Archive for January, 2008

University-Industry Collaboration (Part 2)

1/31/2008

Yesterday, I talked about all the good things that are said to be brought by university-industry collaboration. There is, however, other side of this seemingly almighty strategy. Well, “other side” might be a bit too exaggerating. But there are some things we have to keep in our mind when we discuss university-industry collaboration. What I [...]


University-Industry Collaboration

1/30/2008

In Japan, promotion of university-industry collaboration has been a key topic at many levels since the early 90′s, and especially since 2004 when all the former national universities became semi-privatized. With this drastic reform in Japanese higher education in 2004, Japanese former national universities need to be transformed into a new mode of knowledge creation. [...]


What happens to PhDs?

1/29/2008

I have been reading this book titled “Highly-Educated Working Poor – Graduate School as a Manufacturer of Part-timers ” (written in Japanese).  Sounds pessimistic?  Yep, this is a very pessimistic book, indeed. Pessimistic it may be, the book conveys the critical truth about post PhD lives in my country.  In Japan, a lot of new graduate schools were established around the time all [...]


World Competitiveness Ranking – Where is Japan?

1/28/2008

World Competitiveness. For the first entry of my guest-blogging, this topic would not be too bad, I suppose. Thus, World Competitiveness. According to World Competitive Yearbook 2007 by IMD (International Institute for Management Development), Japan is now ranked in the 24th place, sliding out of the top twenty. Allowing China to pass (China rose from [...]


Introducing Ai Takeuchi, guest blogger

1/27/2008

Ai Takeuchi recently completed her doctoral dissertation at the University of Minnesota in the Department of Educational Policy and Administration. Her research interests focus on international development with a special interest in gender issues and international study and training. In her study, Dr. Takeuchi explored the issues related to post study-abroad for Asian women. She [...]


Open seminar 2.0 kick off

1/24/2008

Version 2.0 of the open seminar/co-seminar “From information to innovative knowledge: Tools and skills for adaptive leadership” kicked off this evening with its first meetings. The second version of this training program continues the main characteristics of co-seminars: international, bilingual, and supported with Web 2.0 technologies. The course is designed to enhance learning, utilizing methodologies [...]


The LeapFrog principles and outcomes

1/23/2008

Slides from last week’s presentations at Edison High School and the Minnesota House E-12 Education Committee Working Group on High School Redesign: These slides are also posted at the LeapFrog Institutes.


The inconvenient truth about “Math education: An inconvenient truth”

1/22/2008

I’m not sure how to comment on this one. The most efficient algorithm for me to solve the math problems she steps through is to use tools that are immediately accessible to me: by pressing the calculator button on my keyboard, using the calculator function in my cell phone, or use a standalone calculator. The [...]


Open seminar 2.0 countdown continues…

1/21/2008

Caption: Working late into this evening, the instructional team in Minnesota, Mexico, Ecuador and Chile (that’s a span of nearly 9,000 km among the conferencing sites!) tests various video and audio conferencing connections.


Learning as a social event

1/21/2008

One of the participants in the upcoming knowledge co-seminar, Ismael Peña-López, wrote on the visit of John Seely Brown at UOC as part of the institution’s Innovation Forums. He pondered, “is there anything more in ‘open’ and learning than Open Educational Resources?” From Ismael’s notes: Tinkering — enjoy fixing, experimenting — as a learning platform. [...]


Related posts

Just what are co-seminars?

A while back, I promised to share more on what co-seminars look like and how they operate. I promise to show a little bit tomorrow, with sample videos and a link to a co-seminar in progress. But, before I get to that, let me supply some background. Co-seminars exhibit the following main characteristics: international; multilingual; [...]


Open Seminar 2.0: A hemisphere of innovative knowledge

“Version 2.0″ of the open seminar “From Information to Innovation Knowledge” will kick off on January 24, 2008. Partnering institutions include the College of Education and Human Development at the University of Minnesota, FLACSO-México, FLACSO-Ecuador, and FLACSO-Chile. Confirmed guest lecturers include Dr. Nora Sabelli at SRI International and Ismael Peña-López at Universitat Oberta de Catalunya. [...]


Leapfrog Asia!

I’m still in China, so this is just a quick note that CNN.com published a special report labeled “Just Imagine,” a vision of what life would be like in 2020. The learning section is quite good, and contains an interview with Yasuaki Sakyo, who founded Shibuya University Network — and implemented a lifelong learning approach [...]


Random tinkering as a pathway to innovation

Nassim Nicholas Taleb writes for Forbes that: Things, it turns out, are all too often discovered by accident–but we don’t see that when we look at history in our rear-view mirrors. The technologies that run the world today (like the Internet, the computer and the laser) are not used in the way intended by those [...]


Wired: Play Warcraft? You’re hired!

This is a great article! Online education often provides too much explicit knowledge and too little tacit knowledge and social interaction. In this article, John Seely Brown and Douglas Thomas identify an avenue for tacit knowledge production in virtual settings. As virtual reality is becoming more-and-more preferred over the real world, perhaps the “Leapfrog U” [...]


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