WLS 2021

After Corona: Transforming Higher Education

A welcome to Donna Kidwell for the Oslo Roundtable

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Donna Kidwell, co-chair of the Future Learning Lab, is joining us for the Oslo Roundtable. Here is a brief cut from another blogpost presenting here: Donna Kidwell is President of Webstudent International, a software company located in Norway and the US. A key member of the Future Learning Lab team, Donna has visited our conferences in Norway and Europe, sharing our interest in North-South issues and through that building working relations with universities in the Global South.

Professor Kidwell received her doctorate at the Ecole de Management in Grenoble, France, and her Master’s in Science and Technology Commercialization at The University of Texas at Austin. She led the development of The Innovation Readiness Series™, an online course developed to help global innovators.

Her research interests include innovation and commercialization. She has worked globally to encourage economic development through science and innovations. She is the driver behind several successful MOOCs at UT, Austin.

Prior to her work with UT Austin, Donna was a software consultant, and developed custom database applications and eLearning environments for companies such as Exxon, Agilent, and Keller Williams Realty International.

Janet Walkow to the Oslo Roundtable

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We are fortunate to have Dr. Janet C. Walkow with us for the 2018 Oslo Roundtable. Janet has been with us before in Kristiansand but this time our context will be a bit different:  Janet is an accomplished executive with proven expertise and experience in both the scientific and business arenas. She has done extensive work in drug development combined with experience in business operations with an aim to improve the performance of teams, systems and organizations in both the R&D and work-life environments.

Janet received her Ph.D. from the University of Texas. She serves on the Board of Directors for the Health Promotion Council of Pennsylvania and the Harvard Kennedy School Women’s Leadership Board. In August 2008, Janet joined the Drug Dynamics Institute at The University of Texas. Leading this collaborative research center, she brought together scientists and investigators to work on novel solutions for disease and healthcare issues. The Institute partners with University, industry and community leaders to foster collaborations.

A leader in efforts to empower women – locally and around the world, Janet is a also a co-founder of the Leading Women Project, designed to help women of all ages and professions learn to lead – both themselves and others.  She works with a variety of organizations and continues to seek out opportunities to identify ways to provide goods and services that support and empower women around the world.  She combines her passion for women and high impact communications, creating Women in Science programs and serving as a coach and mentor helping women develop leadership skills. As a Same Sky Ambassador, Janet works to educate people about the efforts to empower African women through Same Sky’s work programs. She mentors women around the world for the Cherie Blair Foundation for Women and serves on the Vital Voices Artisan/Enterprise Advisory Committee.

Oslo Roundtable collaborating with Future Insights 2030

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On June 12th 2018, Future Learning Lab will be collaborating on stage with the Future Insights 20134 conference. This is a really big step for us, and we are happy that we could deliver the kind of workshop in January in Silicon Valley that convinced the organizers we are worth taking on board.

On stage will be Keith Devlin from Stanford University, Karl Mehta from EdCast and Oddgeir Tveiten, chair of the Future learning Lab.

A few pointers as to who Oddgeir Tveiten is:

As co-host to the Oslo Roundtable, Oddgeir Tveiten brings with him the backgrounds and experiences from annual conferences and workshops at the Future Learning Lab since 2010. Future Learning Lab is both a research center at the University of Agder and the international network behind the World Learning Summit – WLS. A conference drawing between 200-300 attendees annually, WLS has hosted speakers like Google´s chief scientist Peter Norvig, Sir John Daniel from The Commonwealth of Learning and Cathy Casserly – the former head of Creative Commons. Check out our website for the wide range of speakers to have been on our stages.

This year, WLS is split in two events, one being the main summit in Kristiansand September 19th. – 21st. and the other being the Oslo Roundtable. Both are creations of the Future Learning Lab, co-developed by a dedicated, international team over many years on professor Tveiten´s initiative.

Tveiten is a professor of media studies at the University of Agder and a professor of journalism studies at the NLA university college with head offices in Bergen. As co-chair and host of both WLS events, his engagement reflects a long-term interest in the ways and means by which media technologies transform societal processes, for instance learning. Having taught extensively in Norway, Uganda and Ethiopia over the last few years, his engagement also reflect a North-South development perspective and a critique of global media empires, including giant conglomerates like Apple, Amazon, Google and others who fundamentally impacts on learning and education.

Tveiten has hosted a number of workshops for nordic scholars and innovators in Silicon Valley, in part through the Future Learning Lab and in part on invitations form organizations like Open Innovation ab of Norway. Together with Cathy Casserly, he was also the main architect behind the 2015 Future Learning 2020 conference, at Stanford University, where about 35 high recognized education technology speakers were on stage during one full day. He has been visiting scholar at Stanford twice, the Future Learning Lab activities in many ways reflecting that engagement. He is currently starting up a project on uses of interactive video-making in higher education coursework’s on social science subjects.