An Approach to Education

One of my thoughts about the future is that, with respect to education, teachers will become more important as facilitators for knowledge, for the transmissions of core values in society (whatever they might be), and for the human presence. Other than that, the teaching of the subjects themselves will be all about technology and immersive experiences.

By facilitators of knowledge I mean – critical enquiry of the knowledge that learners acquire and applications and the learner’s own contributions.

I suspect that in that future, every kid will be able to pursue their own passions, through the customization of their own syllabus and curriculum. That means every kid will be able to learn slightly different things, even construct their own synthesis between different areas of knowledge. The trend with education has always been the introduction of more complex material at a younger age. In time to come, I suspect kids in kindergarten would be able to learn quantum mechanics/relativity. Who knows?

Prospects for Education

I wait in excitement the day the first classroom in Singapore gets a multitouch screen. And I hope the first classroom will not be those upper-tier schools, but a school in a neighbourhood, in the weakest class, where students will become interested in learning again, and come to school with the daily expectation of being blown away by another powerful demonstration of technology not just to teach, but also to express.

I believe that technology empowers people to express and create, no matter the medium. I think of this interesting thought when schools become the temporary monopoly of high-brow technology in any community, where even ordinary folks would go to schools and interact with the tech. I know this is a bit far-fetched, and considering that interaction with tech – that’s for the library and for the community centres. Nonetheless – when that technology is democratised, when schoolkids and scribble on their own multitouch pad and rich people will be messing around with supercomputers…

With technology empowering the forms of expression with young people, the onus will be upon the teachers to teach and guide – that onus will never have been greater, because of the double-edged character of tech. I expect frequent abuses of the tech, then, teachers might have some master switch of some sort to incapacitate a student’s tech if the student is found to have committed wrongdoings. But I believe that the young kids will come round, and learn to use the tech in beneficial ways… or so I hope.

That means more lessons for teachers on how to use the tech creatively and expressively. Once again, tech is only the means to an end – the end, which is, to impart knowledge in a way that students will want to do so on their own, to find their own contexts and meaning in the knowledge that they have acquired. Some sort of an assessment – in the form of examinations will still be required, to assess the students’ capacity to internalise the knowledge, and maybe more interesting questions, for example, how to test falsifiability of concepts they have learnt (what to look out for if what they learn is wrong and how to confirm rightness/wrongness)…

Learning to learn – I think that’s the real way of learning. And I think that’s where teachers need to be trained as well… Not as pompous know-it-alls, but people with the passion to learn and the passion to teach that attitude – that philosophy…

Lifelink!

Is it possible to connect everything we are with everything we do? Our interests, our studies, with our hobbies, our friends, our personalities?

The components of our lives do not stand by themselves. Everywhere we look in our lives we can see invisible links connecting one area to another. This sounds airy-fairy, but it is true, isn’t it? We are who we are, what we do, because of a certain way the links connected to one another.

In a way, this is just Emoviere expressed in a different way. It takes a life, individual-centred perspective to see how things in the person’s life all connected with each other.

I don’t know how it’s going to be done, or how the actual thing is going to look life. Its actual use is also going to be an issue of design, of both form and function, or if its possible, the information itself defining both form and function.

Emoviere grows bigger

Emoviere is bigger than I thought.

Emoviere is more than about managing your social relationsips. It’s about managing your life.

But of course, unfortunately, Emoviere is also non-existent.

I think now, there is really a market out there, for life-managing applications, things that go beyond news aggregators and social aggregators. It’s now all about information, our access to it, and how we relate to it, how we contextualise that information with ourselves, with our lives. We don’t want to just know the news, we want to know how it makes sense to us. We want to know how it relates to the various parts of our lives.

It’s not about information – its about information connecting to us, connecting with everyone else we know, and seriously, those things are the things that really matter. So what, if we know the news? We would like our friends to know the news, and how I relate to the news. Similarly, I would want to know how my friends react and respond to the news out there. Does it cause them anxiety? Are they interested in the things I’m doing?

If something could meet that need, that universal need to connect with things and with ourselves…

Introducing… the Personal Information Aggregator

I have a lot of books, a lot of saved Internet articles, and quite a bit of ideas, some written, some spelt out in abbreviated point forms.

I’m then thinking, I’m actually taking in quite a bit of information, and they are all in my head. I wish I could consolidate all of the essays i’ve written, all of the books I’ve read, along with all of the webbie stuff that I’ve gone through – and try to see how all of them are connected, and see how every part connects to one another. I don’t want to make tools for people to connect to information and to their own worlds – I want to make tools to allow people to do it by themselves – which I think is more empowering.

But how to do that? – Thats the potential billion-dollar question. I don’t know…

This is related to Emoviere – heck, this was suppose to be a section of Emoviere, but this thing could be by itself…

Homes for Bright Green Living

Here’s another idea I had.

I live in an apartment, and everywhere, all the old people think about the ‘kampung’ days, where everyone knew everyone else, and everyone was actively contributing in a community. So older people lament that the kampung spirit is dead or something like that.

I think it is so important that urban planners have to incorporate social considerations in their designs of towns and all. But my point here is not that. Since we’re living in an age of exploding technology, why not harness it?

Wire up every home to one another, have a simple interface where people can interact with each other easily. It might be a simple screen in the living room, or simple LED indicators regarding the status of the neighbours. A simple, ‘at home’ or ‘away’ or ‘traveling’. Or ‘cooking curry chicken’. Sharing recipes, sharing household stuff. ‘Child weak in math. Please help’. Make it simple, make it really accessible. So that anyone can use it. And it’ll have to be always ‘on’, to be really effective.

I think it’s a simple tool where people can easily utilize to get together.

And the other idea is simply making HDB flats more green. The usual. People in the top floors complain of winds. So put wind turbines on the tops of the HDB. And put solar panels on the exterior. Why not? Advice homeowners on more efficient technologies that can cool the house. Adaptable walls, adaptable windows that absorb or reflect sunlight depending on interior circumstance. Why not?

Since Singapore is so vulnerable to external shocks, might as well build some shock absorbers within. Improve energy efficiency so we’ll rely less on fossil fuels. So it’ll help to reduce inflation, and stem the increase in the cost of living. It can all be done. Why not?

I wish I could put the new Al Gore video, but since I can’t, well…

Unfortunately, wordpress doesn’t support the video embedding, so there’s a nice video on TED but I can’t show. Its by Al Gore, and in it, he makes an even more compelling case for the climate crisis, and that ‘we’ meaning everyone, as a generation.

Here’s the video…

http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/243

But the rest of the entry isn’t going to about the video. It’s about TED. And it’s not about TED, its about all these cross-disciplinary talks and collaborations and what it means for the future for all of us. It’s going to be the new way to live work and play, and people need to know about all these exciting thing that are happening.

A simple idea about buses and routes

Have you ever ridden on a bus and constantly looking out of the window to see if you are on track to your destination?

Well, there ought to be a simple solution somewhere, and I thought that it would be cool if bus users could know about the landmarks they might see along their routes, as in, pictures they might see along the way and correlating the landmarks that they see with the bus stops nearby.

Of course, this is assuming that people remember bus routes with landmarks…

Introducing Emoviere and the Emoverse!

I would like to introduce this idea of mine. It starts off as a personal attempt to figure out my emotional life, and how I think web technologies can help me do that.

It starts off with a few premises:

1. We all have friends. That’s simple enough.

2. All of us are doing different things at different times. What I mean is, we have work, hobbies, families, church, studies, and all.

3. When we are doing all those different things, we make friends! Again, simple enough.

4. Friends from these different aspects of our lives are different in kind. We can’t expect our church friends to know what goes on in school, nor can we expect school friends to know the challenges we have at work. And our family can’t really be expected to know everything that goes on everywhere else.

5. Not all friends are equal. Not all our friends will be BFFs.

So from these few ideas, I was wondering, if its possible to create some sort of tool that will enable us to connect our friends in the respective communities that we inhabit.

Currently as I see it, social networking sides don’t really enable you to group and classify friends according to communities and emotional distance. You can’t really focus on the people that you want to focus on. We might have a few hundred ‘friends’, but whats the point when you can only spend a limited amount on time on some of your friends?

Thus was born Emoviere.

The other key thing that I dreamnt for Emoviere was that it would depend on really graphical representations in the way it functions. The person might be the central star, or central core, or the main attractor, and friends from the same area would be clustered together, like particles or asteroids in orbit around the main star. In this way, school friends would be tightly bunched up together, distinct from work friends and the like. Another representation of emotional distance might simply be like electrons in different energy states, or whatever. These are just the bases that I’m starting from.

If the user so desires, he/she will be able to express his/her emotional state by simply illustrating it with the central star/planet that represents the user. If there’s a life-changing crisis, the world might break up and slowly re-form back over a few months. If there’s been just a slight misshap, then there might be just a fissure that runs along the star/planet. If the user feels angry, then a volcano blows up. Or something like that. Wouldn’t that be cool?

And I would really love Emoviere to be able to utilize the user’s existing networks from other social networking sites. That would be great.

And then comes the other part of Emoviere. The user can simply put whatever stuff he/she wants to share with people, connecting others to his/her personal universe of photos, videos, blogs/writing, twitter? and all. That way, people will be able to share their lives with each other.

Together, the sum of the user’s emotional universe in life and of friends, all of these would constitute the Emoverse!