MR. GATES: Thank you and good morning. This is truly an exciting era. The major advances to be made in technology are transforming the way we do business. It's allowing us to work in more efficient ways and to reach out for new ideas and new products that wouldn't have been possible before. The news is full every week of new start-up companies that are taking advantage of these advances. But today I want to focus on what I think is really the most exciting use of the new technology. And that is to use it as an educational tool for the new generation. There's a lot that we need to do to achieve the potential here for bringing this tool into the classrooms. In fact, if we look at it in a generational time frame, we can say that the kids who have been born just recently, they will grow up with the Internet as a fact of life for them from the very beginning. If we give them the right opportunities, they'll show us how to take full advantage of what can be done with all these advances.

The PC era started 25 years ago. That's when the first microprocessor chip came out from Intel. That's when Microsoft was founded by myself and Paul Allen. And we had a vision then that the combination of microprocessor technology along with great software from thousands of companies would create a tool that would be valuable for everyone. Our vision was a computer on every desk and in every home. And during the last 25 years, we've made incredible progress towards that dream. Today, over half of U.S. households have a personal computer. And in the workplace it's become a standard tool for creating documents and communicating.

Now, a key element of this is taking those PCs and hooking them together using the standards of the Internet. If we look at the statistics there, we have further to go. Only about 30 percent of kids at home today have both a PC and Internet access. Now, that's up very dramatically from just a few years ago, so the trend is in the right direction, but 70 percent of kids don't have that access today. We're quite certain these numbers will continue to grow as the cost of the hardware and the cost of the communications comes down, and also it's viewed as more and more of a vital tool. The things that are really driving this phenomena are that more and more of the world's information is becoming easily accessible on the Internet, whether it's medical information, travel information, or just plain chat rooms where people are interested in getting together and talking about a topic that they care about.

If we look at schools, we're going to have to play the primary role in getting this technology out to kids. Some of the statistics give us hope that we can really fulfill this mission, 90 percent of schools have some type of Internet access. Now, what that means varies quite widely. In some cases, that means a single computer -- if you had to wait in line, you'd get very impatient for an individual student to actually have a chance to go out there, and really browse the Internet. So that figure, in some ways, overstates where we are.

Our goal should be that this Internet access should not just be in a lab somewhere, but it should be literally in every classroom. It should be part of the curriculum, and getting teachers enthused about bringing this in as a new tool. After all, every student starts out with amazing curiosity. They want to explore subjects, they want to find kids who have similar interests. And the Internet is fantastic for letting people go out and explore things on their own. And if it's done properly, you can bring back to the classroom the things that you found that were very interesting, and share those with all of the other kids.

Now, the number of Internet connections for each student in the United States is today about 14 students per Internet connection. That's much better than a year ago where it was 20, but still very far away from making it something that everybody gets a chance to use at leisure. The majority of schools report that teachers are really using the Internet, they're at least going out there to find materials that they can present in the classroom as well as involving in the kids in using the Internet. But the vision of what this should be is far different than we have right now. We talk about a "connected learning community" where the parents are going online and seeing what's being assigned. They're helping to research a topic, working together with their kids. And the curriculum itself has been redesigned to take full advantage of this.

And who are the kids that are going to have the full impact of this? Certainly the kids being born today, from 1994 on, they're a new generation, and nobody has really labeled this generation, so I would propose today that we think about this as calling this "Generation I." Of course, "I" for Internet. You know, these are kids who will always wonder why we talk about having records. To them, music will just be something you can get on your computer, and organized exactly the way you want and carry around with you however you want. To them, the idea that all the rich information should be easy to search and find, and that you should be able to find other kids in another country and speak to them about what their thinking is about that topic. They'll simply take that for granted. They'll think of buying as something where you can go out and get the best prices, or get the product reviews across the Internet. And so, they will think about the Internet in a far more profound way than most of us who grew up without it being an ever-present tool. And, in some ways, this is very, very exciting. These kids will be agents of change as they move out into their jobs. These kids include my own children. I've got a three-year-old and a four-month-old who are definitely going to be leading members of Generation I, and they have their high speed Internet connection from the very beginning.

So, what will this lifestyle be like? Well, a lot of it will be saying that when you pull information together, you don't have to worry about writing it down on paper. You'll be able to go to the Internet and submit your homework that way. You'll be able to read books with very incredible screens. One of the things that is still ahead of us, but is definitely going to happen in the next three years, is to have flat panel screens that you can hold in your hands, just like the tablet, so it's comfortable to sit and read for long periods of time. That tablet display will have a resolution that makes it as comfortable as reading off of paper. I'm not saying that this will eliminate books, but it will give us a new flexibility to be able to call up material that otherwise wouldn't be easy to get to. And you can take textbooks and customize them for your class, take the portions that make sense from many different sources, and by bringing it together that way, the kids can browse it electronically. They can comment on parts of the text, send back something with a voice annotation or a handwriting annotation, whether they're confused about something they're reading or they want to make the comment on it.

That whole process of collaborating, letting kids show their ideas, will be very different than its been -- where we have to work strictly out of the textbooks that are often out of date, and not really tailored to that particular child's interest. Kids will all have a little smart card, so whatever PC or tablet they see, they just will run their smart card through the reader, and it will immediately bring up the things that they care about. Their electronic mail, their schedule, and they'll have access to that information wherever they go.

These kids won't think about the phone and the PC as being two different worlds. Whenever you're using the PC and you go to a Web site, you'll be able to click and talk to people, and likewise the phone that you carry around more and more will have a pretty good screen on it. And so, calling up things about the weather or new messages, all of that will be available from the phone as well as the PC. Likewise, the TV will let you connect up, not just playing great games, or getting any video you want, but also navigating the world of information. So, we'll have one set of standards around the Internet, and all of these devices connecting up to that common network.

So, it will be a world where everything is online, and that's simply taken for granted. And these kids will, in a creative way, build the Web sites that will make the Web sites we have today look like really nothing, sort of in the same way that you look at the early TV shows, early radio shows, and realize that the medium was not being fully exploited, there was so much more that could be done by people who really grew up with it and thought about it as central to their life.

Having all these devices makes it a lifestyle activity. You won't be surprised when you look at your small screen and say, okay, what's the traffic look like, or what are my friends up to. That will just be something you expect to do all the time. All the material that's in the library today is slowly but surely being digitized. All the new books, the periodicals, and even the books from the past that are hard to get when they're in paper form. In fact, a little later we'll see a great example of how digital access is letting people see the history and get back to their roots in a way that wouldn't have been possible without digital technology. So, the Internet, the power in the microprocessor, the miracle of great software, and other advances like the flat screen displays, will make this far more natural to use. The interface will include speech recognition. You won't have to type everything that you're interested in, you'll simply be able to talk to the device and ask it to help you find the information.

So, this will really be the most incredible tool that's ever been created. The way that we get the most out of it is, we connect everything together. We have all the material that museums can put online, and have accessible from kids. We have people in the community, we have parents at home, and then we have the schools themselves all sharing across the Internet. So, the first time teachers will find that if they're teaching a subject in a particularly creative way, they can put up the material they're using and the approach they've taken onto the Internet, have other teachers find out, perhaps add things into it, and share it back to the original creator, and everyone else. In fact, I think there will be a lot of great awards that are given to teachers who go to the effort to take their good ideas, put them out on the Internet, and make them available to everyone else. So, whatever subject it is, whatever level it is, you'll be able to go out there and find neat, exciting ideas that really draw the kids in, that use examples that they can relate to by using the breadth of material that the richness of the Internet provides.

When I keep saying Internet, I don't just mean text pages, or even pages with just pictures. The Internet that we're talking about in the years ahead is one where audio and video are a full part of the experience. And so, if you want to have, say, an interactive experiment where the kid can play around with some of the different parameters, you can have rich software that can create a video experience showing you exactly what would happen when you change the different variables. So, if it's playing around with the physics equation, or the design of something, right there on the screen, you'll be able to get a lot of the feel of how the different inputs control the thing. And so you'll want to pursue that and go with your full curiosity to understand exactly how those things work. So the boundaries won't be the same as they've been today. And this connected learning community, the idea of everybody contributing will be commonplace.

So what are the key things we need to do here? We need to get great content out there. We need to have rewards for everybody who is putting up that content. We need ways of classifying it and linking it together, so that it's easy for people to find something that they might want to be interested in. We need to get teachers involved, so that the design of learning is built around this. We need to make sure that it's not just a small percentage of the kids who've got access. We don't want to have a divide here, where the kids who have the Internet at home are able to go and do wonderful things, and the kids who don't have that access in their home don't have a way to have the equivalent experience. We want to make sure that we're avoiding material online that is damaging, so the idea of how you control that, how you train kids to use this in a responsible way -- that's very, very important.

In terms of content, the progress here is pretty fantastic. One of the things that Microsoft got involved in very early on is the idea of taking the encyclopedia and creating a digital version. And so we created over five years ago what we call Encarta. And that was delivered on a CD, and included not just the text and pictures, but also audio and video. In some ways the encyclopedia is a great example of how digital information can be more accessible. Now, I remember when I was a kid I had a copy of the World Book, and I thought, well, how am I supposed to read this thing? Well, I read it alphabetically. But, it's kind of strange, because you're reading about the 1600s, then the 1800s, then the 1900s, and it's sort of hard to get a feel for the subject when that's the only way that the information is organized. And when information is changed, you get the year book every year and you paste in the labels, but you really haven't revised all the things that should be changed there.

Well, moving this into digital form means that you can navigate the subjects in a far more natural way. Tell me all the articles about the kings in England. Give me all the articles about great scientists. And so it's far more natural to pursue your curiosity and go through the material that way. You can have timelines, music, all the things that paper form doesn't provide. Another key point here, and one that shouldn't be missed, is that it can be very inexpensive. Today for $40 or $50, these electronic encyclopedias provide far more information than even the print version that was very difficult for a lot of households to buy, because just the printing costs and everything made those cost $300 or $400. So the results are quite dramatic here. This is the first paper document where the electronic form is far more popular than the paper form.

In the last year 2 million of these electronic encyclopedias were sold, and that's been increasing pretty substantially. And actually the paper encyclopedias have gone down in sales a little bit. My friend Warren Buffett actually owns the World Book, and I always tease him, I say, hey it looks like our electronic things are selling very well, and it's going to be tough. And he says, no, people like having an encyclopedia on their shelf. Well, he's right, but not as many as who like to have the electronic. And so at the peak, the most popular of encyclopedias sold about 300,000 copies a year.

Well, probably the best way to understand why I'm so excited about digital content, and the way kids can navigate through it is to see an example of this. And so I'm going to show you one of the latest things we've done in partnership with an incredible group. Professor Henry Gates, Jr., Skip Gates, partnered with us and he and his cohorts have created something really fantastic. It's a version of Encarta called Encarta Africana. We've got a new version of that, that we'd like to give you a quick glimpse of. And Skip is here to navigate us through that. So let me ask Skip Gates to come on out.

MR. HENRY "SKIP" GATES: Thank you very much. Thanks, Bill, for that kind introduction.

In 1909 W.E.B Dubois, the greatest black intellectual of all time, woke up one day and decided that the most efficacious way to fight white racism will be the editing of the equivalent of a black Encyclopedia Britannica, and he called it The Encyclopedia Africana. And, tragically, Dubois spent the rest of his intellectual life trying to get this project off the ground, and he never could. He even repatriated to Ghana in 1961, at the age of 93, renounced his American citizenship and became editor of this project, but it was never published. I first heard about the idea when I was an undergraduate at Yale, and I thought what a hoot it would be to bring this to life.

I went off to the University of Cambridge in 1973, and I met these two African guys, a Nigerian called Wole Soyinka, who 13 years later, of course, would get the Nobel Prize for literature, a young African prince called Kwame Anthony Appiah. And one drunken night, I have to say, at an Indian restaurant in Cambridge, October of '73, we made a pact that we would try to edit this encyclopedia. And on January 19th, 1999, 25 years after that Nigerian and that Ghanian, and a poor colored boy from Piedmont, West Virginia, made that pact, and 90 years, almost to the day after the great Dubois first envisioned this marvelous reference product we, with Microsoft's help, we published Encarta Africana.

(Applause.)

MR. HENRY "SKIP" GATES: You know, we're all familiar with the dire statistics about the digital divide, about what we think of as "cyber-segregation." We're very much in danger of becoming two societies in the 21st Century, one white and plugged in, and one black and unplugged. Now, you see most commentators haven't yet realized that this, in terms of the black community, in part reflects the legacy of slavery. The thing that slavery did that was so disastrous was to break social connections, if you think about it, to disconnect black people from their history, and from their culture, from the African continent, from their families, it was illegal to get married, form ideas, it was illegal to learn to read and write, and of course, disconnected from economic opportunity. In fact, slavery equaled social death in the 19th Century.

Well, ladies and gentlemen, cyber-segregation equals social death in the 21st Century. And one solution to this problem, of course, is cheaper and indeed sometimes free PCs. And the federal government is doing a lot about that, many of us are making interventions in that area. But, just as important, it seems to me, is the introduction of black content. More black content on the Web. Why is this important? Because content attracts an audience. And an audience organizes itself into interest groups. Interest groups communicate about problems, about issues, indeed, about new knowledge, and new knowledge extends existing content, attracting an even larger audience, and locking-in existing users into an even larger committed group.

The analogy for this is the introduction of records, the invention of records on the market in the 1920s. Do you think black people would have bought records if all they could buy was Kate Smith, and Rudy Vallee? I mean, hello? Black people who had no money in Harlem would stand in blocks just to get the latest Duke Ellington or Bessie Smith records. It's a perfect analogy, and that's what we're trying to do with products like Encarta Africana, with the increasing presence of black Web sites, like Net Noir, Bet.com, Africana.com, a leading educational black portal we set up at Harvard. And we think also that we can, using organizations like the NAACP, and the United Negro College Fund, the leaders of which are both right here in the audience today, we think that we can start to generate the equivalent of cyber schools. Schools in the inner city, after school programs, where kids can learn after school about information technology, and about African American history and culture. And using the Internet, using black content, ladies and gentlemen, we can take our people not back to the future, but black to the future.

Thank you very much.

MR. HENRY "SKIP" GATES: So, Bill, now it's show time. We are debuting the second edition of Encarta Africana.

(Audio/Visual demo.)

MR. HENRY "SKIP" GATES: That, of course, is the South African National Anthem. The encyclopedia is dedicated in memory of Dr. DuBois in honor of Nelson Mandela.

We're going to look at the entry on my hero Martin Luther King, Jr. You see long articles have an outline on the left, we have all the media scrolling around at the top, we have over 800 Web links to put kids right on the Internet through our product. And we even have historical film footage.

(Audio/Visual demo.)

MR. HENRY "SKIP" GATES: That speech still gives me gooseflesh. And we can bring it into the classroom. You know, for our kids, last week is ancient history for them. We have a new feature, Bill alluded to this, you know, most of the text written by black people are out of print or unavailable. For this edition, we digitized seven million words written by black people between 1773 and 1919. We call it the Library of Black America, and it's fully searchable. So the other day a student up at Harvard came to me and said, Professor Gates, did anyone black write about Charles Darwin. So we typed Charles Darwin in, and do a search in the Library of Black America, it shows us that five black authors wrote about Charles Darwin in the 18th Century. If we click on Frederick Douglass, it takes you right to the page with the word "Darwin" highlighted. Do you know how long it would have taken for anybody to find Charles Darwin's references in all the books written by black people? Now you can do it automatically. So inexpensively, you could buy the entire mind of the black world in the 19th Century from the United States. It's just incredible what we can do with this technology.

And, finally, I think that African Americans' greatest contribution to world culture is African American music, and with Quincy Jones, our partner in this, we have designed an African American music time line going from 1870 to Lauryn Hill and hip hop. Now, if we can't use this to get black kids onto the Internet, ladies and gentlemen, no way will we ever be able to get them onto the Internet. I mean we have rare historical footage. We have Bessie Smith from St. Louis Blues in 1929. We have Duke Ellington and his Jungle Band. We even have rare video footage of George Clinton, my friend and hero. George Clinton descending from the Funk Spaceship. But my favorite piece of footage, and it took us a long time to procure the rights to this, is of my two heroes, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, April 1958.

(Audio/Visual demo.)

MR. HENRY "SKIP" GATES: Well, with the creative partnership of 400 scholars from around the world and the marvelous technology wizards at Microsoft, we have finally given birth to Dr. DuBois' dream, Encarta Africana 2000. Thank you very much.

(Applause.)

MR. GATES: Thank you.

Skip's enthusiasm really is quite infectious, and it took all his energy and commitment to make that a really incredible product, and it's fun to see not only that it came to completion but the speed with which kids are taking advantage of that and reaching out to the Internet in new ways. I've said that we're going to have to put a lot of investment into thinking about how to teach this Generation I. You know, how does technology fit in? Technology by itself is not the answer. The answer is teachers, great teachers, who are using technology in the best way. And, there's a lot of investment to be made in these teachers. Really helping them to feel prepared for the modern classroom. It's got to be intimidating when you've got kids who, in some ways, are ahead of you in using this tool. You have no idea how you're going to control their usage, and you have a curriculum that you need to teach that really hasn't been adapted to fit the Internet and what can be done there. And so, it was interesting in a recent survey, only 20 percent of teachers said that they really feel prepared to bring in the technology in the right way. That's quite a stark contrast to the fact that, yes, we are creating the connections, and that's going to happen, but we haven't made the investment in the teachers to really bring them along and get them to drive this forward. And that's the only way it really can come together.

So, I think there is a clear call to action here. How do we make sure that the education curriculum is changed, how do we make sure that as teachers refresh their skills, they're really brought into this? How do we take those textbook budgets and really think not just about what's on paper, but also about what can be done on the Internet, and how those two things relate to each other?

So, there's a need for some massive training to be done, and this is a case where government at all levels, corporations and philanthropists really need to come together to have this take place.

The kids today are anxious to have this opportunity. And so, the sooner we can get all the teachers to be enthusiastic about it, the better. There are many companies jumping in on this. We've done a lot of things ourselves with training labs. We have our Web site that we connect people up to training opportunities, and through our work, including the material we've created, over a million teachers have been trained. Now, compared to the need that's only getting part way there.

One of the programs that is most exciting that we've done isa called "anywhere, anytime learning." And that's where you see that the best thing to do for a student is to actually give them their own computer. When they have their own computer, they have that sense of ownership, they don't have to stand in line to use it, they can go home at night, if there's something they're confused about they get as much time as they want, they can sit with their friends and talk about it. The teacher can know that every kid in the classroom has this tool. That's where you get the greatest impact. And we call that anywhere, anytime learning, because this is a program based on getting portable computers to all the kids, and then connecting up the network in the classrooms so they can print, and display their information. There are 500 schools around the world who've adopted this idea, and it's something that the results have really been quite fantastic.

For me, there's nothing more fun than visiting one of these classrooms and talking to the kids, and talking to the teachers about how their taking this tool and doing new things with it. They're actually taking the same Microsoft Office software that's being used in businesses as a standard tool and using it in more creative ways than even the people in business are. So, to go ahead and find out what's going on, I thought we'd ask some teachers and kids who are really part of this revolution to come and show us what they're doing.

So, I'd like to ask Dahlia Johnson and Steven Jaffee to come on up, bring a couple students, and talk to us about the great things they're doing. Welcome.

(Applause.)

MS. JOHNSON: Good morning, everyone. My name is Dahlia Johnson, and I work at Innwood Intermediate School 52, which is located in the Innwood Section of Manhattan. We are north of Harlem and south of Riverdale. Last year, I had the pleasure, along with four other teachers in the school, to pilot our laptop program. You have to keep in mind that our community and our student population is 90 percent Latino. At the beginning of this project, Mr. Leonard Letronica, was the principal of the school. He has since retired. I don't know if it has anything to do with all this hard work. But, Mr. Jose Rivera has taken the torch and is up and running with it. And we are creating a fantastic time with the children.

The five classes that have participated in this program are part of our Alpha Program run by Ms. Ellen Miller. The task of integrating curriculum and working with the technology, and also keeping in mind the mandates that we have from state and city, made the job interesting to say the least. My role as a teacher in the classroom totally changed. I became a facilitator, and then an active learner along with the kids. And many of them sitting right here in the audience are way ahead of me. I would like to thank Class 6A1 and 6A2 for putting up with my petitions of running around and doing stuff.

Now, it is my great honor to introduce to you Vanessa Rodriguez, who is the class representative, and she will give us a brief overview of one of the projects.

Vanessa.

(Applause.)

MS. RODRIGUEZ: Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Vanessa Rodriguez, and I'm here to discuss with you a project my classmates and I did. The project was for us to choose a country that we knew nothing about and do research on it. The project also has several purposes. One of the purposes was for us to practice our interpersonal skills. We did this by calling the embassy of the country we chose, and asking for requirements to travel to the country. We also spoke to travel agents for more information.

Another purpose was for us to integrate technology with curriculum. We did this by using Microsoft Office on the laptop, and covering points that were mandated to learn in English and Math.

The final purpose, of course, to make sure we had developed our research skills. We used the encyclopedia, books and the Internet. We used search engines such as Yahoo and Excite for more information. This project helped me a lot because it helped me feel more comfortable with the use of the laptop -- and also it made me feel more comfortable and also improved my writing skills.

Now, I introduce to you, Eric Rodriguez, my classmate, who will talk about his project, and the country he chose.

(Applause.)

MR. RODRIGUEZ: Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Eric Rodriguez. The country that I chose to learn about is Egypt through the use of the encyclopedia, books, magazines, and especially the Internet. For example, I used Internet Explorer, I went to Yahoo and got information about the hotel costs.

MR. JAFFEE: And what did you do with that information?

MR. RODRIGUEZ: I took that information and made it into a Microsoft Excel chart.

MR. JAFFEE: And what else did you do?

MR. RODRIGUEZ: I found information about the travel costs.

MR. JAFFEE: And what did you do with that information once you got it, Eric?

MR. RODRIGUEZ: I took all the information and made it into a chart.

MR. JAFFEE: Anything else?

MR. RODRIGUEZ: I also made -- I also found a site about pictures of Egypt.

MR. JAFFEE: And what did you do with those pictures, Eric?

MR. RODRIGUEZ: I cut them from the Internet and I pasted them into my Microsoft PowerPoint presentation.

MR. JAFFEE: Once you had all that information together, Eric, what did you do with it?

MR. RODRIGUEZ: I did a bibliography.

MR. JAFFEE: Very good.

(Applause.)

MR. JAFFEE: Eric, what was this experience like for you?

MR. RODRIGUEZ: I found this very challenging, but using the Internet made it exciting.

MR. JAFFEE: Thank you very much.

(Applause.)

MR. JAFFEE: Ladies and gentlemen, my name is Steven Jaffee, and I am one of the technology facilitators with Community School District 6 in Manhattan. My job is to go into the schools and help facilitate the technology with the students and the staff, and to help level the playing field for all the students in the community. I have found this job to be very challenging. It is something that I look forward to.

We are especially proud of our laptop program, which enables every student to have his or her own computer for school and at home. It has helped to level the playing field. When we first started this laptop program, we began with one class at Mott Hall. People gave us dozens of reasons why the program would not work. I'm glad to say they were all wrong. This program has succeeded, and now we have over 4,000 laptops throughout the district.

I would just like to say one thing that Bill Gates has alluded to earlier, the children, the only complaint that I've had from the children when they come in the next day is the fact that they couldn't do some of their work, and when I ask them why they say, because my parents were wanting to use the computer also.

I'm very proud to know that we are helping students to be active participants in the 21st Century, using real skills that will have them prepared. It is good to see the children embrace the technology and the Internet with so much enthusiasm and success. I would especially like to thank the educators, colleges and universities like NYIT, the parents, the community, and private industries such as Microsoft for making this happen.

Thank you very much.

(Applause.)

MR. GATES: Well, that's learning in action. There are many places where kids should be able to access this technology. In fact, Skip Gates talked about his passion for making this available in lots and lots of communities. Getting the prices of the machines down, so you can have them at home, coming up with special financing options for things like laptops, that's very important. The schools themselves, whether it's special levies, or allocation or resources towards technology, clearly that's a very central role. The libraries are another place that can be part of this. That's one area where the foundation that I created has helped to make sure that over the next several years every library in the United States, all 16,000, will have a state of the art PC with an Internet connection. So kids who can reach the library can get in and take advantage of that. And the usage of that has been quite phenomenal.

We should also reach out to community centers, any clubs, any place where the kids go we should make sure that the technology is there. Now there is special work that needs to be done to make sure that the kids are using this tool in a constructive fashion, and that they understand some of the things they ought to know and be careful about. We've worked together with Boys and Girls Club to come up with what we call the Stay Safe Online program, it's the kind of things that teachers, or a community center, or parents can go through with children who are using this tool, and really give them guidelines about how it should be used properly. And so that's, we think, an important element of how this can move forward.

There's no doubt in my mind that we've got a fantastic opportunity here. The people at Microsoft who work on creating the software that's part of it, part of the reason they love their job is they know that these tools will be used in education in some exciting ways. We're really just at the very beginning of this, but I can say with great confidence that the Internet is going to change education as fundamentally as it changed when we had printed books. And that's something that it's going to be very exciting to be a part of.

Thank you.

(Applause.)