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I recently submitted an essay for the NUHA blogging prize . The question I picked was "Most people don't listen with the intent to understand; they listen with the intent to reply." - Stephen R. Covey. Do you agree? My title was " We Make the Sacred Profane ". Here is the introduction: Covey writes at an interesting time for humanity. While his quote is taken from a book about personal change, it is also written in the context of effectiveness. Effectiveness can be defined differently depending on one’s context, but this essay focuses on two perspectives: One is of the Responder, and the other is of the Understander. These two perspectives can often seem to be opposites, but are in fact interdependent. Read the rest of my essay here . I also submitted an essay back in 2016, titled " The Paradox of Arts Today ".

"We explore creation as we sense it, but there is no known example of a creature in the world that has the mind of a human. For some, it is the ability to choose destiny, to forge past what is right versus what is wrong. For others, it is the ability to love, to care for another in the most unique of ways. But, we cannot fathom a uniform definition of humanity except in the face of each other. To be human is to be the same as one another."  Rajabu glanced at his phone. 3 minutes left. The old man was small, sitting on a chair with his back to the campus wall. His diction was clear, like Rajabu's great grandfather. Rajabu knew the English those men spoke was immaculate and came from a very systematic and colonial education. He had never seen this old man... Read more of my submission to the 2016 NUHA Blogging Prize here.

Are habit-formulation and disruption mutually exclusive? I read a lot about how successful people (Pending: Definition of "success") attribute much of their success to well-formulated habits; things they do day in, day out that are fixed in a schedule bound by time. Yet, I also read about unconventional activities that lead to changes in the way our world works that were previously unprecedented. So, in a world where "habit" implies consistency and "disruption" breaks it, what's a 3-year old to choose?

"In any self-organising system there is a need to escape from a local optimum in order to move towards a more global optimum. The techniques of lateral thinking, such as provocation, are designed to help that change." -- Edward de Bono on Lateral Thinking

So much to think about here, but needed to throw  this link in here along with the following quote: “We have not yet become good enough at the kind of pedagogues that make the most of technology; that adding 21st century technologies to 20th century teaching practices will just dilute the effectiveness of teaching.” This is not news, especially not in Tanzania. But thinking broadly about the situation, here is what will be on my mind for the rest of the day: Why is technological innovation in education surpassing the needs of those who teach and learn today? If technology is made up of tools that support needs, what needs is ed tech supporting? What will it take for pedagogy to adapt practice + content to current tools? Or is this a reverse-logic problem?

Two recent observations: First, it makes sense to me that a manager should hire/work with staff that have better skills than the manager him/herself. Otherwise, if the manager was better-skilled, then managing would be an unproductive use of time (as opposed to operating). Second, the hiring tradition in TZ seems to cultivate an opposite scenario, one in which managers are often better-skilled than their supervisees. Getting things done, therefore, is commonly a function of the manager's direct input in operations. 

I return, about 6 months later. No, I didn't forget about my blog, nor the people that may (read: may never) read it. Oh no. What I may have forgotten is how valuable an activity blogging can be.  Where I work now , time is of the essence. Here's an Edward Said nightmare: We are trying to sell to people who have very little to spend; they need to be in many places at once, and are not as mobile as society may think they are. They are sensitive to change, but are demanding about their aspirations. So when it comes to our products, services and sales routes, we are constantly moving, shifting, trying.  That leaves me with little time to think and do the things I write about here.  I used to think this situation was a binary choice and, therefore, a problem. However, I have come to think of the "binary" in a different way: It isn't about time; it's about ideas.  A friend once told me that I would either spend the rest of my life building someone...

Read this article on FT Magazine today. Interesting how artists can benefit from the streaming industry after all, just when it looked like artists were going to go broke due to free streaming and downloading online. Can this be applied to learning? For instance, can teachers benefit from putting out custom curriculum that they write from their bedrooms? Better yet, can students benefit from asking the right questions on the web? The answers to these may lie in who we think are the "artists" in this situation: The teachers, or the students, or someone else?

"Students may find their own ways of assessing quality by applying the approach they might take when shopping online for shoes or mobile phones to selecting a university course." Full article here . User-centric design or just fast-food school?

This post was created on 19th October 2014 at 1640. However, it was published into the past, on 15th September 2014 at 1640. There is not much point to this post, except 2 lessons: (1) History can be fabricated, (2) history is being fabricated. 

There's a bunch of works on investing that I've spent minimal time and attention on. But today I clicked on a post referred by a friend , and found some simple but fantastic words from Li Ka-Shing (who I only found out about through this post). Here is an extract: " Life can be designed. Career can be planned. Happiness can be prepared. You should start planning now. When you are poor, spend less time at home and more time outside. When you are rich, stay at home more and less outside. This is the art of living. When you are poor, spend money on others. When you’re rich, spend money on yourself. Many people are doing the opposite. " This puts a lot in perspective for me, compared to the other works I've seen. Thanks, LKS and NM!

Two more Economist articles. This one suggests that academic journals are likely to lock down their clients' sharing tendencies (including asking their clients' to remove published content from their own websites). One journal, Elsevier, has already started asking people to take stuff that belongs to their journal down. I appreciated this quote from Thomas Hickerson, chief librarian at the University of Calgary: “Requesting such removals…seems at odds with the nature of an academic enterprise, in which the sharing of research information is an essential element.” Another article discusses the skew of research itself; that it is mostly based on the US, where there is an abundance of data available. It's a sad situation for the world's poor, who ironically need the implementation of all the cool things that academia finds out: "The world’s poorest countries are effectively ignored by the profession. From 1985 to 2005 Burundi was the subject of just four ...

A library was recently torched in Tripoli . This is not the first time I am reading about the burning of library texts. I have two thoughts I want to share with future kin about this matter. First, that knowledge is manifested through the actions of mankind should be regarded as fact. That is, knowledge has physical implications. For example, the knowledge of how to build a car is manifested in the building of a car; the car is proof that a systemic plan (which includes its corresponding theories and all the experimentation around those theories to prove them as true) was executed. But knowledge itself is not physical. It exists first in the mind. Second, whatever mankind's opinion, knowledge ought to be preserved. Even for "bad knowledge", future generations ought to understand the prevailing interests of past times. Otherwise, if knowledge from different points in time or communities is erased, then history is obscured. Using the example of building a car, how wou...

1. Lessons should never be compartmentalized, because decompartmentalizing them always seems disruptive. Yet, progress cannot be achieved without continuous criticism and learning. 2. Everywhere in life, contradictions are inevitable, especially amidst human activity. 3. It's a meritocratic world. Contribute something valuable or perish.  4. You live a finite life. Therefore, self-interest is necessary at some, if not all points in life. 5. Sure, the world changes and so should practices. But the experience of elders counts. 

I just came by this NYTimes article which is a somber reflection on the progress of MOOCs. One example (from a few): "Much of the hope - and hype - surrounding MOOCs has focused on the promise of courses for students in poor countries with little access to higher education. But a separate survey from the University of Pennsylvania released last month found that about 80 percent of those taking the university’s MOOCs had already earned a degree of some kind."  The first opinion on the article posted here agrees with this reflection. For me, the power of MOOCs lies in the ability to (1) disseminate content in a smartly moderated way, and (2) to collect feedback directly from any number of students. Perhaps I am blurring the lines too much between MOOCs and VLEs, but the ways in which a "stranger"-student would be able to contribute to the content that will be taught next time around seems powerful to me. Why, then, do we busy ourselves in worrying about h...

About 300 years ago, the scientific method was developed as a way to find new knowledge while making room to discredit faulty knowledge. This Economist article brings this method into question today. It discusses how the new knowledge we read in journals today could be unverified. It could be unverified because experiments are seldom repeated, when they once were to test the authenticity of findings across different contexts. What's the implication of this? It means that "new" knowledge is spreading uncontested, meaning it could be totally baseless. And if this is what ends up shaping how we educate the young, from primary to secondary to higher education systems, then what will they really know in 50 years? 100 years? 

How else can learning happen? Here are 10 alternative options to how we design formal learning today: 1. Learning circles with one mentor 2. Home schooling with one teacher 3. Parents as teachers throughout the learning "cycle" 4. Friends circles with no one teacher 5. Self-teaching 6. Pre-programmed learning software 7. Learning by experience 8. Vocational training; one mentor, one skill at a time 9. Visiting the library 10. Conversations with one friend (paired learning) I am sure some of these options do happen. In thinking about these options, I am curious about the following: a. How are pupils qualified? b. Who awards the qualification? c. Do qualifications need to be standard across many people? We have reached our current popular version of schooling after some research and thought into pedagogy and rising populations. My contention is that it is never too late to reassess that research and thought. The world and how we communicate is cha...

If marketing is an effort to ring in new customers by relating product/services to them, and if knowledge exchange involves sharing deep stories about the effect of things, then marketing is indeed a form of knowledge exchange.  If companies publicized why their news was good for the world rather than just provide the good news to the world, marketing may just begin to make more sense. It may also get tremendously easier. 

In the first post of these series, I basically asked how people will choose what they read in the future. In the second post , I asked what will information will be available when they go looking. Now I would like to ask: What will be an 18-year-old's motivation to read about a random status update from his or her's counterpart on the opposite side of the world? There is a ton of information out there these days. You can hardly avoid it when you log into your social media accounts, even after all the filtering and careful choosing of "friends". You might have logged on in search of something specific, but you tend to get distracted by the waterfall of everything else. So, if this grows, what will motivate one to check on the waterfall at all? Will there be mechanisms to further customize one's content to their own tastes? Will we develop an interest in peer-to-peer learning that is complimentary to formal, productive, more industrial learning? My gut te...

Who demands education and who supplies it? In this post, I refer to "education" as formal education, that is the learning that takes place in school classrooms. There is a consistent tendency among people and institutions today to assume that education is demanded by students and their parents or guardians and supplied by teachers and schools. So, when anything happens to go well in education - a certain year showing exceptionally good results, or a surge in engineering professionals - schools are rewarded. Similarly, when anything devastating happens in education - a year of terrible results, or an increase in exam-time suicides - schools are blamed.  But this assumption begs a question: Where is the students' and parents' or guardians' demand for education rooted? Is it an esoteric demand that comes from within the household at any given inspirational moment? Or is it an exoteric demand that comes from outside the household, nudging the household itself ...