State of Telecom Industry in Pakistan

Mobile Learning Environment is a product for promoting learning in schools using mobile phones. More information is at GoKnow web site. I will write additional posts about this soon.

Guest Post By Phil Cruver

This is a continuation from Collaborative Learning in Paksitan Part 1 which introduced the concept of collaborative learning using enhanced video technologies.

Educators can also provide students with links to their lectures and assignments to tag as a class project. With this technology they can tag “chapters” and “topics” within the media file with a descriptive text for each tag. Additionally, all tags can be exported and distributed as a blog.

Once students tag a portion of a video or locate a tagged section of a video that is relevant to what they wish to learn, they may want to share the link with others. They can embed this as a deep link on their website, blog, or even in an email message. When other students click on the deep link, they will be taken not to the beginning of the video but to that precise section within the video.

Rather than conducting a search for keywords or tags that describe an entire video, students can conduct deep searches for tags that describe specific sections within a video and then immediately jump to that precise portion of the video clip. This saves time and facilitates education because students don’t have to watch a five-minute video to find a five-second nugget of information they need to understand.

How do these deep technologies specifically enhance learning?

• They increase the granularity of indexed media, allowing specific parts of video lectures to be more easily remixed, linked, and reused.
• They engage students to co-create content via annotation of lectures.
• They make media as an instructional tool more efficient since reading or reviewing streaming video is more time consuming than print media.

Also, these deep technologies enhance the educational content. The more the commenting and annotating, the more valuable the learning asset becomes as the wisdom of numerous and diverse interested parties add layers of collective intelligence to the video. Furthermore, specific moments of time within these videos can be instantaneously identified and retrieved with the Learning 2.0 Platform search engine.

Consider the opportunity for enhancing the quality of education in Pakistan by harnessing thousands of video lectures produced by the top teachers throughout the country. This digital archive could be searched as indexed meta data by key words within the annotations. Not only would this video library compliment and extend traditional learning but it would also scale giving millions of students access to a quality education.

Hopefully, Learning 2.0 will be adopted in Pakistan as a complimentary component to the upcoming national curriculum, which would help foster a new culture of learning. It would be a positive step towards educating its students with the new literacy they will require for competing in the flat world global economy they inhabit.

Continuing with E-Learning Series, here is a great example of how video based lectures can be used for education and for spreading knowledge. MIT World is a free and open site that provides on demand video of significant public events at MIT. See this video on Providing Chips and Technology for a World with Four Billion Cellular Subscribers. The video shows how industry and academia collaboration can work. Also note the telemedicine potential mentioned – see telemedicine related posts here.

Here is another post in the E-learning series. Watch this video (from authors@google series) for pragmatic tips about how to define and achieve what you want in life: Leadership and success through your passion.

Ever wondered what makes a good-or great-leader? Think you have leadership potential but have been reluctant to step forward? Ever wanted to lead but felt you lacked the tools, training or charisma? In Passion at Work: How to Find Work You Love and Live the Time of Your Life, Lawler asserts that from our own perspective and experience, we all can become leaders when our passions are awakened, ignited and engaged.

On a personal note, many years ago I worked as an e-business consultant for Scient in Boston (mentioned towards the end) and Lawler Kang ran that office. It is great to see him inspiring people and I admire him for his passion!

E-Learning Series: By Phil Cruver, President of KZO Education

Learning 1.0 was about the delivery and management of online courses usually consisting of downloading text-based materials and perhaps the streaming of lengthy videotaped lectures for anytime and anyplace viewing. Learning 2.0 leveraged the vast array of interactive and collaborative Web 2.0 technologies and concepts such as social networks, wikis, podcasts, and blogs with user-generated content as the cornerstone. Learning 3.0 is now appearing on the evolutionary path, which when coupled with emerging digital distribution networks and mobile computing technologies, has the potential to revolutionize education.

In a recent meeting with senior strategists at Intel Corporation, they made it clear that “global extreme learning” and the challenges of its “massive scaling” have been on their radar for years. These articulate and seasoned technology strategists confessed that that they are struggling with defining the composition of extreme learning tools and the supportive ecosystem that must be developed for scaling global education. They also indicated that Learning 3.0 could be the missing link between two of Intel’s major initiatives: WiMAX for wireless broadband access and Atom microprocessors for next generation computing devices.

So what is Learning 3.0 and what technologies will shape its emergence and evolution? Consider: There are 455 WiMAX deployments underway in 135 countries covering over 430 million people and despite the slowing global economy, at least 100 more operators will deploy additional wireless networks this year. Atom chips are fueling the exploding market for low-cost, low-powered Netbooks, which will grow 66% this year to more than 27 million units and is expected to continue at breakneck rates.

Intel has committed $100 million annually for global education and has a huge footprint in Pakistan claiming to have trained 175,000 teachers in this nation with illiteracy exceeding half its population of 175 million – the 6th most populated country on the planet. Coincidentally, Pakistan possesses the first nationwide WiMAX network covering over 22 cities, making it ideal for showcasing how emerging market countries can leapfrog directly into next generation learning technologies.

Could extreme learning with new computing tools and digital distribution technologies assist and advance education in Pakistan? The recent announcement that a national curriculum will be approved in six months for introduction to the classrooms in 2010 may require a back-up strategy. Political risks and bureaucratic delays are inevitable and the costs and logistics for printing and distributing millions of traditional textbooks, vulnerable to obsolescence, are staggering.

According to USAID: “In Pakistan, the cost of teacher professional development is 25.5 times the cost of training a secondary school student. Producing low-grade teachers at such a high cost is a matter of concern”. It is estimated that there are about 1.4 million teachers in Pakistan, which must be doubled if universal education is to be achieved. Therefore, rather than continuing to incur “High Per Capita Cost for Low Grade Teachers”, with advanced and affordable streaming video technologies, lectures from top Pakistani teachers could be recorded for distribution over the Internet resulting in a quality education for millions of students.

WiMAX broadband connectivity to the Internet, coupled with Netbooks, would provide the infrastructure for producing and archiving quality video lectures for teacher professional development. This could serve as a scalable solution for augmenting education in Pakistan with access to the latest and best classroom practices and also provide a parallel back-up strategy.

Netbooks promise to debut this summer at $99 and at $10/school/month, all 25,000 public secondary schools in Pakistan could have access into a “Window on the World” with WiMAX/EDGE. At $3 million a year on a capital investment of about the same amount, this would be a pittance to pay for access to a global world of knowledge where traditional textbooks cannot compete. Furthermore, Learning 3.0 may provide the only opportunity to rapidly scale quality education for millions of Pakistanis wishing to compete in the 21st century global economy.

About the Author: Phil Cruver is President of KZO Education, a provider of comprehensive digital communications and training solutions for government and commercial clients. He is a serial entrepreneur, founder of three start-up companies, and has served as CEO of two public companies. Phil recently visited Pakistan and welcomes those who are interested in assisting education in Pakistan to join this Social Network.