Fiona O’Carroll, senior vice-president, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt


3 Feb 2011

I would hope that we, as a country, understand the critical nature of continuing to invest in our human capital. It has served us well in the past and I would hope there is still a big commitment to the importance of education.

What needs to happen is we need to really focus on those early implementations that are being done now with the initial phase of broadband, laptops and projectors, and evaluate the benefits they are bringing.

We need that case study for Ireland, that fact base that says this is what we implemented, these are the results and this is where we can scale it, and that should be the focus this year.

If we look at what’s happening in our classrooms – we have budget pressures, student numbers are going up. I hope there is a realisation that the technology backbone and investment will help with this. Teachers will be able to do more with less and get better results if we continue on this road.