Ben: The cloud's impact on education
1. Ben: The cloud's impact on education
My name is Ben, and I'm the senior vice president of Learning and Sustainability at Google. I'd always been interested in learning because for me, my mom, my mother was a school teacher, and I felt that learning is really what enables people to reach a different point than they otherwise would. I know it enabled me to go to a place I could not have dreamt of being, were it not for the education I got. And I think that's incredibly important for people to have access to that kind of opportunity. And growing up in India, I did have access to a good school. I did not come from wealthy family but I had access to a good school, and I saw the difference it made in my life. And I think today, with the help of technology, we can hopefully bring more of that opportunity to more people in the world. The cloud is really important because it's a trajectory of where computation is going. If you think about all of the major products that you use, almost all of them are now based in some online cloud data center, and they have access to all these amazing computing resources, and they enable these services to really provide amazing things for their users. So studying cloud technologies enables you to participate in that whole economy of jobs and of opportunities that consist of building these powerful facilities in the cloud that are being used by people around the world. One of the really interesting ways in which education is evolving is allowing people to build and learn individual skills through various skilling courses. Many aspects of education are not available to everybody everywhere, unfortunately. But it's possible to build the basic skills that one needs from an education more piecemeal today. And I think the approach of skilling can allow people to build up the pieces of the education that they really need in the way that they have access to, in the way that they have time for, in a way that they have the resources for. The initial parts of learning anything are learning the basics and the fundamentals, whether it is a sport or a physical skill like carpentry, whatever. The first steps are learning the basics. So persevere with it and it'll get really interesting. I've been working with computers for, what is it now? Over 30, 35 years, and it is still fascinating every day.2. Let's practice!
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