This week, we’ll have our Annual National Forum on Education, organized by the Colombian Ministry of Education. This year, the main theme is the pertinence of education, given that 2009 was declared the year of education for innovation and competitiveness.

As part of my small contribution to this event, I wanted to collect some ideas from people attending the Open Education Conference, and in fact, going around with a camera asking a few questions was one of my purposes there. It was a great opportunity to get some thoughts about a couple of questions: First, is education relevant? Second: If so, how can we make it more relevant?

Clearly, those were ambiguous questions, but that was the idea: To try and get some insight on the views of different people about this, starting with an ill-formed question .
The short time allowed for just eight people to answer this question in OpenEd. Here are those eight answers. As you will see, there are very different approaches to the same thing, but I’d say the whole picture gives a great view of a challenging issue. So, there you go (in the order they were recorded):

Brian Lamb

Sylvia Currie

Gardner Campbell

Leigh Blackall

D'arcy Norman

David Wiley

Stephen Downes

Tony Bates

I have to say there are a lot of people I didn’t get to talk with (the first names in my head are Scott Leslie, Chris Lott, Alec Couros, Dave Cormier, George Siemens, for example), but I would be glad to include here any new ideas about this, and about where that lead us.

Right now I'm in the middle of translating all of this (via DotSub) to Spanish, but I'm having a hard time to get what Leigh says at 1:23-1:28. Any help will be appreciated. UPDATE: Thanks to Gardner for helping with "rhetoric"!

Thanks to each and every one of you, who accepted to answer this question out of the blue!