As part of my new-year reflections and resolutions, I’ve looked at how well-rounded human being I am. How do I look at the things around me, and how are my interests? Are they wide enough, are they deep enough (by whatever metric)? I came to the conclusion that I knew much more as a kid than I know now as an adult, regressed in a lot of areas, and it’s worth taking a look at why that could have happened & what does it really mean? Do I need to be worried about that?
Let’s see some examples of things that occupied the mind of kid-me and now-me…
Kid-me knew more
Dinosaurs & Prehistory
Triceratops
I don’t think there are many kids who were not fascinated by dinosaurs! I had a bunch of books about them, and about other prehistoric creatures. It’s amazing to see life forms that are not found anymore, and also see how they connect to animals living now. It’s a whole different world that is amazing to imagine. This also includes prehistoric people, their ways of living, a much simpler, very different way of being. This put everything into perspective, gained an appreciation to looooong times, and change all around us on earth.
There are all kinds of toys and fun gadgets around the house for most people that might work or be broken, but either way most people wouldn’t know how do they work inside. For example take this solar powered Tibetan prayer wheel. There are many of these out there, and found one at home lying around as well. It didn’t seem to work, and thought why not take apart to take a look?
Solar powered Tibetan prayer wheel
The inside of this Tibetan prayer wheels is pretty straightforward: taking off the bottom cover out come two ballast stones, and drivebox with a solar panel hanging off it. The drivebox is connected to the prayer wheel outside via a rectangular shaft to turn it.
I have signed up to support it for two main reasons: it’s a Taiwanese project (Skytraq, the company behind Navspark is in in Hsinchu city in Taiwan), and I haven’t seen anything about Beidou before.
They barely made the campaign, but it’s not for the lack of quality. There were a lot of updates during and afterwards as well as the project was developing. Those were good behind the scenes information, got to see what parts of hardware development are more troublesome than others.
The Navspark board
Navspark unboxing: board, antenna, pins
The rewards just shipped this week, and since for this campaign I’m a “local”, I got it pretty early. I got my Navspark GPS/Beidou (BD) version in a big envelope, together with an antenna, some pin and a jumper.
I’ve just recently travelled from Taiwan to Japan on a short trip to check out the cherry blossoms of Kyoto. While it was fun, I did realize that there are a lot of technological details I’m keeping track of, that take up significant mental bandwidth. Technology is helpful even if it takes effort to keep it running. This is a writeup of a non-exhaustive, arbitrarily ordered list of tech I used on the trip, and the way I used them.
Internet connectivity
One of the first concern is how do I get online on the go? There seem to be a bunch of companies providing mobile hotspot rental. The one I wanted to use originally is in Taiwan, and tried to arrange it too late (needs ~5 days in advance). Instead I found another company online called Japan Wireless. They can send a wireless hotspot or pre-paid 3G card to a hotel, or to an airport to be picked up. Since the hotspot I wanted to get was out of stock for the first half of the trip, I went with a 3G card and wanted to use an old Android phone to act like the hotspot.
3G SIM card pack
Picking up the card at Kansai Airport was very straightforward. My Android phone worked much less. Might be getting “too old”, sometimes it couldn’t start the wireless sharing at all, though when it worked it was good for a while. It is also worth enabling “network traffic monitoring” and appropriate warning levels. The pre-paid card had 1G traffic included. Definitely does not recommend running a Play Store update while connected, apps can easily take up 30-50Mb, and 50% of your traffic allowance is gone before you can say “Ice Cream Sandwich”…
Ever since the first time I took couple of ground-breaking online courses a few years back, I try to keep some courses going all the time. Doesn’t always happen, but there’s always a lot of good stuff to choose from. This semester (if there are still semesters in continuous education), I chose to go a bit outside of my normal territory of physical sciences, engineering and IT. Instead ventured onto the territories of marketing, management, and music. It was pretty successful, I feel I have grown as a person because of that. Here are some notes and impressions from those courses.
Content Strategy for Professionals
Content Strategy for Professionals (Engaging Audiences for Your Organization) is hosted on Coursera by Northwestern University. I took it to know better about purposefully managing content, that I can put at good use at the Taipei Hackerspace, Ignite, Future Shorts, or any other project that I might be working on.
The instructor, John Lavine, was quite interesting, engaging, and gives off an aura of knowledge and authority. The first lecture was pretty good overview. From the second lecture the course went into a form of having two invited experts each week, who are pretty much doing an Explain-Like-I’m-a-5-Year-Old of their ideas and field to John Lavine. That was somehow much less interesting. Similar to a fireside chat, a lot of polite talk, we are just onlookers, but this is not a lecture. Lots of repetitions, even between different guests. I can’t really tell if I have learned anything. It might not have helped that it was “for professionals”, and they repeated multiple times that “there are no grades, no pressure…”
They have also incorporated other teaching methods. There was an e-book, which I haven’t gone into much. The hands on learning was supported by a case study, which might have been interesting, especially because the course managers arranged peer-to-peer feedback. I skipped that because I thought doing actual work instead of fictional case study might be more conductive. Apparently there was also a breakfast series, when the travelling professors invited the course attendants out at different cities around the US. Now that would have been interesting to join.
All in all, I don’t regret taking the course, and probably did the topic as well as possible given their aims. Maybe the topic was a bit shallow for me.
Critical Perspectives on Management
Critical Perspectives on Management was also on Coursera, by the IE Business School in Spain. I chose it because I have a lot of ideas about how teams should work, management should work (some of these ideas which might not have gotten me too many favours with past bosses), and thought it would be good to have some more inspiration for thought.
Here’s the trailer of the course with the instructor, Rolf Strom-Olsen.
The format of the actual lessons were recorded classes at the business school, with weekly readings, and tests.
The course went well beyond my expectation. It explored a lot of interesting topics, drawing examples and lessons from the Roman grain trade, shipyard workers, housing crisis, and much more. The overall message was “keep thinking and asking question”, which could be a duh!, but the way it was presented and discussed showed me how much uncritical of things I can be, even when I think I’m critical.
This is probably my favorite “thinking” style course besides the classic Justice with Michael Sandel. Rolf Strom-Olsen is a very good orator as well, and I would probably join any other courses that he puts up. The technology for the course was well done too. Weekly message and lessons learned along the way from the instructor; the tests are challenging and interesting; some of the readings are checked out of the business schools electronic library….
Jazz Appreciation UT.8.01x
Jazz Appreciation is on EdX, hosted by University of Texas, Austin. Chose this one because even if I’m a self-proclaimed jazz fan, I feel I barely know anything about jazz, and would love to know more.
Boy, this didn’t disappoint.
Jazz Appreciation on UTAustinX
From all these courses, I feel this is the best put together. Jeffrey Hellmer, the instructor (professor and musician) has a good style, can feel his enthusiasm and knowledge every step: his comments, when he’s demonstrating one or another famous musician’s style on the piano, when pointing out things to listen to in a particular piece. The text was well prepared, and while I’m sure it was read out, it didn’t feel like it, but very engaging.
The course had a number of innovative features. As much as it can be surprising, others mentioned that this is one of the few (or only?) course so far about music that actually uses musical excerpts in the teaching. I can vouch for that it went a long way. The learning sections used Cerego, a spaced repetition app/site. It can be quite addictive for a while, though for many people it was a very big departure using “long term recall progress” instead of one time test scores for tracking the course achievement. The instructor also had an earpiece, and he started/stopped musical excerpts, so he could listed together with us, and point things out, count rhythm, emphasize musical features while we were listening with him. This kind of interactivity can go a long way!
It wasn’t all good, though. The price to pay for including music in the lecture is that copyright law apparently kicks in. The result is that all the videos were online only for 1 week, after which they were taken offline and only the transcripts were to be found – and reading those wasn’t really helpful for understanding music on the weeks when I missed it.
The great course also spawned an engaged community. My favorite is that people were compiling playlists on Grooveshark of music mentioned in the lectures. Definitely have to find those and give them a good listening. I already have a somewhat more nuanced ear when I listen to jazz and music in general, and have a bit better idea why do I like or not like particular songs or musicians.
Conclusion
It feels the online courses are definitely improving. The teachers are better, and also better prepared. The overall production value of courses seem to be higher. There are more courses to choose from to, with a larger intended audience as well. In the future, I will try to have a more balanced portfolio of online courses that I’m taking (between humanities and hard science).
It is exciting times. I hope more people start to realize, that universities are not the only option to get an education (by far).
