I am Dr. J. Anupurni, HRE, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, BIT campus, and I know it's literature up early. I am delighted to be here to host this inauguration function. Welcome to COVID-19 National Bioinformatics, online hackathon for full stackers, integration function organized by an I know city spoken tutorial, IIT Bombay, Indian culture, Delfi Foundation, MSSW, and Climates for Technologies, and endorsed by ASD, MHRD, MSDE, Skill India, Directorate General of Training, NSDC, PMKVY, and NASBET. COVID-19 is an ongoing pandemic, shaking the world with its serious consequences. Millions of people are being affected by the touch of this lethal virus. The life of human beings has been terribly harmed by the outcome of it, has led loss of lives and economic downfall, crippling the normal life. Although people are getting used to the so-called new normal and the lockdown by following social distancing, preventive measures of COVID, and reminds lots of needs that are still left uncovered. So, focusing on the need of the hour, we have organized this online hackathon to challenge full stack developers to build community health information system apps, and mobile responsive web for Indian states. To start with, I would like to call upon Dr. T. Sandil Kumar, Dean, University College of Engineering, Anna Inosri Tirucharapalli, to deliver the welcome letters. Myself, Dr. T. Sandil Kumar, Dean, University College of Engineering, Anna University Tirucharapalli, honored to welcome you all for this inaugural session of the event, COVID-19, National Bioinformatics Online Hackathon for Full Stakers. We have a platform for the students of our country to build the community health information application and mobile response web for our country. I'm glad in welcoming eminent personality who are presented for this inaugural session. First and foremost, I would like to welcome our Honorable White Chancellor of Anayana Chennai, Professor M.K. Surappa for this inaugural function. I take this opportunity to express sincere thanks to Honorable White Chancellor for the inspiring, dynamic, and visionary leadership and guidance for conduct of this event. Honorable White Chancellor, tireless effort towards welfare of people and student community encourages us to conduct this event, even during the lockdown period. He's motivated us to conduct this event to encourage the student talent for the social reason. With this inspiring thoughts and motivation, we are conducting this event to help the people with outbreak of COVID-19 pandemic. I am very glad to welcome our Honorable White Chancellor in this session. I welcome you, sir. Thank you. I welcome Professor Anil D. Sansapudde, Chairman of the All India Council Particular Education, New Delhi, for supporting us to promote this national event. I thank him for accepting our invitation to deliver the chief guest address during this inauguration. I welcome you, sir. I thank our beloved registrar, Anayana Chennai, Professor Garnamutti, who are supporting us in all of our endeavours. I welcome Professor M.K. Venkatesan, Controlled Office Examination, Anayana Chennai, who has always supported us, motivates all of us in the endeavours. I welcome you, sir. I welcome Professor S. Salladurai, Additional Minister, Centre for Constituent Colleges, Anayana Chennai, who is a constant source of support as and all our activities I welcome you, sir. I wholeheartedly welcome Professor S. Mutton, Coordinator for National Health for Health Care and Development and University, and Professor Sankaran, Network Consultant of NHHID, who are a constant source of support and support us. I extend to welcome to Professor Kannan M. Maudalya, Chapter Professor, Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, I welcome you, sir. I am welcoming Mr. Jeevanandam Dureshwamy, Founder, CEO, Climate Smart Technology Co-op, a former World Bank consultant and also an organisation committee member on this event. I welcome Mr. Antony Stephen, Assistant Professor Head, Department of Social Entrepreneurship, Metta School of Social Work Chennai, also an organisation secretary for this event. I also welcome Jagan Karthik and Lakshmi Jaganathan, Murphy Foundation, Bangalore, of this session. I also welcome our Deputy Registrar, Dr. Shibu, Dr. S. Raja Samvel, Principal of Metta School of Social Work Chennai, Ms. Purneshwari Pundusamy, Managing Director of Climate Smart Technology, Bangalore, for this inaugural session. Finally, I welcome my own team from Manan University, Tirucharapalli, Dr. V. Prachikudi, Pedadipurma, Pharmaceutical Technology, Dr. S. Annapurni, Head, C.S.C. and I.T. department, who are all in this event, also welcome various heads of the session. I take this opportunity, also welcome the technical committee members, the Eminent Professor for various institution across the country, students from the various parts of our country, and members of present media for inaugural session. Once again, I welcome everyone for this inaugural session of the event, COVID-19, National Bioinformatics Online Akkatha, for the full-stakers with your support and encouragement. I hope this event will become a grand success, a development of many apps on our website for helping our society during this critical situation. I congratulate and wish them all the best for all the student friends. With this, I conclude my welcome note. I hand over the session to our missionary leader and Honorable Vice Chancellor of Anand Chennai, Professor M.K. Surapa for inaugural address.


Hello, hello. Welcome back. This feels much more like law school, doesn't it? This setting. Great to have you back. Thanks so much for your hard cluster work. I hope you submitted some ideas so that Rob has something to chew on. He's fired up, Rob, right? Great. So it's a real pleasure for me, actually for the first time in my career, to introduce Jonathan Citrain, who's not only my boss in many respects, but actually the co-founder of the Berkman Center and a member of the board, the co-director of the Berkman Center. He's a professor here at Harvard Law School, but also at the Kennedy School, and is a professor of computer science as well. Jonathan, in many respects, is combining many of the things we talked about over the past three days in a quite unique way. So he's a man with an educational vision. He has deep technological expertise and combines the two in a fantastic way. And most importantly, he has this gift as a teacher to create human connections. And we talked about the importance of exactly that skill as well. Frankly, it's been among the most inspiring teachers I've ever had, and I'm deeply grateful that you join us today for a session, and that I'm here to introduce you for once. Thank you. Thank you, Urs. Good afternoon. It was around 1998 in this kind of room, in fact in this very room, I started to see seas of laptops as well as seas of faces, and I knew what that basically meant. I would look out on those laptops, and if I could see what was going on on the other side, the chances are good that this is what I would be seeing. And this is a problem because I could try to kind of amp up the teaching to be more interesting than this, but it is depressingly difficult to do. So that's 1998. Fast forward to the introduction of wireless networking and respective cards in student laptops, and this became this. You had networked internet hearts, and now people were playing each other, which the tell was somebody in the middle of class would just be like, damn, there's an unrelated to what I was saying. That was sort of the advance of bringing networks into things. And then finally, you move into the latter part of the first decade of the 21st century, and you end up with this. There are actually people winning and losing substantial sums of money during class. Now, that is progress of a sort. I want to abstract a way to say, step one was basically a product. Solitaire came bundled with Windows. It was a product. It was yours to play as much as you wanted on the machine, and people took up that offer all too often. Then you get into something like this, which has a network mediating different people playing, and it's essentially a service, a service mutually offered among the players, but it moves from product to service. Then you see, wait a minute, if there's fun to be had, that means there's money to be made, and we go from product to service to commerce. And I say that is actually the trend line for the larger sets of issues that we're convened here to talk about during the week, and I want to sort of amend that trajectory a little bit so that the kinds of stuff we're talking about, namely conveying the flame of knowledge among people back and forth and actually apprenticing to the Western Enlightenment to see that as something different than this. It's not in the same category. It's not cash and carry, and now you know stuff that somehow might increase your ROI as a profit producing creature later. Not that there is anything wrong with that, but there might also be something more. Now we saw a kind of sense starting again, this is from 2000, an online knowledge alliance is going to be formed for which I love. They needed some kind of stock photo. It's like, how about the quad of the British Library? Like, okay, works for me. We have big institutions getting together to found fathom.com. Do people remember fathom? Anybody here fund fathom? Nobody wants to admit to that. Anybody a student of fathom? Those were good times, fathom.com. Well, not so much, but the idea was somehow we're going to take material and offer it for free. It was too soon, it was too confused, and there were lots of copyright questions and vision questions, and then you just ended up with this wonderful kind of swan song of the dot-coms that never quite took off. Founded by Columbia 1999, launched in 2000 with the goal of providing high quality resources to a global audience. Here are some statistics, and then in 2003, as part of a reorganization of Columbia University's digital media, who could have predicted that, we had to pull the plug. It's too bad, it was just about to succeed when they reorganized. So although visitors are no longer be able to purchase courses through fathom, including introduction to grammar, Columbia will provide this fathom archive so that it blah, blah, blah, blah. Okay, so that was sort of thinking of things in the kind of product mode, and there is still the idea, this is the revolutionary idea from MIT of open courseware, is also thinking in terms of free product. Now I don't know if you remember the first time you heard about open courseware, what I remember from it was, huh, all right, if anybody can get away with programming software to do education, I guess it'd be MIT, let's see the courseware. It turns out no, there is no courseware in the sense of where, that is a course, where is the where, it is nowhere. It is, the professor has a bunch of teaching notes and other stuff that he or she used to teach the course. We subtract from that like holes in Swiss cheese, anything covered by copyright. We then put it in a sack, ship it overseas where people bundle it into a digital archive and ship it back and it goes up on the website. Now the way I'm describing it does not sound that generous and my feelings about MIT open courseware remain that it is revolutionary, it is amazing, it is great, I am 100% behind it. I just want us to note that it's very modesty, what a small step it represents, the fact that that is revolutionary is worth noting. And the real contribution to me, the fundamental contribution of MIT open courseware is the idea that universities might want to make available what they have to the public at large without worrying about selling it instantly. That is the revolution that MIT open courseware really has set off and it was an invitation to other universities to do their own open coursewares, come up with your own sack of knowledge and figure out how to put that out. But it does have a sort of static quality to it. You can go and see a particular course at MIT as it was taught in 2009, take a look at all the materials and they might be helpful, they might not and then look at 2010 and see what has changed in the meantime. It's sort of alright folks, here's what I used, it looks like solitaire. It's a product, not a service and not really beyond that and it hasn't gotten the commercial aspect in. Then you see this, I love the guy up in the upper left or maybe it's a robot, Introduction to Artificial Intelligence from Stanford and this, by all accounts has been a brilliant offering. The proof is in the pudding. Lots and lots of people have taken this course. Has anybody in the room taken this course? Yeah, Victor, was it good? I did part of it, but it was great. You did part of it. You took up Joeychi's invitation to be a poll learner and kind of graze and then move along. You've taught it. So you were just taking it to make sure you knew it. You wanted to kind of... You were taking my class. That's a non sequitur, but I believe you. I remember you well, hence I know your name. Those were good times. Okay, so here is the movement from MIT OpenCourseWare product to thinking of it as service and service that is meant to scale with one hub. You're going to Stanford or Udacity or whatever it is and you know what, we're going to take 50,000. Next year, 500,000. Soon there will be more people taking this course than there are in the world. That's when we know we have succeeded because they will be artificially intelligent robots taking the course to program themselves for the coming bad years. So, alright, great. This is a service and to the extent that it's free, great, but notice that it anticipates still there will be a course taught by one group of people radiating outward to as many as possible and in that sense, I don't know how well it conceptually scales. If I'm in the business of teaching artificial intelligence, but not at Stanford, what do I see in this except my own doom? And that's worth noting about this model that just sees it as one to many. There's a broadcast model, a service, not a product, and then you start to say, alright, is it going to be a dot com? And here, as far as I can tell, Udacity and there's like some kind of already, some kind of like Mao versus Lenin split at Stanford. There's something else at Stanford. Some of you will know the details better than I, but there's money involved. Now we're into party poker zone. Not that there's much wrong with that, but as you can tell, I'm setting this up for some reflection about alternatives to the product model of just shoving free stuff out there and hoping people can make use of its solitaire style and the service model that says, I'm going to try to teach a course, not just to this room, but to everyone and if everyone takes it, we win, we're done. That creates a certain monoculture that I think we can do better than and that also represents what, when we again go back to the Enlightenment, what it's about. Now here's the starting point for me in my own classroom, including this very classroom where I teach torts.  And next to it, it does not get you on the subway unfortunately, next to it are case books. And case books are meant to look extremely austere. Here's the one I have traditionally taught from, tort law and alternatives. Like, you know, there are alternatives. You'll have to take the course to find out. And it's a book that is extremely boring looking and the book comprises mostly cases. And by a case, I mean a reported opinion, usually from a judge in the United States, federal or state courts. And there they are. They're lined up. And if you're going to take torts, 50% is already predestined by, I don't know, historical accident, no pun intended since it's torts. Accident law is what, anyway. If I have to explain the joke, it's not a good joke. Half of the course is already predestined because if you're going to take torts, you have to do Murphy versus Steeplechase, the case about the flopper, where Judge Cardozo says famously, the Timorous may stay at home on this amusement park ride that breaks down. Everybody wants to read that case in torts and I can name you ten others like it. Then maybe the author of the casebook throws in some others and sells the casebook for between $150 to $200 a pop. In what we call an agency problem, I just tell my class, go buy this casebook and it doesn't redound to my detriment that they have to spend the money. They spend the money, they carry around the book, they come into class, we read the cases. Those books are copyrighted, as well they can be because they have some other words in them as well as the cases and there's arrangement and stuff. But the raw materials, the cases themselves in America are not. They are public domain. So we saw this as a starting point to say, well, wait a minute. Could we imagine creating a lightweight system that would let me arrange cases the way that people spend time curating their music list in iTunes? A playlist of cases. So for Wednesday, here's your playlist. Play them in sequence and some of the cases will be long, some short, but if I did that and I could get my mits on the cases sort of immaculately conceived, not burdened by contract and already, as I said, not by copyright, I can come up with these playlists, assign them to students and charge them nothing and already we're ahead of the game. It's not exactly revolutionary, but it's cheaper and that was the first step we did when we created these things called H2O playlists. So here's a typical playlist now for the case book I and a team working with me, including Kendra, who is somewhere here in the room. There you are, Kendra. Came up with a playlist for the entire torts course online, both service and product. If you want to print everything out as a big old PDF, go to town, you've got it. The students, it turns out, didn't. To the extent they wanted to do their reading at all, they would do it online or on their iPad or be ready to read it as if it were kind of a service and it meant then that as they would read for a given day and go through the indented outline, so here's Vosberg versus Putney. That's a great one. Somebody kicks somebody else in the schoolhouse in Waukesha, Wisconsin in the late 19th century and that light tap ends up with the guy losing his leg. Somebody soothes, et cetera, et cetera. And here is the case. And by the way, if this were live, you can change the font size as much as you want. It's obviously way too small here. And the case is edited as if it were being edited in a case book. And where you see dot, dot, dots, you can actually end up expanding and seeing what you're missing. So I don't have to make a binary trade-off at all or nothing. The students, if they're lacking some context, because the cases are written to be read fully, they can expand or contract individual paragraphs that have been elided, something not possible in a regular case book. And there's a possibility in the first instance for me to annotate it. So we can say here, this is the famed case of USV Carol Toeing in which the bar G, who cares for the bar, wait, what's a bar G? And it turns out, well, we can add that in the annotation because we don't have bar Gs very much. It's not pictured here, but you can see other explanations in italics here describing what happens when this poor bar G sinks because the bar G got drunk and wasn't keeping an eye on it. And this then lets me add stuff. The students can read it great. Everybody's happy. But now's where we start to say, let's not just make this a product, a nicely bottled product for free, but start thinking about it beyond to service and beyond that to a community. So one of the cool things about iTunes is that there's a store and you can just drag and drop as long as you're willing to pay the $9.99, whatever you want to add to your playlists. So our conception here is that I can now go out to anybody else in the world teaching torts and say, if you want to teach torts from my materials, you can fork my list. You can immediately copy everything and have my torts class ready to go and it will cost your students nothing. In the meantime too, I teach Monday, Tuesday for two hours a day. You're teaching three days a week. You can go in and say, please rebalance the readings for three days a week. Any teacher who's had to go to a case book or textbook and upon a change in teaching schedule reallocate the readings. Talk about annoying. Here it's just redistribute and away you go and if they want, those other professors can tweak that forked copy in small ways. They can change the way the cases are edited. They can change add a case here, take out a case there and we have prepared extra modules on feminism and torts, on law and economics and torts so that somebody wanting to spin the class one way or the other or add extra materials can draw from that, make their own playlist in turn contribute that playlist back to the common wheel and then I can copy it from them and now my torts class has improved and instead of there being a universe of a handful of case book authors hoping to hit it big on the top end of Zip's law and be the 20% of the case books that 80% of the students read, now you have almost any professor able to be a little bit of a case book author, the way that is getting Morozov complains we can all be slactivists now, we don't have just activists, the crazy people that run around and the rest of us, we can be a little bit activist if there's a cause we like on Kickstarter or on Facebook or whatever it is. Now anybody can contribute a little bit and the wonderful experiment here is how will the case book evolve now that it can micro-evolve? Will it really be that a 19th century case involving one kid kicking another has to be the center point of the rule and tort of the egg shell plaintiff? You know, maybe, maybe not. There's some interesting stuff out there and there is a currency at work that isn't just money. This system can keep track of whose materials in syllabi were drawn upon by whom? Because I remember all too well for those of you who've heard of SSRN people, SSRN is familiar this is where you put your working papers and such people used to do it just to make their papers available and then one fine day SSRN came up with this wonderful innovation called the download count with the download count came trumpeted news stories including I dare say from this law school Harvard Law School boasts five of the top ten most downloaded authors on SSRN legal things and now everybody is falling all over themselves not only to put their papers into SSRN to rack up those download counts and therefore accolades but to break their books into chapters so they can put each chapter in as a separate thing and then get ten downloads for the prices one I remember at one point right before an exam an internet related class I was teaching my students all somehow through like wildfire not inspired by me they all thought that if they read one of my articles they'd be prepared for the exam so they all rushed to SSRN to download the article SSRN started refusing to give it to them saying this is an attempt to game the download count our download count defense has come into play you may not have the article I found out about this because the students were desperately writing me we can't get the article and your exam is tomorrow I'm like what are you talking about I tried to tell the SSRN people just don't increment the counter like still give them the article or subtract one I did you know this is crazy it is crazy but let's harness that craziness back here to have professors competing to come up with materials that other professors will draw upon and to watch that genealogy as it unfolds to me that's a way of starting to allow professors to get into this system using incentives that they recognize without having to reinvent everything all at once start simple it doesn't weigh as much and it's free and then move in to the more revolutionary stuff and let me give you one other quick example on that front so we've been talking about playlists which are the lists of cases and of course you can substitute any material here from cases it doesn't have to be legal cases and collage which is I used to call it Santa's workshop but there's an establishment problem with that under the First Amendment so collage is a way for people to edit a given piece of material in a playlist like editing a song to be louder in one part or have a different instrument that's where you're editing and adding the annotations and the dot dot dots and expanding then rotisserie is an idea that says what if I were to put a question out to this class around the material for the day a given reading and by a deadline each of you is to answer that question and at the deadline everybody has his or her answer routed randomly to another person in the room for a reaction so you will write your answer then you will be critiqued by someone and you will be asked to critique someone else and like elephants arranged from trunk to tail no matter how big the class you can always pair up somebody with somebody to critique and someone from whom they are going to be critiqued so it scales very nicely and now the students are interacting with one another okay that's fine we've used that before the next step is for this system to say since it knows the genealogies and it knows all the materials and it knows what's being assigned when to give me a note that says hey you guys are reading the flopper case for next Tuesday there happens to be a common law class in Singapore that is also reading the flopper case for next Tuesday would you like your kids' answer to the question to be routed to the Singaporeese students and vice versa for a critique hey that's not a bad idea as much diversity as I think I've got in this room there is so much more the minute you're crossing lines and doing so around a text which keeps it nicely anchored for people to be relating to one another understanding though that here it is not a broadcast model it's not like soon the Singaporeese will be listening to my class or we're going to have these materials out there and they won't be dead letter they will be alive they will be edited evolved they will be in use I'll see who's using them and have a chance to meaningfully interact professor to professor and then student to student for them so this is just an example of the rotisserie up in order there's a question being asked and people answer it I think that there are basically three types of teachers you have your innovators represented by the people self selected to be in this room who are like it's digital I'll try it we need you that's maybe 25% then you have what I call the orthodox and the orthodox say Christopher Columbus Langdell invented the case method in somebody from the library when did Christopher Columbus Langdell in 1432 number not guaranteed and it's worked since then that's what we're going to do I have what goes on in my classroom it's perfectly optimized there's a lot of people like that the only way I found to reach them is to just change one small variable like it's everything you have only cheaper and that's part of what we're trying to do to reach the orthodox then the third type of teacher is what I call the fundamentalist the fundamentalist is somebody who is orthodox who thinks that everyone else has to be orthodox too there's a difference in the Venn diagram everyone fundamentalist is orthodox but not everybody orthodox is fundamentalist so the fundamentalist are the toughest nuts to crack and I'm just hoping that generationally we can end up outnumbering them and the quality of what we produce be such and the network effect so strong that at some point they're like screw it I'm putting my paper into SSRN2 because otherwise I won't have any download counts and that's kind of the acceleration you get with a system that is networked where students are connected to other students and you feel more and more left out if you're not joining that's so different from just the product thing that says everybody's using these new kindles or iPads in class shouldn't you use them too so that's basically my thinking about it if you want to play with our playlist I was talking about the link is up at the top there for the torts playlist I've left aside the question tool which is a synchronous tool for environments like this but there's no need to demo that right now but I think we should open it up to questions at this point thank you very much yes sir feel free to use your UN style mic just to make it a more awkward exchange you have to press the button so help us pick another academic discipline not law maybe developmental education anything but a hard science I'm with you we have in community colleges thousands of people teaching developmental math developmental English so that students can take four credit classes when they complete that what you describe exists not at all in that universe how to start it well the best way I can think of to start it is to the extent that the curriculum you talk about has elements of standardization to it now the standardization in torts is as I said historical accident and kind of centripetal force it's not like it bears any relationship to what they actually get tested on in the bar exam they have to learn that all over again in bar review for which they pay a lot of money in something like developmental ed or in secondary school public education you're teaching to a test or a set of standards for which the students need to get certified for something that says to me wow common curriculum that teachers stray from at their peril and what I like here is the idea of being able to offer them a playlist perfectly tuned in the first instance to the test to which they are supposed to teach that then gives them the opportunity to improvise and vary a little bit here there where they can and that provides though an initial gravity well for everyone teaching developmental ed to want to be in touch with others and even to be sharing lesson plans with one another I'm amazed at the amount of time people in secondary education spend doing lesson plans that they may or may not execute upon when they're in the classroom but that's sort of the currency of that system in part so to the extent that a system like this there was an iTunes store an Amazon store of those materials cued to the standards that had to be met and they can drag and drop them into a shopping cart and the checkout is free that sounds like a pretty good deal to me rather than pulling out the dog-eared books that may now be outdated they've just changed the standard where we learn everything that's a great time for that person that teacher to want to switch to the digital environment does that make sense to you or tell me more if not in the example you provide in tort law you have these well-established cases that everybody agrees are the sort of corpus of what students need to learn about half of it that's right I need to first of all thank you for the brilliant and provocative thought-provoking presentation but I need to think more deeply about whether we really have analogs in the highest-need areas where we have the access and completion crisis in education both at the secondary and post-secondary level and I don't know that we have that consensus as to the core elements of the curriculum that would allow us to iterate off this model in enough of those disciplines to be able to replicate this the brilliant insights that you're sharing with us today there may be thoughts on this question yes wouldn't it be possible to substitute problem-solving scenarios with the case studies so problem sets but not just here's the problem but the Khan Academy stuff or various other things that are out there but the menu the playlist the playlist can have any elements exactly it could be a song those problem sets which can be graduated from I don't understand numeracy all the way through oh here's how we solve a very complex calculus project but the playlist concept can just be a list of these that a teacher then can pick and choose or a student or however it's organized so I think there is I guess my point of confusion on it is with the torts the greatest hits are already known at least are the oldest hits or the oldest hits or the most venerated golden oldies I don't know that we have that we might be able to develop it talk to any senior math educator or people who teach just how to teach mathematics we have that we have it in the community just in the way that the torts have been codified that's similarly open and public you'd have to pull people together but the problem sets are identifiable couple well positioned grants could help I see hands up and I just either a hook should come out at some point to stop us or somebody should signal me if we need to end immediately so I think I just want to do a translation here I went through many of these law test books and when we say case in law test books we are not talking about problems or questions that will appear later in the exam so I just want to make this clear because this is a translation that we need to do in areas here so when I see the playlist and I view this project in the copyright for librarians we use a lot of this infrastructure you can put any section of any book that is compatible to any curriculum I think that's what the training is trying to say within that playlist and then you use the other tools that are very interactive tools for example the HEO, rotisserie and the questions to set the interchange and questions and build your assessment part so I just wanted to be sure to do this translation yes sir with the flipped classroom I think we've already got this one of the visions that my team at flipped classroom has had for a long time is what if there was a playlist of all these videos and we had the best teachers and I've trained many of them all over the country in making these videos it's not tort law and there was a way for them for people to access these videos and use a tool like this in a playlist fashion yes my question is around language in the rotisserie does this all happen in English or is there a way to overcome language barriers well at the moment the examples all happen in English because that's my primary language but I am so excited at the prospect of machine translation getting good enough for government work we're just on the cusp of that and the idea I use Singapore as an example of course because there's no language barrier English is so commonly spoke there spoken Freudian slip right it's my primary language but I'm still a little wobbly but the prospect that my students could be answering a rotisserie question with Chinese law students on the other side and not expecting the grammar to be perfect Google bot in between or whoever is doing translation to me at least if I'm a student the first time that happens I'm like okay OMG like this is really cool and honestly I think it's what this is sort of a political moment it's what some regimes that don't fully embrace the rule of law fear the most they're counting on language as being a kind of default moat around their epistemic community bridging it student to student yes sir oh you don't have one we're in the cluster we're talking about pathways so in effect it's kind of how you put together your pathways for study in a sense we were coming up with the same sort of idea where once you've identified your pathway and it's common across whichever region whether it be US based or UK kind of base then you're able to kind of identify curriculum that OER materials that you can assign to your pathways and in a sense we have the same kind of view I'd kind of be wandering around the iTunes store I'd go into whatever pathway or course pathway that I was after I'd fill my basket up with my free kind of OER goods that you've aligned and you check out and go into a different environment where you've got your social kind of interactions with your students and so on as well as elsewhere so that's something we've just put in our cluster intervention idea and of course what I like here and this is an open question as to how it will shake out is our law the free software movement it might be that a system like this will lead to more and more common pathways that there gets to be sort of an orthodoxy around how to teach something or it may be that this facilitates many more flowers blooming because you can vary the path so easily and it's kind of like how many flavors of eunuchs and gnu linux are there and at forks and then there's this nopix and then it kind of folds back in again and I imagine we'd see things like that happening here I suppose if there came to be only one real pathway I'd be nervous about it but my guess is we're already stuck with that because of the power law that applies to the traditional proprietary teaching materials and that the real surplus to be gained is in having a pathway common enough that then it's trivial to divert from it and to bring others along if the diversion proves better than the original path I have a sign that even with my limited English skills says wrap up so in conclusion thank you all very much I hope this is the beginning of an ongoing and continuing really conversation about these things thank you so much Jonathan


I would, if I were a brand new today and I had zero money, I would go to foresellbyowner.com and call every single one of the foresell by owners in my area, right online. I wouldn't even leave my office. I would just sit right there, call every single one of them, set appointments with all of them, go get to know them, become their best friend, you know, and find out how I can help them, whether it's to help to list their property or not. They may be better off selling it on their own. They may be, you know, they may have something else going on, whatever, but if I did my job and I created the relationship the right way, then boom. Now they're gonna buy something and who are they gonna come to for that? Because they don't get charged a commission on the buying side. They need somebody to represent them. Oh, I'm gonna call Ricky. He was so good to us. He really helped us, even though he didn't make a dime. And now we're gonna use him. Oh wait, our brother wants to buy something. We're gonna send him to Ricky because Ricky took very good care of us, even though he knew we told him upfront we weren't gonna list, but he still spent time with us, showed us that he cared, worked hard, was dependable, was very professional, and he sends us a freaking weekly email every single week on the same day forever. We love this guy. Right guys? Yeah. Yep, absolutely. And there's no, it's not rocket science. It's making deposits into people's accounts before you expect to be able to take a withdrawal. And what I mean by that is you're making, by offering to help them without an expectation of a return is making a deposit. And when it comes time for them to either list their home or refer their brother to you or whatever, that's the withdrawal. And if you make enough deposits without an expectation of a return, good things are gonna happen. Yeah, and on the flip side, if you're working as hard as you're supposed to and not concentrating on just one or two for sale by owners and you're really trying to go hard with creating a width and a quantity of clients, you're gonna run into people that do wanna list with you.  You get to see a property and experience that. You get to research and learn that. Maybe you list a property, you learn the process of listing a property and all the ins and outs there, sign, lock box, pictures, oh my. You learn all the intricate details of the business so fast by doing that guys. So that, I mean, that's like the bottom line, the quickest way to get the most experience, to do a deal and to really get your foot in the door and hit the ground running. If you're brand new, you have no money and you just wanna make something happen right now for free for sale by owner.com and your cell phone. That's all you really need, like to really get started once you get going and then you're gonna learn, okay, let's make a website. Let's get RedX, let's do a dialer, let's do this, let's do that.


Think Tech Hawaii, civil engagement lives here. Dr. Alex Kuznesov, who is here in Singapore running his business, we're first going to be talking about how he got to Singapore. Welcome to the show Dr. Alex. Thank you. Now Dr. Alex, how long have you been in Singapore? Five years. Five years and where are you from originally? From Moscow. From Moscow. How did you end up in Singapore from Moscow? Because I have five kids and grandfather already and four of them are younger. How younger is younger? From 6 to 13. 6 to 13.  That's why we choose from Hong Kong, Canada and Singapore and choose Singapore. Did you experience living in those places or you were just comparing virtually? We traveled a little bit and then choose Singapore. With your kids? Yes. So you came to Singapore because of the safety? Safety and the very kind nation. In Singapore, they measure the kindness index, I don't know. Oh, they do that? Yes. Officially. Every month.  Is that done by the government or? Yeah, by the government. Really? Oh, I didn't even know that. I was surprised.  Smart nation. The slogan is smart nation. Now, when you say smart nation, what do you mean by that in terms of technology? They cherish the brains, they try to create the environment for the best education in the world. Singapore system and Singapore math is the best in the world, number one. So did you hear about Singapore education back when you were in Moscow? Yes, I studied a lot of Singapore education system and I chose Singapore. This was one of the factors I chose Singapore for. And what did you find attractive about the Singapore education system? Was it because of the high ranking on the OECD, on the PISA scores or was it something else? I will tell you honestly, the first factor for me was the safety and kind nation. Because I don't want my kids to be brought up in Russia, very aggressive. So I want them to be kind, courage and open other people, smiling and all this. And what jumped out at you about the Singapore education system, besides Singapore math? Because I'm a mathematician, math is number one for me. So very effective. And I teach my kids also in my school, I have school international, I set up international school already here and we use a lot of from Singapore math. Then team building, Singapore is number one also for team building, you know. There are also international Olympia and team building. So every nation has a team and they have a question to solve and problem to solve as a team, in real world problem and they have some days to solve in Singapore number one. Yeah, I can agree with that because the Singapore government is probably one of the most integrated government in the world that I've seen, you know, no department works on its own. Even the in terms of education system is always the curriculum is always designed according to the manpower needs. So, you know, it is very relevant, depends on, you know, what's, what's the need of tennis from now, right, right. And if something's not in demand, they start to face it out. That's why they encourage students not to go to university, only 25% go to university. And let's go to the polytechnical to meet the requirement of the real life. The technical needs, the vocational needs, right, you know. But that's another area that I think Singapore has done well is that we don't just nurture those that are academically inclined. Those are not academically inclined, but then who are technically inclined. We make sure we, you know, help them to reach their potential as well. And they show that this a student's person is polytechnical education. They know just inferior, you know, because everywhere in the world, if you go to university, it's like a higher standard position and Singapore, no, they don't feel ashamed. That's interesting. You mentioned that, because Singapore used to be like that. They used to, the people used to look upon the university grads as, you know, more prestigious and whatnot. And the government worked really hard to change the image. They launched a very nationwide campaign to adjust the image that people have of technical ed I also asked them, they say, I say, why don't you go to a poly, why don't you go, you're so smart, you go to university. I like this. I don't want to go. This university graduation is not the thing that's in itself for me. For example, I like growing, creating cartoons or like I want to be a pilot or like an aircraft engineer. I need to go to that. I go to trade school and they are not ashamed of this because they are like, what's the use of the university for me? Yeah, here, whether it's technical education or academic education, both of them are highly prized. And I think it's because, you know, Singapore is not like Russia, we don't have oil, we don't have any natural resources.  Our natural resources, yeah, it's our one and only natural resources and it's the only thing that we can capitalize on. Now you mentioned you have five kids and what are their ages again? From six to 21. 21 of them already gave birth to my grandson. And so your congratulations. So was your, you came here five years ago, so your son was only five, one year old when you came out here. And the rest were colors in there. He said, I'm Chinese boy, I'm English boy or I'm Russian boy because he has a lot of teachers in my school, he cannot decide. What about the other three kids? Are they boys too? So the other three kids that came here, how was the adjustment? I mean, this is very different from Moscow. When I came here, I rented the largest condo in Singapore. I thought a lot of units, they can meet friends there and play together. But everybody's studying and walking, nobody, very hot. So empty space outside. So they socialize in my school now. So that's why I created the international school. They had a lot of friends now and we have a scholarly ambience here. So they all support each other, reaching some milestones.  So how long ago did you start your own school? Actually, I started, I just came and started, but I started tuition. Gradually the school become an international school. Now we have a license for international school and we are moving to another place. I see. So when you first came, you started your own business pretty quickly? Yeah, very fast, because my son was a champion in math. And nobody could believe that he finished his O-Level. It's IGCC, it's like O-Level. And that's the one, the Cambridge examination you're talking about? Yeah, at nine years old. And everybody was shook and hundreds of students come here. So in four months I didn't have place for reading. Now, what was the subject that he started, that he took the test in? It's IGCC, international mathematics. International mathematics. By the age of 11, he finished physics and chemistry also, both A-star. For O-Levels? Yes, international mathematics a little bit, IGCC means a little bit higher standard than O-Levels. With IGCC, you can go to the most universities in the world, 90%. So how did you prepare him for that? I've seen that you were the one that prepared him to do it. I have a lot of tricks and secrets, so I will share with you some of them. First of all, my goal is not academic results and not speed learning. It's not the most important thing. The most important thing is independence, so I teach them to read books. Because some kids, they take books and say, oh, teacher didn't explain. I don't know. But our kids, not only my kids, in my school, they always try to deal with uncertainty. The most valuable courage is to deal with uncertainty. If you don't know how you try, and most kids don't try, that's it. How to develop a curious mind, an ability to read and learn himself, that's the most important thing. So I teach him how to deal with different sorts of information, how to set up the learning environment for him. So now I don't teach him already. They teach him already. They teach other students. And when my nine years old son, the third one, he's studying secondary three, it's like grade 11. Right. This is the nine-year-old, studying secondary three. He's writing and students come here and say, oh, secondary three, how could it be? And he's sitting quietly in the corner and learning something. Is that mathematics or other subjects? All subjects. All subjects. Chemistry, physics, he's nine years old, he's preparing for all levels already in chemistry, physics, mathematics, math, tennis, and Chinese also. They all know Chinese. Did they learn Chinese at school? Yes, after school also. Because my teachers from school do tuition after school and my kids are with me. So your kids go to school here full-time? Yeah, yeah, because it's the local schools. They don't attend other local schools. We have international schools. So your family is here as well? Yes, and it's pretty hard for them, especially for elder ones. Oh yeah, absolutely. But for younger ones, it's easy. Because you know, before six, we have a window open for languages. So he likes it. That's why he says, oh, maybe I change his boring. That's fantastic. Now tell us about your wife.  What does she do? She's a drama director. So she learns, still learning in Russia. Go there, here and there. Oh, she flies back and forth, okay. And she's running the drama theater. They have a two-stage performance a year. Oh. So when kids are wearing his costumes, they're doing everything. They share those theaters, so a lot of speech and training. So some parents are very satisfied because some kids cannot articulate correctly in their languages. The problem in Singapore, especially with younger kids, they forget Russian. And they speak English or Japanese. Right, also English. And the parents want to save the native language. And they start going to my wife's theater and improve their language. So in your wife's theater class, everything is conducted in Russian? In Russian, but now she's expanding because other students from my school, international school, Americans, Indonesians, they go there and see, oh, we want also to join. And she's hiding new stuff. That's wonderful. Wow, that's wonderful. Well, since your kids are primarily in your school, do they interact with kids outside of your school? Do they have friends outside of school? Yes, yes. Because in Singapore, very small, a lot of density population, dense population. So in condos, my sons go to, like, sport clubs, like Aikido clubs or boxing, they interact there. We live every day and it's a very small cozy condo. Everybody knows everyone. Wonderful. So like a small family. Now what is your biggest challenge living in Singapore? I know you've raced a lot. Everybody works hard. A lot of work. I work 24 hours a day. Right, just about. And I work and I have four kids. Very tough. Because I'm in Singapore for them. I actually live for them and create the school for them also. So that's why I try to understand deeper what they're doing every day. What's the problem? We discuss this problem. We don't have time. And I want to be a father for everyone.  I understand that you have a master's in child psychology as well. Yes, I'm a PhD in math. I'm a master in child psychology. And I'm a pediatrician also. And? Pediatrician. Pediatrician? Yes, so I have four education and an economist. Actually all my life I study speed learning. So that's why I test in myself. Are you sure you're not here as a spy? Because you are so well versed in so many different areas. Because my major is actually my main sphere of interest is speed learning. Accelerated learning. The technique is how we learn faster. I see. That's why I learn. If I want to know something new, I learn faster. I know how. And I teach my kids and I teach my students also in math. Do you do speed reading too? Is there such a thing? Speed reading is just a small part of speed learning. Speed reading is very important also. Do you know the number one rule for speed reading? Number one rule? Yeah, don't read useless books. Don't read useless books. But how much do you know the book is useless before you start reading it? That's why you use number two for speed reading and number three you look at the content very fast and see all these users. Okay, well that's a very useful tip. Thank you so much. Well thank you Dr. Alex. We're going to take a little short break here and when we come back we're going to talk more about your business here. Thank you so much. Thank you. Everyone, I'm DeSoto Brown, the co-host of Human Humane Architecture, which is seen on Think Tech Hawaii every other Tuesday at 4 p.m. and with the show's host Martin Desbang we discuss architecture here in the Hawaiian Islands and how it not only affects the way we live but other aspects of our life not only here in Hawaii but internationally as well. So join us for Human Humane Architecture every other Tuesday at 4 p.m. on Think Tech Hawaii. Hey, hello everybody. Thanks for joining us on Think Tech Hawaii. I'm your host Andrew Lanning, the security guy. I host a program called Security Matters Hawaii and I hope you'll join us on Fridays. We are at 10 a.m. and we're going to be talking about those security things that really should be important to you and maybe get behind the scenes on some things that you may not know about the industry or about products or even about your habits. Security is all about people, processes and products. We hope to bring that to you in an informative and hopefully a useful way. So again, 10 a.m. on Fridays, Security Matters Hawaii on Think Tech Hawaii. Join me. Thank you. So soon after you got to Singapore, you started a business. I'd like to learn more about this business that you started. You mentioned that it's an international school. Seven. Before I started international school, I studied tuition. When you said tuition, is that like supplementary classes for after-school essence? Seven out of ten Singaporean kids go to tuition. It's a culture. From school, you go to tuition because it's a very high standard, difficult and they need support. Then I created like a personalized approach and I had before... Just to interrupt you there, is that something you found out before you moved to Singapore? You always knew that you were going to come to Singapore instead of a tuition center. Yeah, because I'm a child psychologist and I'm interested in specializing in education and accelerated learning. I set up a five-step system. Five-step system. I applied here. It was very successful. And more and more kids, just because of world of mouse, they came here. Right. And that's the best kind of advertisement. Yeah, I don't have places for the full house. And it cannot extend here because I used up all the area. How many students did you have when you first started? When I first started, I didn't have any students, only my kids. Your kids? Then some people just go back and forth here. Then join here and you can see the results and talk to another kids. And then they come here more and more and more and more and more and more and they're closed in the world of nature. And when your child became the youngest to... It was also the booster for the business because he became... Just one overnight he became the famous... So he was in the newspapers and everything. Yes, several newspapers wrote about him. Is that record in Singapore or the world over? Singapore record. In Singapore. Because there was one more kid who passed a GCC at the age of 9.2. Okay. And my son is 9.11. I see, I see. No, the world record. And this exam that you're talking about, what age do students usually take it at? What age are they usually when they take this examination? Usually it's 17. 17. Wow, so that's really a 7. Normally in our school, international school now, kids finish school at 12, 13. 13 is enough to finish all school syllabus with the right approach. Have you had him tested for giftedness? Do you think that is something that's... No, no, no. Yes, my elder son is a little bit gifted. But... Not the one that made the Singapore record. Yeah, that's one. That's his one. Elder son. But every child with every intellectual ability can finish school at 13 with the right approach. Because in most schools, they just waste time. That's a problem. A lot of unnecessary activities. And very strange, the teaching process, they learn some subject, some topic in January, another topic in February, another topic in March. And by the end of the year, they forgot what they learned in January. They started over again. So we don't... This is unproductive. So I created a new system, a five-step system. We take a big chunk of syllabus and go through the simple level. So just concepts and simple formulas. Then next level, we immerse this concept into very simple texts, text question. Then multi-step questions. There are questions which involve several different topics. Then next level is research. So for younger kids also, they can do research. They can do it at the show and count, for example, the number of items which price has below three dollars, for example, something like this. So you believe that, given the right teaching method, that every child can finish school at age 30. In small classes, yes. Eight students per class. This is very important. Even Jesus Christ had 12. So it's impossible for a human being to teach more than eight, actually. But in class of eight, the kids can enjoy the dialogue. That's very important. Because no dialogue is very difficult to get them involved in the process. And a little noisy, especially. Imagine 40 students, primary one students in the class. Difficult. The teacher complained to me because I know a lot of teachers complain. They say, Alex, I spent 90% of my efforts on time just to make them sit quietly. Management. Class management. Sit quietly. Just sit quietly because you cannot focus them. But our kids, each one, follow his own learning plan. It's very important. But still other kids support. Still a group. They support the club. When they reach milestone, they stand in club. And the kids are very proud. And this supports the scholarly environment. So how do you group your students? I mean, obviously you have different age groups coming in, different abilities. How do you group them into these classes? Still we group by age. Because if students 12 years old, they have different group dynamic. So we use different approaches. But from 5 to 8, they can sit in one room. Is that the youngest that you take five years of? Normally five, but we have one student four years old. So it depends on the individual child. Because some students at four can sit and do their work. Some students at 12 cannot. I agree. I agree with that.   For younger kids, three languages and one math, that's all. And they study for 14 minutes, then 20 minutes break. And again, so that's why 40 plus 20, one hour. One hour, one hour, one hour. Then after fourth lesson, we have CCA activities. Now you mentioned three languages? Yes. What are the languages that's being taught? Russian. Russian and English and Chinese. Other students, some younger kids are very outstanding. They want to learn science at 7 years old. No problem. We can adjust the syllabus for them. Because it's an individualized approach to school. So we can create any syllabus. Some kids are interested in music. For example, one of my kids, he was very interested in studying music in the piano. So we increased the number of hours for him. So we just try to capture and use the surge of motivation. The innate motivation. The innate desire to learn. In a big class, you cannot do this. But we can adjust. For example, the child says, I like biology. I want to study biology now. So on this top of his motivation, he can read the whole or level book in two weeks. So there are other kids who are dragging, reading this for the whole year. So then he switched to some other subjects. Very interesting for him. He also stretched this subject in our syllabus. So for the younger guys, they come in, they do one math and they do three languages. And then you mentioned CCA. What's in a CCA program? Music, arts. We have karate lessons. Karate. And even girls study this. And coding and chess. So music, how deeply do you get into it? Do you introduce any instruments? Normally piano. So the teacher shows how to play. We have a very small group of show one by one. They learn how to read notes. They learn how to listen to different composers. So you and your wife, they're from Russia. Where are your other teachers from? Are they local or are they... Local, we have a teacher from all different countries. We have English lessons conducted by American teacher. So native speaker. Chinese teacher. I see, I see. So coding, you mentioned coding. What age do you start teaching them coding? At what age? At five. At five? But we approach to coding from the point of algorithm. Algorithmic thinking. Because if you know algorithms, it doesn't matter which language you use. If you master one language, you can use a lot of language very fast. That's sort of like mastering Latin and then you can understand the Latin basically. This is exaggeration, but for coding it's true. Because if you know one second language is already half time. Third language is already 10% of the time learning the first language. Algorithmic thinking, we use applications for kids very funny. So they can use procedures, loops and all this stuff. Wow. And then we use... If a child is very advanced, we start learning real language. If not advanced, we use scratch. You know scratch? Like blocks. We use Arduino. You know Arduino? It's a special kit with electrical parts. They can create the chains, electrical chains. For example, you can create yourself. Any child can use itself like a device to measure the distance from your hand. And you can do robots. It's like a robot. Oh, that's amazing. My daughter did a coding class last week. She really enjoyed it. They use a little wooden robot. Cubetto, have you heard of that? Yes, yes, yes. She really enjoyed it. Lego robots. But the real coding starts when they start learning languages. It depends upon child because it kills motivation. Very dangerous zone. If you see the child can endure this tough work, we continue. If not, we switch back to some fun. The best thing is to keep the motivation and to teach the key self-learning techniques. If you have this tool, you don't need teachers. If you know how to teach yourself, if you have motivation, you don't need anyone. Only an expert can answer a very difficult part. I agree with that. I have always thought that the best teacher is one whose class will run itself, even if he's just standing quite at the back of the classroom, because the kids know how the lessons are conducted. The one who encourages. Encouraging is everything. Encouraging is a tool, a way to support motivation. And the best teacher always finds the time and the best moments to put some phrases is to encourage their motivation. So you're great, nice, good work, all this stuff. And not just to listen to me, I will show you how to solve this question because nobody cares why I need this question. When do I get out of school? I know none of your kids go to local schools, but what are your impressions of local schools? I know they produce great results, but do you find them to be somewhat stifling? You know why the number one reason we came to Singapore? Maybe number two reason, after safety. Safety, yeah. It was when we wanted to be in the local school. But after some months I started closer, I found one disadvantage. This disadvantage covered all the advantages, big classes. Primary 1 student class, 45 students. It's about 48, 45 years. Impossible to teach. So that's why I refuse this. Because I believe, strong belief in personal bones between teacher and student, in the dialogue. So you answer the question I reply. So why you think so? It's interaction and feedback, right? Yeah, it's conversation. You know Nietzsche, the German philosophy? Yes, yes, yes. When you are looking for a wife, take the look for a friend for good conversation. To make good conversation. If you have a good conversation, you become friends. So the same with the student. The good teacher is a personality. It's not just a sack of knowledge. Just an inanimate right. So the best teacher is a personality who influence students by himself. If you are reading a book, as a father or as a teacher, your kids or your students also will be reading, love reading. If you call yourself, if they like you. They model after you.  You see the potential inside them. And they will feel this. If they feel this, they will love you, or she will love you, and she will follow you. That's a secret. Now I understand that you also authored some books. Yes, on parenting. On parenting. Actually, in Russia, I was a host of a talk show on parenting. Very famous. So, still, I continue my research on this. Is this book available as an e-book? E-book and physical book already. In English now, on Amazon, you can buy 100 parenting tips. In one month, we will be in Chinese also. Thank you so much, Dr. Alex. Thanks for spending time with us today. Thank you very much.