July 17, 2006
Check Against Delivery
I want to says thanks to you, Tony Knowles, for your exceptional leadership here at BCIT.
BCIT is one of our crown jewels in the advanced education system in British Columbia.
I'm pleased to be here with Yona, who is a doctoral student at the University of British Columbia, and with Lindsay, who is a BCIT student. They're going to share a little bit of their educational experiences with you in a few minutes.
I also want to thank the class of students who are here at the summer camp to explore trade and technologies.
As we see these young students and we hear from Lindsay and Yona, it's pretty important for us to recognize that the quality of our life in British Columbia is really going to be directly impacted by the quality of the gift of education to young people across this province, and it's important for us to remember that the world is changing.
There are seismic shifts taking place in the world that are demographic shifts, shifts in technology, a shift in how the economy works. All of those shifts have changed the educational landscape, and one of our goals is to establish a learning landscape in British Columbia that responds to the world in which we live but, more importantly, imagines the kind of educational system we will need over the next 10-to-20 years and responds to that, starting today.
I went to university a long time ago now, and it's important to recognize that students today have a totally different background. They have many different ways of learning. They're much more interested in being out in the world than being in the classroom or in the lecture hall. And one of the things that we have to do is take the incredible asset we have built in the province of British Columbia over the last 30 years
