How to teach kids to be innovators? Go Montessori.

School has always been top priority for my wife and me.  [Education is too big of a term] Though we both admit we never enjoyed it as kids.  Must be the reason we wanted to get it right now with our kid.

Here in the Philippines, sending a child to school can be quite expensive. In fact, you could easily say that it's number one reason why we need to earn, really.  Public schools?  Well, let's just say that it's bottom most in our list of options.

Anyway, here's food for thought if you who value learning and innovation as well.  

Montessori Builds Innovators

There are strident disagreements these days over every aspect of American educational policy, except for one.  Everyone thinks it would be great if we could better teach students how to innovate.

Full article by Andrew McAfee here.

Plus, ever heard of Monsieurs  Brin, Page and  Bezos?  They're quite successful now so you may also want to read 'The Montessori Mafia' and perhaps see your kids' names on this elite list in the future.

After graduating Montessori preschool last year, kid said she didn't want to go back. We obliged but look, she made own shield.  Eat your heart out Mr. Starks, not vibranium but does the job!

When Open Feels Closed

At OSCON, a new group was launched and calls itself the Open Cloud Initiative.

From Networkworld: 

The group is a “non-profit organization established to advocate open standards in cloud computing”. The OCI is modeled after the Open Source Initiative that helped define OSS and OSI accepted licenses.

The OCI says their purpose is “to provide a legal framework within which the greater cloud computing community of users and providers can reach consensus on a set of requirements for Open Cloud, as described in the Open Cloud Principles (OCP) document, and then apply those requirements to cloud computing products and services, again by way of community consensus.”

One word comes to mind.  Splinter.

And that is often is followed by 'ouch'.

[Might as well just call it CCCP.  Closed Cloud Computing Posturing. ] 

Is that what you call open?

Choice‬‏

via youtube.com

It is never too easy -- when all I want is 'simple'. To believe that I am in charge of my own life, to stay true to values I hold dear despite the obvious rule of a consumerist society under the guise of freedom.

eCLOUD: Part weather, part computing wonder. All design genius.

via vimeo.com

Not only does it capture the essence of looking at clouds to evoke randomness such as when you're looking at actual ones and fuzzing about the shapes, eCloud is an amazing work of computing and design. Excellent alternative when you can't go to the roof because you're not a kid anymore.

Persist

Email, Keynote or Powerpoint, they all have their purpose and have wowed and inspired us all plenty of times.  Call me sentimental but still, nothing compares to a simple, heartfelt written letter.  

Here's proof with extra that extra Pixar creative touch. Thanks to Letters of Note.

Bonus: For the Sprouties, Lions in my own Garden, handwritten by Paddy given to Lloyd Cole.

See the full gallery on Posterous

The Irony of a National ICT Month

You can still catch the celebration on the CICT website or at least the farce of it before it goes under the the banner of DOST.

"Let’s celebrate the National ICT Month this June! With the theme, “A Digitally Empowered Philippines”..."

Paraphrasing US President Obama's statement during the appointment of Vivek Kundra as first federal CIO, we can now read the CICT demotion as stating the Aquino presidency's direction as:

"[Forget about] using the spirit of [Filipino] innovation and the power of technology to improve performance and lower the cost of government operations. [With CICT under DOST, we are] making sure that our government  [will NOT be] running in the most secure, open and efficient way possible.

Plus considering the results of UN's E-Government Survey of 2010, it seems our current government believes otherwise.

While technology is no substitute for good policy, it may give citizens the power to question the actions of regulators and bring systemic issues to the fore.  Similarly, e-government can add to public service delivery to help governments respond to an expanded set of demands even as revenues fall short.

No offense to DOST but I thinkyup.  ICT deserves an office all of its own.  After all, unlike the fairly tame DOST, technology has a way of exposing things that should not be named thereby biting the very hand that created and sustains it.

Oh, well.  For wishful thinking, we can just read this document and pray that e-nlightenment comes.

The E-government handbook for Developing Countries (A Project of InfoDev and THe Center for Democracy and Technology)