Handbook

Keynote Thought Leaders
CHARLES LEADBEATER
Charles Leadbeater is a leading authority on innovation and creativity. He has advised companies, cities and governments around the world on
innovation strategy. He drew on that experience in his latest book We-think: the power of mass creativity, which charts the rise of mass,
participative approaches to innovation from science and open source software, to computer games and political campaigning. We-think was the
latest in a string of acclaimed books: Living on Thin Air, a guide to living and working in the new economy; Up the Down Escalator, an attack on
the culture of public pessimism accompanying globalisation and In Search of Work, published in the 1980’s, which was one of the first books to
predict the rise of more flexible and networked forms of employment. Charles was ranked by Accenture as one of the top management thinkers
in the world. He has been an ideas generator in his own right. As Associate Editor of The Independent he helped Helen Fielding devise Bridget
Jones’s diary. He wrote the first British report on the rise of social entrepreneurship, which has since become a global movement. His report on
the potential for the web to generate social change led to the creation of the Social Innovation Camp movement. Charles has worked
extensively as a senior adviser to governments on the rise of the knowledge driven economy and the Internet. He spent ten years working for
the Financial Times where he was Tokyo Bureau Chief before becoming the paper’s Features Editor.
YONG ZHAO
Yong Zhao is Presidential Chair and Director of the Institute for Global and Online Education in the College of Education, University of Oregon,
where he is also Professor in the Department of Educational Measurement, Policy, and Leadership. He is a Professorial Fellow at the Mitchell
Institute for Health and Education Policy, Victoria University, Australia. His works focus on implications of globalization and technology on
education. He has published over 100 articles and 20 books, including Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Dragon: Why China has the Best (and
Worst) Education System in the World, Catching Up or Leading the Way: American Education in the Age of Globalization and World Class
Learners: Educating Creative and Entrepreneurial Students. He is a recipient of the Early Career Award from the American Educational
Research Association and was named one of the 2012 ten most influential people in educational technology by the Tech & Learn Magazine.
Zhao is an elected fellow of the International Academy for Education. Until December 2010, Yong Zhao was University Distinguished Professor
at the College of Education, Michigan State University, where he also served as the Founding Director, Center for Teaching and Technology;
Executive Director Confucius Institute and the US-China Center for Research on Educational Excellence. Zhao was born in China’s Sichuan
Province. He received his B.A. in English Language Education from Sichuan Institute of Foreign Languages in Chongqing, China in 1986. After
teaching English in China for six years, he came to Linfield College as a visiting scholar in 1992. He then began his graduate studies at the
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1993. He received his A.M. in Education in 1994 and Ph.D. in 1996. He joined the faculty at MSU
in 1996 after working as the Language Center Coordinator at Willamette University and a language specialist at Hamilton College.
http://zhaolearning.com
42