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EG7Once again this year, Cisco is a proud to sponsor the EG 7 Conference in Monterey, California, April 18-20, 2013. The theme this year is Everything is Learning — and Learning is Everything,  and many of the world’s leading inventors, explorers, educators, entertainers, artists and entrepreneurs are coming together to probe these frontiers.  The content is truly inspirational.

Everything is learning… and in higher education, the sea change has become a tsunami: Stanford-born Udacity and Coursera are racing with edX from Harvard and MIT to flood university curricula online.  Will this be the most significant transformation of universities to date?  After all, these thrusts aspire to reach billions of learners — anywhere, anytime.

At EG this year, the founding CEO’s of all these movements are speaking: Sebastian Thrun, Daphne Koller, and Anant Agarwal.  This is a revolution in the way higher education is purveyed.  How it affects learners around the world — the billions who may someday benefit — remains to be seen.

And learning is everything… but as Oscar Wilde once said, nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.  And revolutions do bring you back to where you started — hopefully wiser, having learned a few crucial things before the next revolution.

For most of us, the most meaningful qualities of learning are as different from online “courseware” as digesting a great meal is from the supermarket. Pioneers like Nolan Bushnell and Nicholas Negroponte have always taken a different tack, as do renowned scientists like physicist Brian Greene and cognitive psychologist Alison Gopnik — all of them will be at EG this year.

You can learn more about the EG Conference at www.the-eg.com, but we’re also excited to share some of the highlights of last year’s conference with you, starting with a unique insight into the story behind The Invention of Hugo Cabret and the Hollywood film Hugo,  as told by the author and illustrator Brian Selznick.  Brian shows us the importance of printed media, and in the process, gives unique insight into the meaning of Hugo’s story. 

I hope you enjoy watching it as much as I did!  Staytuned for exciting offers for students and educators to attend online.