Air-cover: Innovation's secret ingredient

Bill Fischer has written about how innovation can flourish in organizations (see his latest book The Idea Hunter (co-authored with Andy Boynton),Jossey-Bass, 2011). You need a great team that can work freely. That is a necessity. But, what he finds as more important is to protect this team from the day to day problems and the usual business related stress and strains. Someone with enough authority, within the organization, can do this. Such a person would need to be visionary enough to understand what's needed, what's possible, etc. and have faith in the team. Usually, such person will be a hard nosed businessman, but needs to have this head in the cloud kind of imaginative bent of the mind too. Mr. Fischer provides many examples of this collaboration over time. Steve Jobs succeeded, repeatedly, in nurturing such innovation. May be, this is a necessary combination to get innovative products/ services generated in an organization!


Air-cover: Innovation's secret ingredient - Forbes:

Observations about Academia

I met a principal of an engineering college in Hyderabad. We got to talking. The topic turned to evaluation of faculty members. I have several posts on how, in the present way of administering things, you cannot reward good performance of teachers. Having worked in industry for a long time, rewarding performance is something routine and one of the best tool to encourage someone to give his/her best. I discovered that is not possible here, how do you provide positive reinforcement  to some one doing well!


Having listened through a lot of presentations, I was a little surprised how performance issues are never discussed in such gatherings. Performance issues, particularly, teaching performance need to be evaluated and really good teachers need to be encouraged. Looks like this issues is an aversion universally. I have been following up on "lecture capture" for sometime now. One of the biggest barrier seems to be the aversion of teachers to appear in such lecture capture sessions.The resistance coming from the fact that the video may be used for evaluation. Student evaluation, often is not usable. Then what do you use for evaluation. Research performance and other aspects may not tell you anything about the teaching capabilities.


There is another side to teaching capabilities, comments on that later.

Another Seminar and Some Observations About Academia

I was at a place named Sirhind in Punjab on 16 th. and 17th Dec. There was a seminar about the role of regulatory bodies in higher education. That is a significant issue. I presented a paper on " Technological Changes Impacting Teaching-learning processes". This talked about some significant changes happening in technology related to education. To me, the most significant thing is the changes now possible with text books.


From the time text books were created as printed material, since the time of Gutenberg, text books have been quite static.By the time it is published and start to get used in classrooms, the material is already behind times. One of the criticisms about text books have been that text books are out of date compared to what is happening in industry. Even when newer editions come out, they take 2/3 years and thus never in sync. If you create a ebook now, it is possible to be absolutely current. Even if the text book were to be updated, it can be done very frequently and distributed easily.


Text books can be customized for a course being run on different colleges, different course and for different instructors. A student can add material to it and customize it further. It can be updated as he learns, researches the material, the book can be a living document. For professional courses this can keep being updated through the students' working life too!


Would it not be nice if the book could keep updating itself!


Comments on Academia remains reserved for the next post, hopefully in a couple of days!

China Advancing on Their Navigation Setup

The eighth of the 35 constellation Beidou system went up on the 27 of July. This is a sure sign of China's determination of creating a navigation set up all of their own. This will take a complete break from the familiar GPS system. The system should be complete and star its international operation by 2020, as claimed by the Xinhua.
China launches navigation satellite: Xinhua

OMAP4470 Will Power Smarter Smartphones

Users keep demanding more and more power on their smartphones. They would expect ever smarter apps to run on these devices. The processors have started to become multicore in the process. Over the years the user interface experience has become an important feature required in smartphones. That has driven graphics capability into the processor core.With the blowing up of video demand, it is increasingly necessary to have these combine CPU+GPU  processors handle video. Video at HD and 3D variants are also increasingly being demanded. manufacturers are trying to meet these demands with processors with multiple cores, integrated graphics processing and capability to handle HD video, etc. Here is an example that was announced back in jun and are due into market by early 2012, sampling should start during second half of this year. Here's the press release announcing the processor.
OMAP4470 app processor packs processing power, graphics and display functions

Reinventing the book

This too is for academics, general readers too. Books, as we know them, is changing completely! Possibilities are immense. This article looks at some of them as is happening and as is evident from the BookExpo end May!
For one thing, the possibilities of combining multi-media has not really been applied completely. I feel very excited in thinking about just how it can be used for making the learning of concepts so easy. Education is, after all, about getting these concepts! Rest of your life, one applies them and possibly makes this place a little more livable! As people get more used to reading from screens, the book is bound to shift to the screen. There are no two ways about it. I would think, that would happen by the time the young generation, early and late twenties, take over. These people are so used to reading screens that reading learning material from screens would be very natural for them. What form the content will take is anybody's guess. This article discusses a few, things that are visible already. Time to think how best to use the new technologies and how to use them for learning!


Reinventing the book, one uncertain step at a time

Take engineering education in context - 2011-04-21 10:00:00 | EDN

This piece is for everyone involved in engineering practice. The article I have cited below brings out a major issue in how engineering is taught everywhere. Dr. Kevin C Craig mainly criticizes how in the engineering curriculum we teach skills in isolation and very little attention is paid to "playing the game". By playing the game he compares it with training of a baseball player where a rookie learns all the skills as well as how to use them together to play. In case of an engineer it will be actually engineering things while using all the skills he learns in isolation, without a good feel of how they are to be used together. How to use the skills learnt individually and in combination is vital to creating good engineers.


In our context, the situation is even more pathetic. The so-called engineers we churn out every year are woefully short on those individual skills. Capability to use them together is something they are not very capable of . We, the trainers are to blame for that I would think.

Take engineering education in context - 2011-04-21 10:00:00 | EDN