Design Thinking and online education

Colleague Denise came my office and discussed using portfolio to enhance student learning experience.  We talked for almost an hour and got very excited. So this is our ideas

The CSIT online program, being 12 courses and 2 years.  The learner's experience can be told as a 100 weeks story, each one with a title of learning outcomes, some of hard and some are soft.  But each one is a capability.  Each entry is determined by the teacher and student blog their learning and reflection and shared among their friends.

Week 0 (yes, in computer we start with 0) - orientation

Week 1.1  CST 300, beginning, knowing the curriculum structure, classmate,
Week 1.2...
Week 2 Design their learning plan
Week 3 Know the industry
Week 4 Thinking about their capstone project
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Week 8 Final and reflect upon their learning, complete the portfolio

Week 9 CST 205
Week 10 Know the syllabus
Week 11 Know the python language
Week 12 The media type and format


Week 99 Presenting capstone

Felt af home

Visit Santa Barbara area to review a program. Pleasant people, friendly town.  Nothing special. But the feeling at home surprised random saddened me. 

I talked in English, cursed in English, flirted in English.. when I see the people, I no longer see foreigners.  I am at home. I felt at ease.  But not happy.

CA SCA5 bill - a racist bill that will hurt everyone in the Golden State

"The Way to Stop Racial Discrimination Is to Stop Racial Discriminating" sounds so self-evident that I believe no one will dispute.  However, the lately passed CA SCA5 bill is trying to discriminated students based on their race.

People come to and admire the U.S. because here an INDIVIDUAL can be successful not matter what race, gender, birth place, all the items beyond individual's choices, are.  CA SCA5 is trying to limit the number of students not because their achievement and aspiration, but because their surname.

Should I change my last name to hispanic sounding one, or dye my skin to black or brown, to avoid being discriminated against when I apply to a university?

Should the professors in public universities are required to give 40% "A" grades to the underserved minority? You will think that is absurd, but SCA 5 is trying to do that.  Should a public bus limit the number of white passengers to 30%? That is preposterous, but SCA 5 is trying to do that.

I am proud to be a resident of California, because its meritocracy, its opportunity for individual.  SCA will be a terrible blow to me, and to each citizen in the state.  Even the students took advantage of the preferential treatment to get into a college, their self-esteem will suffer because many, including themselves, might question their qualification.

ATL

Travel to far away places to find the long lost spirit.  Can each trip be a pilgrimage?  Can we cleanse ourselves of all the worries, burdens, scars, and the dark corner of our hearts?  If the source of the ill is deep in our soul, can we forgo it?  

Admin or not Admin

After so many years, I start to realize that most admin are either too busy or too incompetent to be effective.  My worries are that I am becoming one of them. Some admin climb the rank because they don't do anything. Often they don't remember details that they should know.

Some of us take on the admin position simply to prevent someone to do it because they might bring disasters to the organization. 

Outline of my latest Invincible Company through Innovation workshop

Innovation Management

- building an invincible company by sustained innovation

by Eric Y. Tao, Ph.D.  (see bio http://erictao.weebly.com)

Dr. Tao, a professor of technology management and director of Institute for Innovation and Economic Development, leads executives through a journey of innovation that started from a deep appreciation of how individual brains work in innovation, to enabling everyone to become more innovative, to cultivating innovative teams and conclude with how innovation can lead to not just one successful product, but a long lasting, invincible company.  

Many innovation management theories by the top scholars over the last fifty years, Peter Drucker (father of modern management), Clayton Christensen (Harvard Professor, author of Innovator’s Dilemma), Tim Brown (Stanford scholar and CEO of Ideo) will be discussed and practices in the workshop.  Through stories, hands-on exercises, team-projects and brainstorming, Dr. Tao guide the executives completing the workshop with a new mindset, a set of usable strategy and a plan to make their company invincible through sustained innovation.

16-hour lecture and workshop for executives

Hour 1-2 Start the innovation journey

• What is innovation
• What is design thinking
• Innovation stories that we can learn from
• “Innovate or die” - is it true
• Discussion the sample and importance of innovation

Hour 3-6   Becoming an innovative individual

• Know how your brain work
• 5 good habits to make you more innovative
• Individual innovation games
• Innovation now! (in class exercise)

Hour 7-10   Build an innovative team

• Why some team are more innovative?
• How to promote innovation in your team
• How the human resources department can help
• Team innovation game
• Reflection on current company policy (in class exercise)

Hour 11-12 Balance between innovation and efficiency

• Efficiency is crucial for survival
• Learn from efficiency stories and theories
• Innovator’s dilemma
• Essential efficiency strategies
• Balance innovation and efficiency

Hour 13-18 Build an invincible company via innovation

• The design thinking and innovation process
• Analyze the market place and trends
• What are the competitors doing
• Change management challenges
• Design new product/services to the markets (in class exercise)
• The long term goal - invincible

Spending time on investment or not

During the last few years, my investment in stock and real estates are doing fine.  I studies, analyzed and braved the turbulence of the market since 2009.  Often I woke at at 6:15AM PST to survey the major news of the world in general, and the companies whose stock I was watching in perticular.  I will spend about an hour on these and I would decide the sell and buy limits, instruct my onlne brokerage on my trades and let the waves of the market determine my actually trade.

I figure out the longer trends of the real estate and stocks and project its growth.  When the price raised shapely, I will sell, when it drop below the price I feel it deserves, I buy.   I usually stay with value stock and the major players pick, such as major banks, insurance companies and volatile (yet has foundamentionals to support the grow) ETF.

I will work on these until 8, when my day job starts.

Lately I start to resent the time I have to spend on these activities purely for money.  Sometime it is just for intellecture challenge to beat the market, most of the time it is just trade my valuable time for money.  I felt distained about the time while my wealth, although limited, is enough to sustain my living for good.

I re-read the auto-biograhpy of Benjamin Franklin, and reflect upon the people I respect, such as Sklansky, Moroh, chairman Jiang.  I felt a little better, these people also put a lot of effort to managing their finance.   I felt it is not just waste of my time, which can be used to help students and faculty on the Monterey and San Jose campuses, but a healthy regiment and I have to do as an succeful, independent, well-rounded person.  When done in an maderate, intelligent way, spending time on my finanical health is as valuable and necessary as spending me on my phyical, spiritual and relational health.

And when I read the Franklin book, I also surprrised a great man as he was, he pained the earninging and loss of every shilling in his early days.  So importatn to him that he can record who, where, how much change hand 40 years after the matter had happened.

As I was brought up in the chinese intellectual way that worriing about oneselves is selfish.   The old Ben's book comforts me.  Thanks!  I passed a note to him when I walked by the public library of Boston with his status and words.

 

Blew up in school meeting

During the last meeting before winter break today, I asked faculty for inputs so we can provide more timely feedback to students in our classes.  Some faculty provided very thoughtful suggestions.  But quickly some faculty start pointing fingers to other direction: the learning management system, students don't come to office hours, etc.  When one CS professor demanded more salary and teaching assistant support, I was very upset.

I can't take the attitude that "the prerequisite to improve my work quality is to give me more money", especially we are dealing with education.  There are so many problems that we can solve and help the students, especially the under-served one, but when the first thing faculty think is more money, we quickly going to how to allocate limited financial resources - important discussion, but rarely link to better education to the students.

I discussed with a retired provost a couple of days ago.  His remarks on why he took an early retirement is interesting "I can't stand the politics of the faculty".  I am worried that many of the faculty are falling into that trap: "more money or low quality".  In both education and high-tech, it is proven the mentality does not work.
Quality has to be #1 issue.

Being a professor

I appreciate my job AND career AND calling as a professor.   There are always ups and downs, but there is not many other positions that is secure, pleasant, autonomous, prestigious, engaging, appreciated and well-paid.  Wait, sans the pay part.

Compared to the old days, a university professor is similar to a priest.  The gospel is knowledge and pursue of new knowledge. The professors are supposed to work hard, but on the subject they find worthy and interesting, answering to no one but their peers.

Internal management team

I heard this over podcast of Harvard Business Review -

Each person's perspective is limited, since we usually don't have a group of advisor that know us well and have the right aspect and available to us, it is an worthwhile strategy to have some "Internal Management Team"

CEO - set the vision, lead the charge, adjust the strategy
CFO - make sure the resource is there, be prudent and efficient with the resource
COO - make sure all the procedure is established and followed and production is effective

Board - Watch over the "big picture", heed the danger, take the long view, the sure I do the right thing, not just doing things right

Often we have to put ourself in one of these role so the overall operation is meaningful and productive.  And hopefully, lead us to peace and joy.

Financial Independence and Financial Knowledge

I started investing rather young, right out of grad school.  I carefully put away 30% of my earnings every year for four years.  I bought two houses and several stocks.  It was terrible.  I was too naive and too lazy to learn.  I lost most of my money in stock and lost one house to foreclosure.  The bad credit followed by for 7 years, during my time in the doctoral program.

I was lucky enough that I cash out most of my remaining stock in 1999 for another house in Monterey and escaped the dot com stock bubble. I restarted my investment in 2003. Not until I stared study the necessary book, take the necessary risk, avoided the typical pitfall that devour the typical investor: greed and fear.  I read several books on stock and real estate, follow closely WSJ, forbes and Money and fool.com.  Between 2003 and today 2013, I started with less than 100K, now is 10X more.

The total time I studied is less than 3-400 hours.  The hourly rate is more than $1000!  I cannot believe I did not spend some time earlier in financial study, I probably wasted at least 3000 hours in college on games and useless chats.  Everyone should know the basic of investment.  It might not be as important as life and death, but it is definite results in rich or poor.