Cardinali commented that the biggest challenge faced by those in every sector of the economy today is not leading the competition but surviving it. He mainained that the rate of economic change is so great that today's ten top jobs did not even exist in 2004. Furthermore, he predicted that the current 'media age' will limit Europe's economic growth by at least one per cent per year for the next three decades.

"In the past, Europe faced economic competition from emerging economies, such as China, purely in terms of price", Cardinali said. "Now, these economies are 'skilling up' and competing in terms of quality as well as price."

Viewing today's economic climate in a historical context - equating it with the change in the world's economy when America was discovered and recalling that the last time Europe led the world's economy was during the Renaissance - Cardinali proposed creating a multi-disciplinary meeting point for learning industry creativity and innovation.

In particular, Cardinali advocated:

• Bridging skills and competency gaps by adopting competency-based qualifications that take account of the rapid changes in the skills and knowledge that today's workers need (rather than rely on the rigid, formal structure of national qualifications currently in place).
• Fostering personalized learning. Cardinali explained, "The traditional idea is that you produce average curricula to train average people. Now, however, the technology exists to allow you to find out what each individual doesn't know and needs to know - and this allows you to design learning materials for specific individuals and so speed up their time to competence."
• Using new media and knowledge distribution channels. Cardinali added, "Traditional means of imparting learning, from books to broadcasting, were 'individual massification'. Today's technology enables us to use 'massive individualization'. This is achieved via the use of open and interoperable digital repositories of skills and competencies, qualification tests, and remediation contents delivered via new media and knowledge-distribution channels."
• Conceiving new pedagogical formats to motivate and engage each learner, via constructive, personalized self-development learning rather than 'behavioral, prescriptive learning'. This enables the delivery of personal ambient learning (PAL) - learning that follows the learners where they are, knows what they need to know, and so on.
• Using open and interoperable technologies to enable the interchanging of standard components in learning design, development, and delivery. This is done via eLearning using service-oriented architectures (SOAs), which separate learning management systems (LMS) and learning-content management systems (LCMS) to produce PALs. These are ubiquitous, wireless, broadband and mobile devices providing just-in-time services and empowering a personal learning experience.

Cardinali concluded, "'eLearning 1.0' was characterized by the rapid authoring of 'traditional' education contents online. It was prescriptive and gave rise to the 'unsatisfied user' issue. 'eLearning 2.0' is characterized by self-generated, grassroots-learning content production, profiling, and exchange. There is still low average user satisfaction, but we are beginning to see the emergence of 'learning communities'.

"'eLearning 3.0' will see learning become personal, using constructive pedagogy and delivering individualized contents" he concluded. "It will be characterized by de-structured, well-produced content that will be tagged using XML to make it available via mobile devices."