As delegates to the www2006 symposium prepare to meet in the capital, keynote speakers reveal why e-learning is vital to future prosperity.

THE school of tomorrow will not be at the end of your street. It will be everywhere, and getting there will only take a click of a mouse.

In this vision of the future, every school will have a web portal where the pupils, parents and teaching staff will have the opportunity to interact and share information.

In this virtual space, e-learning lessons will be beamed direct to anyone who wants to attend, while all the teaching materials required can be downloaded in a trice.

Video conferencing will facilitate group interaction while scholars from Tokyo to Tomintoul will log on to their personalized home pages to upload course work, view their marks or receive news about the wider school community.

This is not science fiction. It is a peek at the next 10 years. Internet technology is revolutionizing the way we learn, and Scotland is leading the charge.

Such is the backdrop for the www2006 international symposium, which runs from May 23 to May 26, at Edinburgh International Conference Centre. It will welcome 3000 business leaders, industrial technologists and academics to discuss the latest industry developments in what will be one of the key events that will shape the future of the world wide web.

This time they will hear a very different message from the one they heard when the symposium started 15 years ago. Then it was all about marketing and easy money. Today, it is about putting your money where your mouth is and delivering the services the market demands.

“In the 1980s the industry’s focus was on developing the technology and in the 1990s it was all about expanding as rapidly as possible on the back of one or two good ideas, but those days are gone and they’re not coming back,” says Ian Ritchie, one of the keynote speakers.

Ritchie is a bit of an internet guru, having founded Office Workstations Limited (Owl), the first and largest supplier of Hypertext authoring tools for personal computers. He will tell delegates that over the next 10 years the web’s biggest buzzwords will be interactivity and education.

Joining Ritchie on the podium will be Cisco’s Scottish operations director Gordon Thomson. Speaking with the zeal of the converted, he will outline the a global business opportunity, which he believes Scotland is poised to grab with both hands.

“Distance leaning and e-education has to be one of the expanding markets of the near future,” he says. “Scotland is already a world leader in this field, and I can honestly say that there is not a single country that can claim to be as prepared for this as we are, but there is still work to be done.”

“Successful online learning demands a focus on the learning rather than the online part of the equation, and it is the strategies that define teaching, rather than expensive technological systems, that are the key to success,” says Paul Leng, professor of e-learning at Liverpool University.

Scotland’s companies might be well-positioned to take advantage of the digital teaching boom, but it seems that our students are not.

It is recognized that the biggest challenge to comprehensively implementing e-learning at a domestic level is not technological but political; recognizing that putting in money would require the support of everyone from education ministers to teachers on the front line. He believes that these are battles which must be fought, however, and that failing to do so could prove dangerous in the long term.

“The political agenda is the biggest obstacle to seeing these ideas become a reality in our schools. They would require changes in everything from national policy to everyday teaching practices and there would naturally be some resistance to this,” he says. “e-learning is taking off, and companies, government officials and the public alike have to face up to this and consider what it means to them.

We need to start thinking about what technology can do for education and realize that in the near future, its place may not necessarily be locked up in a classroom.”