Microsoft Malta attends two-day Education Leaders Forum in Poland

Fiorella Ellul Sullivan and Karl Davies Barret of Microsoft Malta have attended the Education Leaders Forum organised by Microsoft in Poland following this year’s Imagine Cup finals, which brought together over 500 of the most talented students globally.

The two-day forum was attended by around 140 policy makers from 43 countries. Microsoft Malta invited Mario Azzopardi, director of the Life Long Learning Programme within the Education Ministry, to represent Malta.

Themed ‘Engaging student creativity and innovation: A key to global success’, this year’s forum was held in collaboration with UNESCO and the European Schoolnet programme to instigate dialogue on holistic change with the goal of putting technology behind core innovation.

This was the fourth in a series of forums exploring the future of post-secondary education and the strategies for overcoming barriers to its implementation.

Anthony Salcito, vice-president of Microsoft Education, who hosted the forum said: “There are three keys we’ve been talking about to reach these goals: access, employability and innovation. Having the Education Leaders Forum at the same time as the worldwide finals for the Imagine Cup is not a coincidence. We link these two events because both focus on the importance of technology as key to global success – whether it is obtaining your first PC or access to cloud technologies – which leads to employability, economic stability and national competitiveness. “

“In today’s information age, there is little question that information communication technology (ICT) can help drive opportunity and provide a competitive edge in the world economy. World Bank data shows that worldwide, companies that use ICT have over five per cent higher profitability than enterprises that do not use ICT. For every 10-percentage-point increase in the penetration of broadband services, there is an increase in economic growth of 1.3 percentage points. But this very data that can give hope also creates the digital divide. The bridge across that divide is access.”

Hal Plotkin, a senior policy advisor at the office of the Under Secretary of Education in the United States Education Department was a keynote speaker who focused on the development of vocational learning.

“Our challenge is to figure out how to transfer higher education from a system that pushes people out to one that attracts people,” he said. “People need to be given an opportunity to contribute to the country’s economy because this benefits society at large. There is a lot of untapped human capital, a lot of individuals who have the capabilities to cure the scourge of cancer and find solutions on how to bridge cultural divides.”