Correction: This version of the story corrects Don Burton's company affiliation.

The future of learning was woven into two keynote talks at the Wilmington Information Technology Exchange (WITX) conference Tuesday at University of North Carolina Wilmington.
 
Through different lenses, speakers Don Burton and Mark McDowell looked ahead to how technology will influence and challenge centuries-old education methods.
 
Burton, former managing director of the Kaplan EdTech Accelerator who is now at the Edge EdTech Accelerator in New York City, sees entrepreneurship increasingly focusing on increasing learning and teaching effectiveness, with capital and technology flowing into the educational system.
 
“Technology has changed everything except education,” he said to the audience of about 250 people. He added that with the new focus, “education will change more in the next 30 years than in the last 1,000.”
 
McDowell, a Charlotte resident and co-founder of Acta Wireless, an investment firm focused on early-stage companies that use wireless technologies to innovate in media, advertising, payment and education industries, predicted the reemergence of a new analog age. He asserted that analog approaches to problem solving – emphasizing creativity, empathy, design and imagination – will ultimately be done through new kinds of computers that mimic what he termed the approximating capabilities of the human brain.
 
Digital calculations are essential where exactness is important, he said, but approximations are fine for solving many problems. He spoke of a future that combines digital and analog pathways, comparing that approach to early 20th-century light fixtures that worked with both gas and electricity.
 
Burton also talked about entrepreneurial ecosystems: both the process needed and the resources required to nurture them. He compared his experience in developing such an entrepreneurial community in Boulder, Colorado – where entrepreneurial activity is very intense and concentrated – to his more recent work in New York City, where the size of the city made such creation much more difficult.
 
In both locales, as in many others were Kaplan EdTech has been active, it was important to have an anchor program, which Burton described as a three-month program for startups in which they were mentored by successful entrepreneurs and companies. The program incorporated numerous events to draw participation from other parts of the entrepreneurship community. It also required substantial corporate support, he said.
 
With those resources, the anchor program was a “galvanizing event” that brought elements of the innovation community together and got them talking, Burton said.
 
“You get a lot of collisions,” he said. “That’s really important because it gets that dialogue going.”
 
For the past two years, Burton said, there has been significant interest in building entrepreneurial ecosystems around educational technology.
 
The daylong WITX conference, now in its 12th year, continues this afternoon with learning exchanges, exhibits and a speed presentation event at 5:30 p.m.