Conference 2007: Welcome to Wired Wales by Carwyn Jones

Carwyn Jones, Minister for Education, Culture and the Welsh Language

On behalf of the Welsh assembly it is a great pleasure to welcome you all now. I know that it’s an important conference – it’s important to stay in the forefront of learning, sharing experiences and learning from elsewhere.

I was a student at Aber, left in 1988, and was blessed that on my doorstep was the National Library of Wales. But you had to be at least a third year student to enter it, you were led into a back room, would make a request to see certain documents and in time they would be provided… to access medieval documents was almost impossible. And with good reason – they are fragile and wouldn’t be given to those who would not treat them with respect.

But now many of those documents are now online and we are witnessing a democratisation of research. Many more documents will be available in the future than in the past. These are exciting times we live in.

I remember the excitement when the 2001 census was put online – it was a thrill to be able to access original records. Now it is common – we see many sites with access to census figures and people have come to expect to have that at their fingertips.

What do I think IT will look like in 10 years? I don’t have a crystal ball! In 1997 I had a 14,400 modem – would access a website, go off and make a cup of tea and by the time you had made it the site may have loaded. We would avoid going online when the Americans were. Now with broadband it gets faster and faster and access for information gets greater and greater.

In Wales we do have urban centres like Cardiff but much of our population lives in rural Wales so we felt it important that broadband be available in rural Wales – could not leave it to the market as would take many years – we want to make sure it was rolled out as quickly as possible. In 2002 broadband Wales programme rolled out and the high speed lifelong learning network.

Education has changed. Where there used to be blackboard and teacher, now whiteboards are getting old hat – fully expect to be able to access information at the drop of a hat where in the past would have taken hours in a library.

We have to be ready to make sure that those resources are further developed so children can learn at a faster rate than ever before.

It is also important that our rural schools can access resources online as cannot always offer the same courses that schools in urban centres can so in order to have the same opportunities for all we need to create a virtual learning environment.

We are also aware that as digitisation progresses and more people use IT that we don’t create the haves and have nots. Capacity to increase the division in terms of educational opportunities is quite manifest unless we take steps to avoid that. So have tried to roll out access to PCs in libraries across Wales. It is important that those who don’t have access to pcs at home have access in public centres.

We are pleased with the million pound resources put into custom-built bilingual IT system at the Library of Wales. Not just talking about documents – it is also important that have access to sounds and pictures and video. If, for example, you study linguistics and want to know how accents have changed then you need to be able to hear them. Some welsh dialects have died out – but can access those voices online.

Important for me to know what your views are today and how we can learn from you and your experiences. We want to develop our online resources in Wales, for education and skills for the new century not the old one.

I wish you a successful few days.