work because you have Repetitive Stress Injury or something like that,
the software we’ve built in to Windows makes that very possible.
I do believe that as we improve the microphones and the software
quality, even for things like dictation, that will be very, very
important.
We also have a new level of collaboration where people with common
interests can go up and find each other and share information.
Gordon Brown talked about things like MySpace where that’s happening
at a consumer level. But it’s also happening at a business level.
Things like this Scottish Public Petitions Committee where people can
come in and say what their grievance is, and that finds its way to
the people who are interested, that’s using a digital community to
connect, to get feedback, to make things work in a better and more
efficient way.
I want to be clear that the hardware enablement that allows us
to move forward is moving at an incredible pace. It’s what we call
exponential improvement. You’ve often heard about that as Moore’s Law,
the doubling in transistors every couple of years. That’s happening
in communications speed, the speed of data we can move over an optic
fiber, the capacity of the disk. These things are not slowing down. And
when we couple it with these high resolution screens whose price is
coming down, and now the high-definition generation of TV, movies,
games, but also business insight, that screen technology makes a big
difference as well.
In the years ahead, what we call the tablet computer that you’ll able
to hold in your hands, that will be as thin and as light as a tablet,
although it’s not yet that good, it will be available, and it will be
available for hundreds of dollars. It will be able to record audio,
it will be able to let you take your notes on it, you can leave your
notes in handwriting or have them be recognized, and that will become
the common tool that people who go to meetings use, students when they
go to classes use, and, in fact, as we move the curriculum online,
they won’t need textbooks at all, they’ll make that transition.
We’re also building services up in the Internet, so that, for example,
if you used to have files on your PC, and you were worried about losing
them, we’ll automatically back them up on the Internet for a very,
very low cost. And if you connect up to another PC, you can access
that information. So, whether it’s photos or documents, they’ll be
available to you everywhere. In fact, even if you don’t have your PC
with you, if you pick one up in a waiting room or borrow someone’s,
as soon as you authenticate and say who you are, your information will
come down and be there. Even if you’re moving from your phone to your
PC, your data will be there with you, and we call this user-centric,
which is a very key advance to drive these things forward.
Now, TV itself is about to change. In many of the countries of Europe
these new high-speed networks are being built, and so instead of
TV being over the air, it comes over the Internet. Well, why is that
better? Well, it means that any information you want, whenever you want
it, is accessible. So, if there’s a topic you care about, the lecture
will show up in your TV guide because it knows your interests, or if
you have a kid who’s in some sport or an interest in that, that will
show up there as well. As you watch the news, any topic of interest,
you can ask for more information or skip over something about a sport
you’re not that interested in, and make good use of your time.
Interactivity is probably where this changes the most, where if
you’re learning a topic you can test your knowledge, you can get more
background information. And so interactive TV has long been discussed,
we’re finally building the infrastructure, the very high-speed Internet
that can carry these high-definition video signals that will make
that possible, and there will be a flowering of creativity around that.
For companies as we think about this, the way we reach out to consumers
and other businesses, the way we do training, the way we do meetings
at a distance, all of these things can be radically changed.
Let me now focus in on education, and some of the things that are
possible there. It’s important to be humble when we think about
technology and education, because there were many pronouncements made
when television came along that it would dramatically improve education
or when we had videotapes or when we had the first software applied
to education, computer-aided instruction, and it really didn’t make
a huge difference. But I would claim that we are now on the verge of
something where technology will make a difference.
You know, when you think about why does somebody go to a great
university, when I signed up to go to Harvard, what was it that was
attractive to me. Well, they had great lectures, incredible people,
Nobel Prize winners that a small group of us could go and listen to.
Well, that’s no longer going to be exclusive to students of the top
institutions. Those lectures, enough universities will put them out
on the Internet for free that you will be able to get that without
that exclusive tuition.
Then there’s the idea of accreditation that the university by giving
you a diploma, testing your knowledge, that that has a certain
reputation advantage. Well, there’s no reason now that that should
be coupled together with the place that you go and take the courses.
Accreditation can be done electronically online, and organizations
can have a reputation for doing that in a strong way.
We also have things like the discussion groups where you sit with
other students and talk, and that’s probably the most important part of
education. It’s motivational, it gets you over the parts that you’re
confused about. But even there, being able to connect up people at
a distance and have technology play a role is interesting in that.
Many of the community colleges in the United States have now said we’ll
just use those lectures that are online, and we’ll put our money and
energy into the interactive, smaller study groups, and so that we
can just be better at that, because that’s what we’re all about is
mapping this knowledge into skills that help people in jobs.
And so the very way that education thinks of its different elements,
technology allows for more specialization and improvement there.
We do think that a huge part of education, and many of you I have sat
and talked to about education have highlight this, that the role of
the teacher remains central and fundamental. And so how do we get them
excited about education, how do we get them to renew their skill set,
which after all when they went to college these tools weren’t there,
and they have to have a concern that if the students are more adept
at these tools than they are, that they won’t be able to maintain
control or the authority that they need to have. And so a lot has to
be invested in them and encouraging them to move forward on that.
Microsoft is very involved in education, things like our Partners in
Learning programs, our Innovative Teachers Forums. We have student
contests, like the Imagine Cup. An interesting focus we have now is
on working with governments around the world on the design of new
schools. This is not totally new to us. In Singapore we’ve had an
initiative there where they use tablets and do amazing things. Here in
the United Kingdom we’re partnered with a lot of these schools that are
under the program called Building Schools of the Future Initiative,
which we think is very exciting and four or five of those are really
pushing the limit and doing new things. In the United States we have
partnerships like the one in Philadelphia where actually a whole
new school was built around the ideas of if you take technology as
a given how can that work.
Well, what are some of the common elements of these things? Well,
empowering the student with a PC, a tablet type that will be very
inexpensive, training the teachers, changing the curriculum — that’s
a challenging one because you need to get to scale to do that really
well — and involving not just the students but also the parents
and the teachers by having Web sites so you can see your student’s
progress, their assignments, their schedule, and so the community
sees all these different things, and you can engage your child in a
discussion about what’s going on at school.
I’m very lucky that my daughter goes to a school that’s been using
laptop computers for over a decade now, and they’ve completely over
that time they’ve gotten better year by year, and the engagement in
learning is really quite phenomenal. The way math is done, the math
achievements have gone up very substantially, and not just for the
top 20 percent — this happens to be a girls’ only school — for the
entire class. The biggest change has actually been for that bottom
20 percent. So, there’s a lot that can be done there that makes a
very big difference.
One of the things that I think has been underestimated is actually
giving people tools to create curriculum. In the past we’ve thought of
that as a very monolithic process. You have companies that write these
textbooks, they go through an approval process, some things make it,
some things don’t. Well, here we can take all of the material on the
Internet, and use that as a starting point. We can take encyclopedias
like Wikipedia or Encarta as a starting point.
But we can also give teachers tools so they can take the information
and craft it, organize it so it fits for their school.
The Gates Foundation and some of the high school work we do in the
United States, and one of the things that’s been very successful is
having high schools that people can pick that have a theme, a theme
of science, a theme of construction, a theme of art, and all of the
topics are taken and motivated, you know, why should you learn math?
Well, at a construction school they use it to teach you how to keep
the building from falling down or how to not bid in a way that’s
going to put you out of business. And so you can take what students
have been unclear why should they learn these things, and bring them
into real life examples in a very strong way.
Well, how can you make that even better? Well, if the teacher can
take the material that’s out there, and add a little bit of their own
ideas, and then put that back into a community, a digital community
where it’s shared, we’re building on each other’s work. And so it’s
not just the way textbooks have done to date, it’s a much different
thing, and it involves pictures and animations and today’s news and
it can be put into a context.
And so for the first time teachers will be learning from each other.
In fact, we can actually take this idea of Webcasting and have the
classes where things are done well, and have people look at that,
comment on that, review it. And it takes the teacher’s job, which today
is a fairly isolated job, and lets everyone benefit from best ideas.
In fact, if we said today the best math teacher ever was somebody
150 years ago, we probably couldn’t prove that was wrong. And that
seems very strange with all these advances; how can we not have some
objective way of saying that, yes, we’ve made progress? And so now
we have the foundation that’s going to make that possible.
One of the things we want to do is scale up this idea of innovative
schools. And so actually we’ve got a new initiative that we’ve got 12
countries that are joining in on to actually do innovative schools
in each of those locations. And we’re not saying that these will be
identical. In fact, part of the goal here is to experiment and try
different things. After all, in the realm of government seeing what
other people are doing and benefiting from that is one of the ways
that improvements are made.
So, here we have many different countries — Germany, UK, France,
Finland, a number of others — all saying that they are willing to
put an investment in, and we’ve put our top technology people in,
who have been involved in these projects, and try and actually do
different and new things that build on these technological advances.
I do think it’s important to remember that the kids coming into
these schools, you know, when they go home at night they’re using
Xbox Live and talking to their friends, playing with their friends,
they’re editing high-definition movies. And so if all we do with them
is they come back into the classroom and there’s a chalkboard there,
that teacher has a hard time living up to the level of sort of drama
and richness that they’re getting in that digital world.
And yet the teacher is fundamental; I’m in no way downplaying the
importance of the role the teacher has. And so we have to back them
and get behind them, particularly the teachers who embrace the new
capabilities. The incentive systems to make that work will obviously
be different around the world, but it’s time to really start the
experimentation.
And so it’s exciting to be part of it. There are so many different
things that come under this e-government label, but the first and
foremost, as we heard from Gordon Brown, and certainly I want to
second that, are the things we can do to improve the education system.
Thank you.