In an enchanting presentation keynote speaker Sugata Mitra, Professor at Newcastle University, UK and Chief Scientist Emeritus with NIIT Ltd., India enabled participants to join Indian children exploring the computer for the first time. One of the best-known results of his research is the discovery that modern multimedia computers and children are literally "made for each other".

Their cognitive processes are so similar that children need little or no instruction to master computing at the basic level. Mitra is building on this discovery through the design of hardware and software that enable children to reach the intermediate-to-expert level entirely on their own.

Even though Andrew Keen, American author, pointed out that he is not against technology, he made it quite clear that for him the ideas behind web 2.0 and the new internet are "killing wisdom…and killing culture". He argued, "Web 2.0 millionaires make money with the wisdom of the crowd … and nobody is in charge".

For Andrew Keen the fact that everybody can become an expert leads to "democratization of idiocy and undermines expertise". The main future tasks he sees are the reestablishment of experts and intellectual property and the training of the general population - especially children - in media literacy in order for them to be able to distinguish opinion from truth and knowledge.

Patricia Ceysens, the Flemish Minister for Economy, Enterprise, Science, Innovation and Foreign Trade addressed the importance of people's e-skills as a means to boost competitiveness and increase innovation. She pointed out that new users, and not only children, would need training and education. Elderly people, for example, expect training that is combined with the work situation.

"We have to focus more on women!" she emphasized and expanded that for them, new technologies allow a hitherto unknown balance in combining work with the rest of their lives. She summarized that the workforce of the future will be older, female, and more mobile - and that the traditional clients, children, will also change radically. They will expect more individual and customized training that takes place in groups rather than being isolated. This training will also have to be interactive, intercultural, and include images, both static and dynamic. "We need to bring multimedia to the classroom, was Patricia Ceysens's uncompromising challenge.

For Roger Larsen, founder and managing director of Fronter, Norway the answer to how to manage the challenges of web 2.0 is to "buy an open learning platform". In his presentation, he traced the development of a learning platform from web pages and homegrown systems to LMS and on to personal learning environments. Fronter's latest vision of a learning platform is a collaborative working environment on the web that includes web 2.0 functionalities and a web desktop.

More than 2,000 experts from 95 countries gathered in Berlin to discuss the latest developments. The conference agenda focused on Web 2.0, games and simulations in education, as well as on ICT-based learning in the corporate sector, schools and universities. Over 500 speakers from 47 countries were featured in a wide range of plenaries, presentations, and very vivid discussions.

The conference was accompanied by an exhibition, in which 121 e-learning producers and service providers from 27 countries demonstrated and presented their innovative products and tools.

The fourteenth edition of Online Educa is scheduled to take place 3 - 5 December 2008 in the Hotel InterContinental Berlin.