Bill Gates Quotes
Online education is pretty special for two reasons. One is that you can get the very best lecture in the world and wherever you are, whenever you want, you can connect to that lecture. The other is this interactivity, where if you know a topic, you can kind of skip over it. Or if you're confused about it, [the area] where you're confused can be analyzed by software.
Gates, Bill. Interview by Charlie Rose. Charlie Rose, PBS, 2012.
When Thomas Edison invented the motion picture projector, he thought that he had invented an educational machine for teaching and learning and that is how he described it in his patent. Entertainment eclipsed it and educators made only slight use of it. The executives of early radio thought that they had a solution for university and other education, but there was very little use of radio for formal education. With television, the early expectation was that it would be a technological educational breakthrough and the U. S. Office of Education in the 1960s actually paid to have an airplane flying around the Midwest broadcasting educational television to schools. Again the materials never got developed for classrooms, but Sesame Street – financed originally by the Carnegie Foundation and the Department of Education – was the first large scale educational use of modern technology. In 1962 IBM had utilized a commercial computer for teaching but the cost of computers was so high that the idea was not realistic. When the PC movement began the many applications that were possible for business and personal activity was so great that there was little formal educational activity using PCs. But by second decade of the 21st century there were many excellent educational materials accessible via PC and millions of students were studying on line. The online University of Phoenix which had not existed before became the largest university in the country, and many millions of students throughout the world were learning via technology. Goldsmith’s “University of the Air” had finally emerged as the “University of the Internet”.
William Henry Gates III is an American business magnate, software developer, investor, author, and philanthropist. He is a co-founder of Microsoft Corporation. During his career at Microsoft, Gates held the positions of chairman, chief executive officer (CEO), president and chief software architect, while also being the largest individual shareholder until May 2014. He is considered one of the best known entrepreneurs of the microcomputer revolution of the 1970s and 1980s. Gates is also co-founder and chairman of TerraPower that is developing next generation traveling-wave reactor nuclear power plants, in an effort to tackle climate change.
