Sponsored TIRO

Location : Egyptian Hall, Mansion House London EC4N 8BH

There is wealth of information about Mansion House and the Egyptian Hall that can be found on the Corporation of London website (Please see About Mansion House – City of London)

Dress Code: Smart Business Attire

Accessibility: There is a ramp into the building, disabled toilet facilities, a sound loop in the Egyptian Hall and lift access to all floors.

Planned Timings – Thursday 9th February 2023

Entry from:                                         5.30pm

Lecture:                                               6.00pm – 6.40pm

Questions:                                           6.40pm – 7.00pm

Wine and canapés reception:             7.00pm – 7.45pm

Guests depart:                                    7.45pm

The Franklin Lecturer 2023: Michael Mainelli Profile

The Worshipful Company of Educators are delighted that Alderman Professor Michael Mainelli MStJ PhD BA FCCA FCSI (Hon) FBCS will be delivering the 2023 Franklin Lecture.

Lecture Outline – Check against Delivery

Teacher, Tutor, Scholar, I – A Multiverse Of Education Or Conundra Of Confusion? 

The traditional world of education and skills is challenged as never before.  Long-removed from ‘computer-based training’ of the 1980s, a plethora of new technologies from language learning or mathematics tutoring to fully immersive and kinaesthetic training are springing up and gathering pace, and money. Skills are being sourced in new and interesting ways.  From crowdsourcing to captcha puzzles people are often unwittingly interacting and training machines.  Marketplaces for tasks make skills themselves increasingly granular.  The boundary between education and entertainment has eroded to paper thin.  The world clearly faces challenges of demography, sustainable development, and the Fourth Industrial Revolution, for which the educational system seems unprepared.  Due to Covid, the world has experienced a profound shift to virtual working, yet most educational institutions talk about a ‘return to normal’.  The opportunity for intense personal, perhaps overly solitary, development beckons as people increasingly slap VR screens and sensors, ‘amounting to polygraphs’, on their foreheads.  Proponents of the Metaverse – interlinked, persistent, shared, artificial reality spaces – imply that there will be an explosion of new, virtual lands where traditional education and skills may no longer suffice, or even be appropriate.   

The educational establishment has seen these challenges coming for some time, yet on many measures little has been done to prepare for change.  Ratios of teachers to students are little changed.  Investment in new technology is low.  Experimentation is hardly radical in educational institutions.  Companies, the military, and consumers are finding new ways to purchase the skills and training they need.  This lecture will set out the case for educators to accelerate the use of new, integrating technologies, particularly the ‘persistent’ Metaverse, to explore a step-change of a magnitude or more in effectiveness and efficiency.  However, slavish adoption of technology for technology’s sake will produce little headway without deeper corresponding changes in the economics of providing education.  The core problem is that the economic models for education, both state and private, have not evolved in line with either the economy or technology.  Thus, the lecture will conclude with thoughts on where radical institutions could change economics to overcome ‘the establishment’ and, in turn, how the establishment could reform its own rewards and risks to deliver superior performance for society and its own benefit.  And have fun doing so. 

–ends–

The Origins of the Franklin Lecture

The Company of Educator’s Franklin Lecture is named after the late Professor Dr Raoul N Franklin CBE FREng, Foundation Master of the Guild of Educators,  the precursor of the current Worshipful Company. More

Past speakers and the titles of their lectures can be found at  Previous Franklin Lectures

Franklin Lecture Sponsor: TIRO

The Company of Educators are delighted for the support that they have received from TIRO for the 2023 Franklin Lecture

TIRO are a science and technology apprenticeship training provider. Sector leading organisations such as Balfour Beatty, the RSK environmental, engineering and technical services group, the Doctors Laboratory – a leading provider of clinical laboratory diagnostic services and Carden IT Services have drawn on TIRO’s services to select and train apprentices for their organisations.

TIRO’s programmes in materials testing, science manufacturing, network engineering and laboratory technicians provide opportunities for apprentices to start extremely fulfilling and worthwhile careers. These highly trained apprentices are in turn valued by employers and their rapidly changing business needs.