Connecting the Dots: GLD Success Stories - Story 3:
Accelerating Powerful Educational Forces
With A Celebration As Big As the Oscars

by John Hibbs, Founder and Director, The Benjamin Franklin Institute of Global Education

(Extracted from Keynote Presentation at the WebCT Asia Pacific Conference Melbourne, Australia March 26, 2002)

We have all learned from Madison, Paine, Franklin, Jefferson and Locke that when one man is enslaved, all are not free.

We have also learned that those societies that dearly protect the rule of law and individual liberties are the same ones that enjoy abundant opportunities for wealth creation.

How does this connect with education? And what I came here to talk about?

I say the path to a better, safer, saner world runs through the classroom, not the battlefield. This is a path that now lies wide open because of marvelous new technologies from people like WebCt, applied in the classroom by people like you.

Figure 1: Child and Crab in Outdoor Classroom

Photo courtesy of NOAA - see Photo Credits

Universal Access to Affordable Education Worldwide

What you and I have in common is an end destination where there is universal access to affordable education, worldwide.

We cannot stand idle while scarce resources are spent on more cannons when they should be spent on more chalk.

Equally important, we must remain steadfast in the protections of basic human rights and due process even when that is the unpopular thing to do.

For all of these reasons I say that we in academia have a special responsibility - indeed a moral imperative - to ring the alarm about any government action threatening that which we hold so dear.

Figure 2: Access to Affordable Education by All

Photo courtesy of NOAA - see Photo Credits

And, finally I hope that because at one time I wore a United States, Army Green Beret, that that piece of ancient personal history will add some weight to my arguments that these dots are indeed well connected.

Now, with these concerns in mind, and in my fervent hope that someday we will put the military in the back of the bus, I would like to discuss my plan for making sure education rides way up in the front.

Five Premises

Here are the five premises on which that plan rests.

Those are the premises - now let me talk about each one individually.

The First Premise I admit is a hard one - The Importance of Branding and Merchandising and Promotions and Public Relations.

What's hard is that the culture of education is keenly resistant to stuff of this nature. Conventional wisdom has it that our job is to educate, not to advertise. That the lessons from the corporate world - firms like Rolex and Cartier, Nike and MacDonald's - have no application to us in our work.

Baloney.

The battle for students - the ugly word is customers - is just beginning. Institutions of learning that do not have merchandising skills are as handicapped as a golfer without a sand wedge. Staying on the leader board of education, and keeping the corporate snouts out of our tent, means learning to use some of their tools.

Also this ---

I find it a good reminder that in a globalized world things change very rapidly. A dozen years ago the Soviet Union was the biggest threat on the planet. Today's it's Osama bin Laden.

Just as nobody forecast the sudden demise of the Soviet Empire or the ghastly destruction of September 11, nobody should be very secure in the belief that education will be delivered by the same folks it has since Bologna - or Cairo.

The order of today's world is rapid change. Get used to it.

Also get used to the fact that if you are a provider of toothpaste or technology or Sociology 101, branding, merchandising, marketing and prompt innovation is crucial to good design strategy - and long-term survival.

Figure 3: Pillars of Change

Premise Two - Globally Recognized Prizes

This is an easy one. The plain fact is that it's inexcusable that we don't have a globally recognized prize with as much prestige as a Nobel and a stage for the winners as big as those built for the Oscars.

There are many, many reasons why we should have such a prize; but the most compelling of all is also most irrefutable -- money.

More money is spent in one single day on education than is spent on all the movies on earth in one entire year. In fact, more money is spent on education than on food or clothing or housing or transportation.

Yet somehow the bosses in our Towers believe the hard lessons of money and merchandising don't apply to us in our little sheltered world.

The fact is our world is neither sheltered nor little. The fact is merchandising and edutainment is as much a part of our landscape as the Opera House and Sydney Harbor.

Figure 4: Sydney Opera House on the Harbor

Like it or not, money talks and baloney walks.

We should not just be comfortable with those facts, we should embrace them; and vigorously promote them.

Believe me, ladies and gentlemen, if we don't beat our own drum, nobody else will. And if we don't beat it in a way that millions can hear the message, we will continue to ride in the back of the income bus.

Now,

About Prizes of Prestige and Big Audiences.

Is it possible to hold an award ceremony where millions will attend? And give out prizes with the stature of a Nobel?

Figure 5: Prizes of Prestige

My answer is yes, - absolutely.

The technical and distribution opportunities for large audience gathering are well known and not all that hard to implement.

There are 80,000 community radio stations and several thousand-niche television broadcasters that devote part of their programming to education. During Global Learn Day V, last year, we partnered with radio in Europe and television in India and proved that our audience could grow from several thousand to several million.

What is necessary - and possible - is to harness the collaborative power of the Net with the broadcast power of niche media. If we do that with skill and dedication and proper resource allocation it is within our reach to hold a celebration approaching a half billion people - a goal I think we can reach by the end of this decade.

The good news is the event models for guidance and inspiration are all around us ... Models like the World Cup, the Olympic Games, The Rose Parade - or my two favorites, the America's Cup and Little League Baseball.

Trust me on this - if you hold an event which lasts 24 hours, and if you involve outstanding people from all 24 time zones, and if you put some big name speakers under the lights, and if your audience is filled with highly motivated people on the way up, very big things, very good things - are likely to happen.

Figure 6: Global Learn Day Every Time Zone

The really good news is we already have such an event - it's called Global Learn Day and we've held five of them. On our stage we've had guys like Nelson Mandela and the real "father of the Internet," Vint Cerf. We've also had Cisco's CEO (chief executive officer) who is unalterably convinced the killer application of the Net is distance education. We've had Sir John Daniel who changed the landscape of higher education in the UK (United Kingdom).

We've also had half a dozen American senators, some high faluten ministers and some big city mayors. We had scientists from Antarctica and schoolteachers from Nepal and technologists from Andora and ecologists from Zambia.

We almost had John Glenn from outer space but NASA had the nerve to change the date of their launch, so that one didn't work out. We have guys like Perry Morrison in Western Australian whose work with Aboriginals would make you all proud. And Terry Redding whose theories about high self directed learning should become a global imperative.

We attracted an audience from 193 countries. Why do they come? Because they want to be on our 24 hour nonstop Voyage of Discovery side by side with map makers charting the richest territory in the history of mankind, a territory called cyberspace.

For all of these reasons, please mark your calendars - Global Learn Day VI is October 13, 2002.

Enough about audiences and events - you can come to our panel tomorrow morning to hear about how we do all this on what most corporate bosses would call chump change.

How About Nominations and Winner Selection?

Recently, we set up the Socrates Academy where 21 Deans do the governing - and no, I'm not one of them. Yes, there's a whole lot of hand wringing about how it will function - what else can you expect from 21 intellectuals from The Academy? - Soon enough they will decide the format for the nominations --- but in my opinion what we don't need is another prize for the best teacher of this or the best teacher of that.

What I say we do need is a prize for heroes like John Dada who built a telecenter in outback Nigeria powered by the sun. That, all by itself, is pretty neat.

Figure 7: African Village and Atmospheric Station

Photo courtesy of NOAA - see Photo Credits

What I think is far more important is that John imports into his African schoolhouse e-education and e-training and exports from it Nigerian brain power.

What John Dada understands best are the linkages between electronic marketing, telecommuting and bigger paychecks for those who come into his sun-powered, brain powered, muli-purpose work center.

So$$$ what's our biggest problem -- besides money?

The Biggest Problem Is We Live in a Nano Second World Where All Things Are Supposed to Be Done in an Instant.

That kind of attitude is deadly for projects like this.

What we need are people who think in terms of decades, not years. People who would treasure Stewart Brand's "The Clock of The Long Now" - ones who would agree this project is "generationaly worthy" - something my grandson Michael Ross will want to pass on to his grandson. It's for sponsors who know that if we can grow awareness in the miracles of distance education we can grow the size of the pie - so vendors like WebCt can get more of their share.

Is such awareness about distance education needed? You bet.

How many know there are over 1.2 million courses available from hundreds of fine universities worldwide?

How many know that education online is better than education face-to-face?

How many employers know that workers trained by distance means are more likely to become all stars than those trained conventionally?

Here's our deal with the corporate world.

We bring them knowledge customers and knowledge workers. They bring us the resources to build our stage, promote the event and fund the prizes.

Now, to My Last Premise and Some Conclusions.

I say, again, the surest path to a better, safer, saner world is by universal access to affordable education. It's a drum we should beat every day because it's a message worth repeating every day.

I want it to be a message that attracts people like you.

So, folks, that's my pitch... Please join our Socrates Academy and be part of Global Learn Day Number VI, ...

By sheer luck [I] wound up in Berlin in June 1963 and watched as John Kennedy gave his very famous Ich bin ein Berliner speech. As was his custom, with brilliant eloquence and grace and Kennedy charm, the President repeated a five-word answer to a question he posed to himself.

The question was:

----- Which is the better system - communism or democracy?

Memorialized for all time, Jack Kennedy's five-word answer was:

"Let them come to Berlin"

On one side of that Wall was prosperity and freedom. On the other was misery and incarceration.

On that sunny June afternoon, Kennedy's firmest promise was that when the Wall came down - as he swore it would - the entire world would salute West Berliners for being on the front lines of a battle he knew we had to win.

I say we in the world of education are on the front lines of a battle we too must win. I say that our arsenal must include spotlighting the value of our work and the benefits of our classrooms. That radio and television is part of our ground force. And glitz is part of our firepower.

With all that in mind, I would like to believe that when educators in the future are asked:-

"Who are the bravest fighters in the world of education and where can they be found?

Figure 8: Finding the Bravest Fighters in Education

Photo courtesy of NOAA - see Photo Credits

That our answer to this question will be

Let them come to the Academy Awards of Education. It's a celebration we hold every October on a Voyage of Discovery - with stops in all 24 time zones.

Also known as Global Learn Day.

(The message here is an abridged version - for the full-text original see www.bfranklin.edu/melbourne/present.html)

Photo credits

The photographs credited to NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) are from collections available for public use. The use here does not imply direct permission nor constitute endorsement of the contents of this page by NOAA.

Figure 1: Young naturalist inspecting a horseshoe crab shell. Image ID: line0682 America's Coastlines Collection; Lower Patuxent River, MD. Credit: Mary Hollinger, NODC biologist, NOAA, taken summer 1985.

Figure 2: Children riding water buffalo in the Philippines. Image ID: theb3372, Historic C&GS Collection. Credit: Captain Hubert A. Paton, C&GS, taken 1925.

Figure 7: NOAA Atmospheric Station Number 064 in Ft. Lamy, Chad. Image ID: geod0807, Geodesy Collection

Figure 8: Marion Aslakson with Moro children in Zamboanga, Phlippines. Image ID: theb3252, Historic C&GS Collection. Credit: Family of Captain Carl I. Aslakson, C&GS, taken 1929.

Read more about John Hibbs.