Pascal Smet

Mr. Pascal Smet studied law at the University of Antwerp. At the age of seventeen, he joined up with the Flemish Socialist Party. By the time he was about twenty, Pascal was actively involved in politics, becoming a municipal councillor in Beveren and a member of the Provincial Council of Eastern Flanders. He was also made President of the young socialists.

He worked at the Commissariat-General for Refugees and Stateless Persons. In 2000, he was made Commissioner-General. In September 2003, he was offered the position of Brussels State Secretary in charge of Mobility.

After the elections in June 2004, Pascal Smet became Minister for Mobility and Public Works of the Brussels Government. Currently he is the Flemish Minister responsible for Education, Youth, Equal Opportunities and Brussels.

Tony Mackay

Tony Mackay has a Bachelor of Economics and a Bachelor of Education from Monash University and a MA in the Economics of Education from the University of London. He is Executive Director of the Melbourne based Centre for Strategic Education, Australia, a Centre focused on leading educational thinking and practice at state, national and international levels.

Tony specialises in the areas of school and system leadership, improvement and innovation. His work at state, national and international levels focuses on strategic thinking and facilitation for Government bodies, education agencies, think tanks, school boards and leadership teams. It encompasses the areas of school and system leadership, improvement and innovation, teacher professionalism and curriculum and assessment policy and includes the design and implementation of Research and Development Programs and Leadership Development Programs.

Dirk Van Damme

Dirk Van Damme is currently Head of CERI (Centre for Education Research and Innovation) at OECD in Paris. He holds a PhD degree in educational sciences from Ghent University and is also a professor of educational sciences at the same university (since 1995). He was part-time professor of comparative education at the Free University of Brussels (1997-2000) and visiting professor of comparative education at Seton Hall University, NJ, USA (2001-2008).

He has been professionally involved in educational policy development as the deputy director of the cabinet of the Flemish Minister of education Luc Van den Bossche (1992-1998), as the general director of the Flemish rectors’ conference VLIR (2000-2003), as an expert for the implementation of the Bologna Declaration for Ms Marleen Vanderpoorten, Flemish Minister of education (2002-2003) and as the director of the cabinet of Mr Frank Vandenbroucke, Flemish minister of education (2004-2008). In 2004 he served as the executive director of RAGO, the organization of public schools in the Flemish Community of Belgium.

Besides that, he has served as an expert on issues related to international higher education policy, quality assurance and accreditation for several international organisations, as a board member of QANU, the quality assurance agency for the Dutch universities, as a member of the scientific board of AQA, the Austrian Quality Agency in higher education, and as a member of the Committee for the evaluation of the University of Luxembourg.

Serge Ravet

Serge Ravet is Chief Executive of EIfEL, a non-profit European professional association whose mission it is to advise and to be engaged in research on projects which use digital technologies supporting the learning and development of individuals, organisations and territories.

Serge particularly takes a very active part in issues such as the following: informal and organisational learning, recognition and accreditation of competencies and experience, authentic assessment, ePortfolio and personal learning environments, digital identity and interoperability.

Steen Larsen

Steen Lassen is senior adviser at the Danish Ministry of Education, Department of General Upper Secondary Education. Apart from being adviser to the Minister for Education concerning ICT in General Upper Secondary Education, he is also the head of educational research and innovation in General Upper Secondary Education, head of evaluation research concerning the implementation of educational reform in General Upper Secondary Education in 2005 and head of the Secretariat for the Ministers advisory committee for General Upper Secondary Education.

Among his tasks is the running of a pilot project with ICT-based exam assignments with access to the internet in six subjects.

Estela Souza

Estela Souza, Director of Lumiar Institute, is based in England. She graduated in Physics and Modern Languages, has taken a specialization course in Information and Culture and holds an MPhil in Business Administration in the area of Learning. Estela has devoted herself to actively investigating lifelong learning and competencies development.

In the past fifteen years, she has been studying this phenomenon in different contexts. She headed the project of one of the Lumiar pilot Schools in Brazil’s countryside. Estela is currently working on the establishment of an international partnership, Synapses, recently launched in London with the participation of Futurelab, Microsoft and Lumiar, having Ideaslab and OECD as invited members. This initiative aims to create a scalable and sustainable methodology and respective tools to make the innovative positive transformation in schools available.

Website: www.lumiar.org/eng

Robert B. Kozma

Dr Robert Kozma is an independent consultant and Emeritus Director and Principal Scientist at the Center for Technology in Learning at SRI International. For twenty years, he was a professor and research scientist at the University of Michigan. His expertise includes ICT policy that links education reform to economic and social development, the evaluation of technology-based education reform, and the use of technology to improve learning.

He has directed or co-directed over 25 projects and authored or co-authored more than 75 journal articles, chapters, and books. He consulted for Ministries of Education and government agencies in Singapore, Thailand, Chile, Norway, Egypt, and Jordan, as well as Intel Corporation, Cisco Corporation, OECD, the World Bank, UNESCO, and the Ford Foundation. Most recently, he consulted for Intel, Cisco, and Microsoft to design an international project on the assessment of 21st century skills.

Roland Schneider

Roland Schneider is senior policy advisor at the Trade Union Advisory Committee (TUAC) to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in Paris. TUAC is the interface for labor unions with the OECD. It is an international trade union organization with members in all OECD countries. TUAC has consultative status with the OECD and its various committees.

Following an apprenticeship as a toolmaker, Mr. Schneider completed studies in mechanical engineering and political science. From 1981 to December 1985, he conducted research projects at the Economic and Social Research Institute of the German federation of trade unions (DGB), located in Düsseldorf. In 1986 he joined the DGB as a full time official, concerned with issues related to the introduction of new technologies and the improvement of working conditions. At TUAC, which he joined in 1998, he works on employment, labor market, and social policy issues, as well as on education and training issues.

Geoffrey Taylor

Geoffrey Taylor studied at the Universities of Cape Town and Stellenbosch (South Africa) and Utrecht (The Netherlands). He worked as Health Advisor for the Cape Town City Health Department and was Guest Lecturer on Community Health at several Western Cape universities and colleges in South Africa.

In 1992 he was awarded the United Nations Human Rights Fellowship to Geneva and Strasbourg. Since 1995 he is the Academic Programme Manager at SAS Software Limited, UK. In that function he is responsible for joint curriculum development with universities and student programmes. As Chair of the SAS Global Academic Council, he is responsible for overall Academic Programme Strategy in 110 countries.

Charles Fadel

Charles Fadel is Global Lead, Education at Cisco Systems, and the Cisco board member at the Partnership for 21st Century Skills where he co-chairs its Standards, Assessments and Professional Development committee. He worked for a number of organizations such as OECD/BIAC, CoSN, SETDA, and others. Charles has world-wide responsibility with respect to the Education vertical (Schools, Higher Education, Lifelong Learning).

He cooperated closely, or via proxies, with education ministries/boards as diverse as those of Massachusetts, France, Chile, Brazil, Scotland, Tunisia, and the Dominican Republic, to name but a few. Charles has expertise in video technology, and has been awarded five patents. He holds both a BSEE and a MBA degree. He is self-taught as regards his expertise in cognitive sciences disciplines (neuroscience, evolutionary psychology, comparative linguistics).