I will be there with new updates.  See you there!

Commentary on “The Power of Pull” by John Hagel III, John Seely Brown, and Lang Davison; Published by Basic Books, 2010.

Page 11:  Quote begins: < It used to be that we could rely on “stocks”of knowledge – what we know at any point in time – but these stocks are diminishing in value more rapidly than ever before.  …. In more stable times, we could sit back and relax once we had learned something valuable, secure that we could generate value from that knowledge for an indefinite period. Not anymore.  To succeed now, we have to continually refresh our stocks of knowledge by participating in relevant “flows”of knowledge – interactions that create knowledge or transfer it across individuals. > Quote ends.

What is the significance of this observation for our approach to education and training? Perhaps we must make a conscious effort to give much more emphasis on collaboration skills.  The current paradigm of education limits the opportunities for collaboration, with only an occasional team project or sports activity giving such opportunities.  For almost the entire four years of engineering education at the undergraduate level, a student goes about studying one subject after another to pass exams.  The good student is expected to listen to lectures, read textbooks, submit assignments (mostly individual assignments) and reproduce what he knows in a series of examinations.  They are all tests of “knowledge stocks”.  Hardly anyone bothers about the process of knowing, which is valuable for a lifetime.

Could we have a paradigm, where collaboration skills are given at least as much importance as individual knowledge stocks?  What would be the challenges in moving towards such a paradigm?

Perhaps, the paradigm shift is difficult because we are all conditioned to believe that one succeeds only through individual merit.  And we believe that a series of exams or assessments is the best way to measure such individual merit.  The belief is further reinforced  by corporate cultures that boast about meritocracy.  Meritocracy often becomes a euphemism for rat-race.  Thus, it is hard for us to un-condition ourselves and start looking at the possibility of success through collective merit.  But this is an alternative worth considering and experimenting with.

If the students are able to ask relevant questions, that would be an indicator of their learning.  To be able to ask good questions, it is not enough for the students to be intelligent; they should have applied their intelligence to the subject of study.  They should have spent some time really understanding the subject.

In this system of examination, each student would be given the opportunity to ask a fixed number of questions, say, 10 questions.  Certain guidelines would be given to define the broad boundaries of the topics being examined.

For each questioning opportunity, the student would be graded on a scale of zero to thee, based on the following guidelines:

Zero mark  – No question asked using the opportunity.

One mark  – Question can be answered by merely reproducing content given in the prescribed textbooks.

Two marks  – Question can be answered by critically examining the content given in the prescribed textbooks.

Three marks — Question can be answered by extending (going beyond) the content given in the prescribed textbooks, along with a critical examination of the same.

Symmetry in Nature

How Nature writes her poetry:

Symmetry in Nature - finer details

Question: Where does the Sun rise?

Answer:  In the west.

Question: How many days make a year?

Answer: Less than a day.

The teacher was happy, student was happy and she got full marks.  Funny?  Not all!  For a student on the planet Venus, these answers are right.  *Venus rotates in the direction opposite to the Earth’s rotation, and so the Sun rises in the west and sets in the east.  Since Venus rotates very slowly, a day on Venus takes 243 Earth-days.  It completes its orbit around the Sun in 224 Earth-days, thus making the Venusian year less than a Venusian day!

A Beautiful Sunset at Veli Beach, Trivandrum

Lesson: Do not judge before you get to know the context.

*Facts noted from ‘Why Venus Spins the Wrong Way’ an article by Harald Franzen in Scientific American, June 15, 2001. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=why-venus-spins-the-wrong

“Never before has this country had such an opportunity to remake the way we teach young people. One reason I am so optimistic about these developments is because, after decades of diffuse reform efforts, they all zero in on the most important ingredient of a great education: effective teachers. The key to helping students learn is making sure that every child has an effective teacher every single year.”

Title of article:   Education reform, one classroom at a time

By Melinda French Gates

Source: The Washington Post, February 19, 2010,  http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/02/18/AR2010021802919.html

My reflections:

Anyone who has a child in school realizes the importance of focusing on great teachers.  I have two kids going to a small school at Trivandrum.  Luckily, they love their school and teachers.  But they have a long way to go to complete their schooling, and I hope they will continue to get good teachers.

It is nice to see that there is a renewed understanding about the importance of getting the priorities right in educational reforms. Some signs are there in India too, but it is still too dim.  We really need to focus on the teachers.  Teaching, after all, is a process of interaction between human beings.

Now come to what we see in an educational institution.  We mostly see the front end – the tangibles. I consider Curriculum, Content and Infrastructure as the tangible components of an educational system.  These are important, but not sufficient to form a vibrant, effective educational institution.  In building and nurturing educational institutions, we must pay a lot more attention to the intangibles.  We shall broadly call it as the culture of our educational institutions.

Culture has an all-pervasive character within any organizational system.  It is mostly intangible, but its quality is felt by its effect.  It is like the air that we breath.  We don’t notice it most of the time, but the quality of air, humidity level etc. has an impact on our state of well-being on a daily basis.  We exist in our culture, just as a fish lives in water, without much conscious awareness of its presence.  Though culture is mostly intangible, it is expressed visibly in behavioural patterns, stories that we tell and the quality of the artefacts that we create.

Within the educational system, culture is mostly expressed in the pedagogic system, teaching styles, leadership & management styles, and the ways in which teachers and students interact among themselves and with each other.

While establishing and nurturing educational institutions, a lot more attention needs to be paid to these intangible aspects.  Quite often, most of the attention goes towards developing curriculum and setting up infrastructural facilities such as buildings and laboratories.  In most cases, the website and prospectus of educational institutions talk about their course curricula and infrastructure.  How many of them mention their unique pedagogic approaches?

A healthy culture in educational institutions is characterized by the following attributes:

1. Focus on high performance in academics and research.
2. Knowledge is generated through dialogue, and continuously fed back into the system for creating new insights.
3. Power derived mostly from expertise, rather than designations and position in the hierarchy.
4. Constant feedback from all stakeholders, with the feedback data used for continuous improvement.
5. Students have clarity of performance expectations, and receive accurate and prompt feedback about their performance.
6. Individual attention, even when the time available for individual meetings is constrained by schedule pressure and large batch sizes.

Organizations responsible for standard setting and accreditation, such as AICTE and NAAC in India, are too steeped in tradition to develop competencies for measuring and giving feedback on the intangible aspects.  Industry bodies such as CII, FICCI and ASSOCHAM could play a vital role in sensitizing educational institutions about the importance of the intangibles.

–  JJ’s last reflection for the day.

Is risk analysis an art or a science?  I would say it is an art.  If it were a science, you probably know the risks pretty well in advance, and then they stop being the really important risks.  The real risks are those whose probability of occurrence and impact are difficult to predict by using analytical models.  What then are the alternatives to discover and cover these potential risks?

I would say, the ability to listen keenly is the most important attribute required to manage risks effectively.  Listen to the subtle messages, often half-spoken.  Amplify and explore them in depth to bring out the nuances of the perceived risks.  Ask questions, and listen without rationalization. If you have a choice, go to the HR department and ask for a list of people who got the least ratings in the last performance appraisal. Randomly choose a few of them to be part of your project team. They will tell you more about what the real risks are, than your star team members!

In a recent book titled What You Don’t Know: How Great Leaders Prevent Problems Before They Happen, Michael A. Roberto narrates how William LeMessurier, the famous structural engineer of Citicorp building in Manhattan responded to a seemingly innocuous question by an engineering student and eventually discovered a flaw in his structural design for the building. The book also describes how LeMessurier took personal responsibility to rectify the error.  (For excerpts from the book, see: http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article.cfm?articleid=2285)  The way LeMessurier responded to the potential risk, though it was discovered rather late (after the building was completed), is a case study in the ethics of engineering and project management.

It would also be helpful to use system dynamics modeling as a method for risk analysis.  With system dynamics modeling you bring out various assumptions and mental models regarding the interplay of various parameters and inter-relationships that comprise the system.  In reality, the technical and social/organizational dimensions are very much inter-related.  As a first level of analysis we may analyze them separately; but to get the complete picture that reveals the greater risks, we need to see the interplay of various dimensions.  This is facilitated by system dynamics modeling.  The use of system dynamics modeling for risk management in complex engineering systems, with reference to NASA projects is given in a research paper by an MIT team: http://www.informs-sim.org/wsc05papers/160.pdf Also, see excellent study material on system dynamics, developed under the guidance of Prof. Jay Forrester, available on MIT OpenCourseWare:  http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Sloan-School-of-Management/15-988Fall-1998-Spring-1999/CourseHome/index.htm

The new web will be dramatically different from what we experience today.  It is not just about better interactivity or more interesting social networking sites.  It is not just better Internet access on mobile devices or improved user experience in video chat.  It will be all these, plus something that challenges our existing paradigms. Something new is to be created, if we are to call it as the new web.  Seeds for the new web are being laid by IBM.  I recently heard and read about the ‘Spoken Web’ project of IBM.

First announced in March 2009, the Spoken Web is still at the experimental stages.  But its potential is big enough to make it really an exciting piece of technology in the making.

Tradition meets Modernity

Here are a few possibilities that I imagine becoming part of our daily lives within the next few years based on the technology being developed by IBM:

1. I use my mobile phone for taking notes in meetings and classrooms.  This is quite different from the use of a voice recorder. I can later go back to the content and add your comments, hyperlink the pieces of information to other content in almost any media and network.  The spoken content now gets hyperlinked to other spoken content as well as resources on the company network and the Internet.
2. Most of my financial transactions are carried out securely and quickly by voice.   The entire financial network adapts to rely on voice instructions.
3. A new web gets built without using keyboard and mouse.  So anyone who can dial numbers on a telephone can use it as well as contribute their own bit.
4. Millions of people create their own radio stations using only their landline or mobile phones.  And these millions of radio stations are easy to search, browse and access on any device, including mobile phones, computers, TV and even the car stereo.  And all the content is stored, with powerful indexing for easy retrieval at any time.  And the pieces of content can be hyperlinked, so that any contributor can refer to or build on the content contributed by someone else.  The Spoken Web becomes the fastest way for sharing information as well as to stay in touch with friends and family.
5. New search engines are developed to discover information on the Spoken Web and present it in interesting ways. This throws up new challenges for researchers who work on the frontiers of collaboration between computer scientists, neuroscientists, psychologists and designers.
6. In the long run the human auditory system develops as much power as the human visual system.

Given below are some suggested links for further reading (sites viewed on December 12, 2009):

HSTP: Hyperspeech Transfer Protocol (by Sheetal, Dipanjan, Arun, Amit and Nitendra of IBM India Research Laboratory):  http://domino.research.ibm.com/comm/research_people.nsf/pages/arun_kumar.pubs.html/$FILE/ht07.pdf

Spoken Web: the next transformational change wave (Conversation between Dr. Manish Gupta of IBM and V. Sudhakshina of Cybermedia News, posted on April 13, 2009): http://www.ciol.com/News/Interviews/Spoken-Web-the-next-transformational-change-wave/13409118312/0/

IBM Aims At Rural VAS By Providing Talk To Web Technology (by Pradeep Kumar, posted on March 20, 2009): http://www.watblog.com/2009/03/20/ibm-aims-at-rural-vas-by-providing-talk-to-web-technology/

HSTP: Hyperspeech Transfer Protocol (by Lidija Davis, posted on March 15, 2009): http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/hstp_hyperspeech_transfer_protocol.php