HRH Princess Loulwa Al-Faisal presents working session at WEF

For over three decades, the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting has provided an unrivalled platform for leaders from all walks of life to shape the global agenda at the start of each year. This year's forum, entitled "The Power of Collaborative Innovation" will take place on 23-27 January, in Davos, Switzerland.

An interdisciplinary and systemic view of the major economic, political, societal and technological forces currently at work in the world form the conceptual pillars of the 2008 programme and the framework for the global agenda in Davos. Its program will be based on the following five conceptual pillars: Competing While Collaborating, Addressing Economic Insecurity, Aligning Interests across Divides, Exploring Nature's New Frontiers, and Understanding Future Shifts.

As part of the forum's rich program, the working session "What Kind of Education for What Kind of World?" will be presented by HRH Princess Loulwa Al-Faisal, on January 23, 2008 in Hotel Saumerstube, as one of Saudi leading figures in the field of education. Her speech will mainly evolve around revisiting the philosophy behind education, what types of lifelong learning systems should be created today to shape and sustain the ideal citizenry for the global future? She will tackle globalization, short-life span of technology and social, economical and political settings as three affective symptoms of the world we live in.

"we need to live the present in order to be able to prepare ourselves for the future," said Princess Loulwa. "Accordingly education is one of the major social choices that must be made today for tomorrow's sake. But living in this globalization era, educational reforms are not the optimum solutions."

Princess Noura Bint Turky Al-Faisal, Assistant to Vice Chair of Board of Trustees and General Supervisor of Effat College, and Dr. Haifa Jamal Al-LAil, Dean of Effat College, are accompanying HRH Princess Loulwa in this trip. Emphasizing the importance of emerging technology in education, Dr. Jamal Al-Lail said, " technology has turned: learner to a blogger, textbook to facebook, classrooms to chat room, and the global citizen is known as the cybercitizen. Making education not only a lifelong journey but a vibrant, continuous, human-technology interface is the trend for innovative education."