Oddgeir Tveiten
Professor, University of Agder, South Norway

You’ve often heard it said that “talent is distributed whereas opportunity is not.” it is in a way a cliché, but contemporary global access to education is a case in point. teaching several times a year in Eastern Africa and sending the rest of my teaching time at home, I have come to learn how great a divide it is.

And yet, we live in a time of global change. Accelerating information flows and increased mobility are change factors also in education and learning. In short, we travel more and use more media.

This is the background for choosing this year’s theme for the World Learning Sumit 2020: Education and Learning in an Age of Mobility.

Some WLS background

Equaling access to learning and education is a key agenda at the Future Learning Lab. Each year we stage an international conference to address these issues. Follow this link: www.worldlearningsummit.com

World Learning Summit is an international conference, begun in a small fashion in 2010, at the University of Agder in South Norway. Over the years we have had attendees from 30-35 countries, joining to develop a community of returning visitors who share in networking and making use of the network for project development.

Our summits in 2015 at Stanford University and in 2016 at the University of Agder, established the initiative as a global network. The Nordic aspect has been a focus on the development of Nordic Ed Tech. The global aspect has been a concern with the globalization of education in diversifying networks of mobility and interaction. What we have tried to do is to merge a concern with entrepreneurship and innovation on the one hand, and critical research on “future learning” on the other.

Typically, WLS offers world class keynotes of the very highest order with small-scale community building, setting us apart from conferences like EDEN, Online Educa, BETT, and others.

We value the community building aspect on a small scale and will continue to do so. A key component is what happens between the summits. Keynote speakers return as attendees, and project networks develop through the ongoing talks.