Feb 4 2009 Update: Found at Technology Review: “It turns out that India’s ‘$20 laptop’ — a gadget meant to cheaply deliver online educational content to students at more than 18,000 Indian colleges — may actually be more of a handheld web access device than a laptop computer.” And, it doesn’t look like a laptop [...]

As a follow-up to last week’s posts by Ai Takeuchi with Japanese perspectives on global education, I wanted to comment on Steve Jobs’ claim that nobody reads books anymore –and counter his claim by pointing out that books are alive and well in Japan because the Japanese are embracing the distribution possibilities provided by new [...]

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. 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 [...]

Roger Martin writes that “Chinese and Indian companies aren’t leaving design to the North Americans”: “There is a romantic notion in North American business that its future lies in design and innovation, while India and China will be the home of less skilled, lower-paying operations churning out the products and services the U.S. comes up [...]