I thought Bill and I might be on the same wavelength, but we're not...

Bill Gates talk at TED as reported by Ethan Zuckerman shows that - apart from Mosquitos - he's interested (like me) in raising the quality of teaching:

"How do you make a teacher great?” We’re all here, Gates tells us, because we had great teachers - including Gates, a legendary college dropout. Gates believes that 20% of American teachers do an excellent job, training the people who will create “the next revolutions”.

The education that the balance of students are getting is weak and getting weaker, he fears. The dropout rate is over 30% in the US, over 50% for minority kids. If you’re a low-income person, you’ve got less than a 25% chance of completing a college degree - you have a better chance of going to jail."

So he's defined the right problem. But oddly, given his background, he doesn't seem to have grasped the opportunities that computing has to offer. To my mind these are self evident. We need an open source, team based, software framework for supporting education delivery. And this can mean teachers don't all need to be superstars for our children to get a dramatically improved level of education.