For the past three days I’ve been in Cairo, Egypt, at the Intel Learning Series Alliance Summit.

The summit is a forum for Intel to bring together an entire ecosystem of companies providing pieces of the solution pie for its education initiatives. Those revolve primarily but not exclusively around the Classmate PC, a purpose-built hardware platform for education.

The ecosystem includes a wide range of companies:

• local OEMs (tech industry jargon for original equipment manufacturers) from many of the EMEA (Europe, Middle East, and Africa) countries
• ODMs (original design manufacturers: companies that create hardware specifications or recipes for the OEMs to follow)
• Education service providers (companies that present a unified and more or less complete solution to a local education agency in the form of hardware, software, and services that they usually aggregate from multiple providers)
• Software companies with education-specific solutions (and a few here that have generic solutions they are applying to the education world)
• Intel personnel from around the world

It’s been an amazing conference, not least because of the chance to see the pyramids or because I had the opportunity to address the entire group on the first day … but also to see the immense range of companies and individuals who are part of providing educational technology solutions.

I think it’s a part of the educational technology spectrum that many educators have only a shadowy knowledge of. There are huge product, implementation, and support needs for any significant school technology effort, and most of these are multi-national and complex project-based collaborations and partnerships between easily 10 or 15 companies.

To simplify the world a little for educators, Intel is promoting the idea of the ESP: Educational Service Provider. This company brings together many custom components of a solution for a school, district, or educational region, after consulting with the school to understand their needs. After meeting with a number of these, it’s clear there’s a lot of expertise here!

It’s gratifying to see the effort that Intel has put into ensuring a secure pedagogical foundation for their products, training, and implementation resources. They’ve also spent heavily on ethnography to understand local needs in regions all over the world. And some members of their teams, like Sabine Huber in Intel Germany, have advanced degrees in educational technology (Huber’s is in 1:1 computing).

Much more going on here … too much to say! Hopefully I’ll have more chance to blog it on the flight home.