Those of you who’ve read my little bio at the bottom of this blog may have guessed that I have a life-long passion for helping kids learn and a strong belief that technology can be a great educational tool. Next month I will be moving to a new position at Microsoft that will allow me to indulge this passion full-time as Director of Education Solutions, helping Microsoft to innovate around technology, delivery models and partnerships to reach the majority of the world’s student population that don’t have access to technology and its benefits today.
Many families today take technology for granted. I know mine does. We all assume that a computer will always be on, connected to the Internet, available to help with studying, problem solving, productivity, and finding the answer to just about any question that we can think of, including how well Junior is doing in Spanish class :) While I appreciate what technology has done to enrich my children’s education, I am also aware that the majority of people in the world do not have access to a computer. My new job is, quite simply, to get to work on this problem and I can’t wait to get started.
After all the OSCONs, OSBCs and other interactions with the Open Source community, I’m quite sure that the list of things I’ve learned and people I have to thank for it is longer than your reading endurance. So I’ll just say that it’s been great, I will never forget the cooperative spirit in which many of you engaged with me as Microsoft made its first forays into the world of Open Source, and I’m sure that many of our paths will cross again as we endeavor to improve education in the developing world.