I just took part in an exciting meeting at the MediaLab Europe, in Dublin. Representatives of the Ministries of Education of thirty countries were there, discussing the future of distance learning, broadband access in all classrooms, and the level of government support for sharing curriculum.

I'll write more about what Seymour Papert, Nicoloas Negroponte, and a host of others had to say in a later blog.

But now, I'm getting ready for Sun Network in Shanghai next week, and the announcement of a new, global educational effort by Sun.

The Java Education and Learning Community (JELC) takes Education and Research projects, members of the Java.net community and combines them with a community of national Ministers of Education and other senior education decision-makers and policy shapers, to allow the development and sharing of best practices in open source and Java on a global basis.

While the idea has been percolating for several years, the JELC was conceived at the first Lifelong Learning Forum in Madrid, Spain, a meeting where Scott McNealy and 40 representatives from 25 Ministries of Education around the world discussed common challenges in implementing a policy of lifelong learning. Several of these ministers are joining the JELC as board members in recognition of the importance to national educational leadership of an open source, Java-based framework for the development and delivery of learning.