With my eight-year-old son, we are planning to build and program a Lego Mindstorms EV3 this Summer. They are robots that look cool and for which you can code tasks and decisions. So, at Google’s Course Builder workshop, when I heard Jennifer Kay, a computer science professor, explain that she has been using robots (including the Lego ones) for education for years, I couldn’t help but ask for an interview.

June is good busy. Here are three highlights. Wednesday and Thursday 4-5 June 2014 I’ll be at the second Google Course Builder Faculty Workshop in Zurich. Google engineers built their own platform to host courses internally, but soon offered public-facing courses like “Power searching with Google”, and then open-sourced Google Course Builder.

Here is an unedited chat with George Siemens about corporate MOOCs. He is preparing an open, online symposium on scaling up corporate learning, to be announced soon. The World Bank and OECD are two international organizations that will be contributing to the conversation. Here are some of the questions we briefly discussed: What is a “corporate MOOC” and why should organizations outside higher education care?

There is of course an intimate relationship between communication and education. In many universities, both sit under the discipline of psychology. However, in most international organizations, these tend to be siloed functions.

A learning organization is an organization that has an enhanced capacity to learn and change.

Scale : Predictions over the impact of climate change and globalization suggest that we will see more frequent disasters in a greater number of countries, along with more civil unrest in those states less able to cope with this rapidly changing environment, all generating a greater demand for humanitarian and development assistance (cf. Walker, P., Russ, C., 2012.

In a complex, knowledge-driven society, learning, education and training are key to sustainability. Sustainability initiatives need to explicitly make learning strategic in order to succeed in the face of growing challenges. No organization, no sector can do so alone. Professionalization alone is not the answer. Education is failing to prepare humanity for disasters, climate change, globalization or conflicts.

Why did the chicken cross the road? Lunch time, after a jet-lagged conference morning. Hand shakes and smiles, mingling Spanish and English. Forks and knives scrape plates as we skewer the plump, roast chicken. Within the first 90 seconds, I am being mandated or tasked to request funding immediately upon returning to headquarters.

A few months ago, a malaria guy showed me the $20 dumb Nokia phones he buys in a Geneva convenience store and then gives out to trainees who then use it to collect data via SMS text messages. ARM says that the US$20 smart phone (read: Android with an ARM chip) will arrive this year. At stake: how to get the next four billion people online.

So, you are unhappy with a five percent completion rate. Hire tutors (lots of them, if it is massive). Try to get machines to tutor. Use learners as tutors (never mind the pedagogical affordances, you only care about scale and completion). Set up automated phone calls to remind people to turn in their homework. Ring the (behaviorist) bell. Or not. Google’s Coursebuilder team has an interesting take on completion rates.

Demure, soft-spoken, personable, affable, no-nonsense. All those things, in that peculiarly North American way. Those words don’t do justice to B., the uniquely compelling individual I met for the second time last night in Divonne-les-Bains. To describe him as a living legend in the world of learning and development is accurate, but far from complete.