Tread Carefully where Others Rush

Posted by on March 29, 2012 No comments

If you’re a trend spotter, you’ll do well, so long as you’re at the beginning of the trend and not the middle. But very few of us have this capability and we only notice what the next big thing is when it already is the next big thing.

Given this, it’s better to be at the back of the pack when you know you cannot be at the forefront. Not for you to be trying to do what everybody else is already discarding, but for you to notice what everyone else has overlooked in the mad rush to be with the “in crowd”.

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As they trample over all the grass and leaves, looking at others instead of around them, note the surroundings instead. What does the bigger landscape look like? What do the tiny details left behind point to?

You never know what you will find.

Students from Guiyang show their Entrepreneurial Side

Posted by on February 18, 2012 No comments

After visiting some of the most beautiful and ecologically sustainable places in Singapore, students from Guiyang set out to discover what they can do for their own home town in China.

How do they put together a product or service that was meaningful for their community as well as desirable, economically viable and technologically feasible?

After much deliberation and many late nights working together in their small groups, with fights erupting now and again due to disagreements on how to go forward, the students emerged with some powerful ideas whose detail and analysis astounded the judges.

Hearing from these youngsters cemented our long held belief that Chinese innovation has never gone away, the stories of those who can still think brilliantly have simply been suppressed. Their efforts, young as they were, reminded us of Cambridge Professor Joseph Needham’s amazement at how technologically advanced China actually was compared to the rest of the world. He famously documented them in his massive work Science and Civilisation in China which he thought would fill one (1) book has actually taken twenty (27) and since his passing has been taken over by other scholars in Cambridge’s Needham Research Institute.

Surely, the Chinese penchant for invention and innovation is very much alive and well and we wouldn’t be surprised if the next big thing comes not from the Western world but from the Chinese.

A Cool Paradigm Shift in Education

Posted by on August 10, 2011 No comments

An incredible TED Talk by the famous Salman Khan who just happens to be a very good teacher, especially in math and the sciences. His premise, after posting up youtubes for his cousins to help them with their homework (and then went super viral), is that teachers today could assign youtube videos for homework and then use the classroom to do homework. This was actually done by some teachers after they found out that his videos were the preferred instructional method vs the one-size-fits-all lecture style today.

Let’s get our kids out of the “swiss cheese” gaps of education today.