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\h        Announcer: Please welcome Ace Glenn, vice president of business development for learn everywhere.

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\h        Ace Glenn: Hi, everybody. That's my name, and there's been a lot of really wonderful

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\h        talks here today about innovation, and most of them focusing on the different processes and formats,

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\h        different systems that you can use within your own business to innovate,

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\h        and I'm going to take a little bit of a different approach today and just going to tell you a story that's

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\h        really simple, do it really fast and tell you how we innovated within the education landscape.

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\h        We're an education technology     
    company, and my goal by the

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\h        end of this, I do have a mission being here today.

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\h        I want to you walk out of this room and have your perception of education radically

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\h        shifted in probably the opposite direction of where it is right now.

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\h        I believe that where we've come and the different ways that, different pieces of the puzzle that we've put

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\h        together about the learning process and how it actually happens sheds a lot of light on a lot of the

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\h        problems that we've had over the past three decades within the education landscape,

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\h        so my goal here today is to inspire a new sense of optimism, every time you think about learning and

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\h        education and hopefully the entire future of where we're heading.

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\h        I just want to get started here.

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\h        When you think about the history of education, and where we've come over the past couple of decades,

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\h        it's received more criticism and more reform, more standardization,

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\h        more time and money and energy than really anywhere else, and after a while you got to ask yourself, why?

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\h        How could we possibly spend this much time focusing on a single problem and have vague results,

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\h        incremental improvements, things that are hard to track and are pretty controversial,

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\h        and when you take a look at what we've snowballed into, you have school budgets that are suffering from

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\h        severe reductions, and school budgets are even tied to how well students do on standardized exams now.

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\h        It's no longer an incentive to perform well, it's a threat, almost an assault.

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\h        Teachers' salaries are impacted by student performance now, some of you may or may not know that.

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\h        If your class does poorly on these end of course exams, you don't get paid as much.

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\h        That's an assault. That's a threat. That is not an incentive.

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\h        That's where we've come and more importantly, now that school budgets and teachers salaries are tied to

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\h        performance, this past year's algebra end of course exam, 59% of students passed,

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\h        and we celebrated because the year before that, it was 46%.

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\h        That's a fail percentage, you know, in education, and we celebrated that.

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\h        I find that really odd, and so when you think about all of the problems that have persisted over such a long

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\h        period of time, they all boil back down to one main factor, and that's learning.

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\h        If it wasn't for the fact that students have a difficult time learning, none of these problems would exist,

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\h        if you're involved in education, some of these might look familiar but this is pretty much the past three

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\h        decades of reform that education has received, so how has this gone on for such a

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\h        long period of time and we've seen such little results?

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\h        There's only two possible explanations if you zoom out and go from a really high level.

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\h        Either we have a lack of ability, inherent like we can't process information any faster, or we missed

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\h        something, there's a piece of the puzzle that we have yet to discover about how the

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\h        learning experience happens, and so let's explore both sides of that.

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\h        Lack of ability. Plausible option. So let's think about where learning happens, it's in the brain.

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\h        Let's think about how powerful our brain is.

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\h        The human brain is made up of 100 billion neurons which forms over 125 trillion synapses.

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\h        Think about that for a second.There are more neural connections in the brain than there are

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\h        computer switches, connections, and internet routers on the entire earth, in one human brain.

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\h        So this is probably the most important part of all of this.

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\h        What that ends up as a result is that humans have an unlimited capacity to store information inside of our brains.

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\h        Did you know that? That's how powerful our neural processing is.

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\h        It's unbelievable, and we have an unlimited capacity to store information.

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\h        We were obviously built and designed as a human being to process information at an extraordinary rate,

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\h        yet learning is something we find incredibly difficult and in comparison of the rest of the things the brain

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\h        allows us to do it doesn't make any sense at all, doesn't add up so then it's on to the next option.

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\h        Maybe we missed something. Learning being difficult makes no sense. It makes no sense at all.

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\h        It's a simple task in comparison to everything else that we are able to do,

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\h        so maybe we missed a pieces of the puzzle here.

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\h        So in order to answer that, and find that piece of the puzzle, you have to dig deeper into the learning

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\h        process and really learning is just memory, it's just your entire knowledge base is comprised of individual

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\h        memories that you put together to form concepts, ideas and opinions.

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\h        And so one thing that most people don't know about memory and about the learning process is that it was

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\h        designed to do two functions, two different processes, it's not just learning.

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\h        Our brain was also designed to forget information on purpose.

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\h        The only time you've ever forgotten anything is because your brain intentionally got rid

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\h        Of that information, remember, we have unlimited capacity.

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\h        The brain only eliminates information it doesn't think are important and it has

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\h        a framework for how it evaluates that information.

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\h        So let's take a look at learning and how that happens.

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\h        Learning, we focus so much on a term called the learning process, right?

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\h        When you think about learning, and you actually analyze it for what it s it's not very much of a process at all.

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\h        It happens instantly. We absorb information even when we don't want to.

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\h        Have you ever been at a bar and didn't see the bull's game that night and you close your ears so you don't

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\h        hear the score because you can't help but listen to information and take it in immediately.

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\h        So for instance right now, if I were to tell everybody the magic number today is 56, and then I wait a few

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\h        seconds and I ask everybody what the magic number is, what are you going to tell me? 56, right?

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\h        It's really easy. The learning experience doesn't take very much time at all,

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\h        as long as there's not an issue with comprehension, as long as you understand what's in front of you,

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\h        we absorb information instantly.

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\h        It's almost to the point of being involuntary. I'll challenge you all to do this really fast.

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\h        I'll put a slide up here and I want to you look at the words but I don't want you to read it.

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\h        Just look at the words, don't read it. See if you can do it. You can't. We can't help it.

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\h        Our brain devours everything around us.

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\h        And so that brings us to the final piece here and what's less emphasized than anything in the learning environment?

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\h        That's forgetting, the process of forgetting.

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\h        That is where all the complication resides and it's hilarious to me because it's totally ironic but the key

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\h        to learning resides in the process of forgetting and I'll show you why. It's much more complex.

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\h        Now we're not talking about do you understand it, can you repeat and regurgitate information, with we're

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\h        talking how long is it going to take for you to forget that information?

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\h        How many days, how many months will you not be able to tell me the magic number today was 56?

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\h        That's going to happen eventually but that's a much less explored side of the learning process.

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\h        But it turns out that all of that happens according to a specific pattern, and we've known this by the way

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\h        since 1885, a guy named Ermine Hibingus made the learning curve and there's actually a specific time for

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\h        everything that you know that if you were to review it, the best time for you to do so is right when you're

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\h        on the verge of forgetting, think of it just like a muscle, when you go to the gym, you don't work your

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\h        biceps out seven days a week. You work them out, heal and work them out again.

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\h        The same with the brain. The most     
    important thing here is that the

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\h        most important time for you to review information,

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\h        the way that you can solidify that into your long-term memory and the most effective

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\h        way possible is right when you're on the verge of forgetting it.

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\h        It's essential. And this is above the time that we have today,

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\h        but this is a basic representation of how the forgetting process happens, so if you take a look at this red

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\h        line, could you see the y axis represents how strong a memory is and the x

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\h        axis represents how long that memory stays strong.

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\h        When you initially learn information, your brain gets rid of it rapidly, very, very fast,

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\h        within a matter of 24, 36 hours, two     
    days, it's because we devour so

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\h        much information the brain has to get rid of it.

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\h        Like you're going to go home and in the next two days you won't

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\h        remember what the color of the walls in this room were.

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\h        The reason is because it's meaningless and the brain has a specific way that it evaluates all this

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\h        information that we're absorbing right now, and it only keeps the things that it is told are important and

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\h        everything that we do right now, everything that we communicate to the brain inside of the learning brain

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\h        and education environment contradicts that completely, it's totally wrong and we built the education system

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\h        in a way that is opposed to how we're designed to absorb information.

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\h        And it's called the spacing effect, Google it, if you have your smartphones I won't get offended, type it

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\h        in, click on any of the first links on the front page.

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\h        This has been around for a very, very long time and you never hear about it from teachers, from anything

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\h        within education but this is the pathway to long-term memory, this is how long-term memory was discovered.

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\h        Our brain is going to take in short term information and if we don't tell it that it should be kept, we're

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\h        going to get rid of it, and remember we have an unlimited capacity.

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\h        Think about that. Do you remember who your teachers were when you were in the eighth grade?

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\h        I can't think of one. I'm a young 'un. I can't remember, and much less the information I learned.

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\h        We have an unlimited capacity to store information.

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\h        There are frontiers about education that are totally unexplored and

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\h        we're extremely excited about the future of that.

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\h        So coming to a close here, we believe that mobile technology is the answer to all of this.

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\h        You think about traditional tools, there's a lot of things wrong with them and how they're designed from a

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\h        functional perspective, because textbooks, when you take notes down on paper, flash cards, they're all

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\h        built, number one, to be used inside of a stationary environment and when you think of going and sitting

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\h        down at a desk, you don't go for five minutes at a time in small little bits as you go on.

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\h        You go there for five or six hours, review the same pieces of information over and over again,

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\h        take a test and on to module two.

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\h        Do we have a revisit module one? Not really, not until the final exam comes around a long time later.

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\h        Everything about what we're doing right now is learn, learn, learn, learn, learn, learn, as we forget,

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\h        forget, forget, forget, and review right before the test.

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\h        That is wrong. That's not right. That's not how we learn so mobile technology can change all of that.

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\h        I'll show you how. The company that I'm with is called learn everywhere,

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\h        and I have the most simple diagram ever to describe this.

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\h        So what we do is we have cloud     
    technology that hosts and

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\h        adaptive algorithm that can emulate human memory patterns.

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\h        Remember the graph we saw? We can calculate that.

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\h        We track all of your interactions and right when you're about to forget any item of information, we use push

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\h        technology to tell you you're about to forget so it's calculating the exact time you're supposed to learn

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\h        everything that you know right now, so that you never forget anything, that's really the key to education,

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\h        isn't it, it's longevity, it's becoming a lifelong learner.

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\h        And when that happens, you launch the push notification.

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\h        It doesn't take to you an update in the iTunes store for angry birds to version 2.5.

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\h        It takes you to the specific learning item you need to learn at that very moment in time.

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\h        And that's what learn everywhere is,     
    and so what we did is kind of

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\h        the opposite of what everybody else is focused on.

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\h        Lot of people are focused on okay, how can we improve the content, how do we make the content better,

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\h        how do we make inside of the classroom more engaging.

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\h        Inside the classroom isn't the problem.

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\h        Teachers are literally telling you exactly how to comprehend the information.

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\h        The problem is what happens outside.

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\h        Right now everything about learning outside of the classroom is very, very -- it's not good, so we built a