In their global education roles, Bernie and Charles have spoken to thousands of educators and met with hundreds of education leaders on the move to a 21st century approach to learning.

Though they both have been deeply involved in the development of innovative technologies to reshape learning, Bernie and Charles share a deep conviction that the most important learning tools are our minds, our hearts, and our hands, all working together.

Bernie Trilling is global director for the Oracle Education Foundation, directing the development of education strategies, partnerships, and services for the Foundation’s ThinkQuest program. He represents the Foundation as a board member of the Partnership for 21st Century Skills.

Bernie has worked on a number of pioneering educational products and services, and is an active member of a variety of organizations dedicated to bringing 21st century learning methods to students and teachers across the globe. Prior to joining the Oracle Education Foundation, Bernie was director of the Technology in Education group at WestEd, a U.S. national educational laboratory, where he led a team of educational technologists in integrating technology into both the instructional and administrative realms of education. He has also served in a variety of roles in both education and industry, including executive producer for instruction at Hewlett-Packard Company, where he helped lead a state-of-the-art, global interactive distance learning network.

As an instructional designer and educator, Bernie has held a variety of professional educational roles in settings ranging from preschool to corporate training. He has written dozens of articles for educational journals and magazines, as well as chapters for educational books, and is a featured speaker at numerous educational conferences.

Bernie attended Stanford University where he studied environmental science and education. He also took some time off from Stanford to help organize the very first Earth Day in Washington, D.C.

Taking Mark Twain’s advice of “never letting school interfere with one’s education,” Bernie has been a lifelong, self-propelled learner, spending much of his career furthering the kinds of learning experiences that he has found most engaging, collaborative, real-world, and powerful, working to make these experiences available to learners of all ages.

Charles Fadel is Global Lead for Education at Cisco Systems, and the Cisco board member on the Partnership for 21st Century Skills, of which Cisco was a founding member. He has engaged with a wide variety of education ministries or boards including Massachusetts, France, Chile, Brazil, and the Dominican Republic, and has worked on education projects in more than thirty countries and states.

Charles has authored articles in publications such as Technology & Learning, New Media Consortium, eSchool News, Education Week, University Business, EETimes, and others. He has presented at numerous education conferences, including the Consortium for School Networking (COSN), the National School Boards Association (NSBA), the National Center for Technology Innovation (NCTI), and the Masie Center’s learning conferences.

He is presently advising two e-Learning start-up companies, two nonprofit organizations, and several professional organizations including the State Educational Technology Directors Association (SETDA), and several committees of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). Charles has recently served on the Massachusetts Governor’s Readiness Project as well as its 21st Century Skills task force. He served on the advisory board of AIMS Multimedia (now part of Discovery Channel). He is also incubating a nonprofit organization addressing the convergence of 21st Century Skills and Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM).

Charles is driven by education as the preeminent mechanism to profoundly improve the human condition, and embraces the promise of technology to progressively enable the mass personalization of learning. He also believes that interdisciplinarity is an oft-neglected mechanism of scientific and humanistic progress, and a key growth engine in the future.

Charles has been awarded five patents on video, content, and communication technologies. He holds a bachelor of science in electronics with a course concentration in quantum and solid-state physics with a minor in neuroscience, and a master’s of business administration in international marketing. An avid reader, he has autodidactically learned cognitive sciences disciplines (evolutionary psychology, comparative linguistics, and others), and enjoys the lessons of classical history.