Sunday Posts

I have written on and off about the e-school concept. The idea was to break away from the model established by business schools, which is all about providing solutions to problems, and rather, focus on finding the problems, as entrepreneurs will do. It is still about studying business, but not through case studies, but doing one. In this conception, the e-School will look less like a school, with desks and all that, but rather like an ecosystem, with incubation, facilitation and education, all bounded together. This is a 'pivot' for U-Aspire and a necessary one. My initial efforts to persuade partners abroad to think about education differently were producing the familiar conversations about getting a British degree on the cheap, a goal I wanted to move away from. The idea was to start a new kind of conversation, about how education needs to change, but the easy one, selling British degrees, was triumphing over the difficult one, of innovating in education. Hence, the cha...

I have 'boot-strapped' for slightly over a year now, living without a salary or even steady income, to get the business off the ground. I did preach that everyone should do boot-strapping at least once in life, and I have done this to remain true to my word. It was challenging, indeed: I was not just boot-strapping to start a business, but was doing so while simultaneously paying for my education and still settling in a new country. That way, this bootstrap was a somewhat mad plunge, and therefore, as great a learning as I thought it would be.  This had the usual elements people learn in a bootstrap, like: That you can't buy everything you want to buy, and I am not talking about diamond rings. Many a times, I shall control the impulse to buy a book, or a toy for my son, because it was not urgent. That there are more efficient ways of doing things. I discovered the cheapest ways to get around in London during this period. I know now when to use my pre-paid Oyster ...

I can be accused of 'media determinism', but looking at the current wave of illiberal politics, I can't help but believe that this is the last stand of the broadcast media.  Two countries I closely follow are caught up in the same 'illiberal' wave - India and Britain. Two very different countries, at different stages of development: A matured media scene in Britain, where newspapers are dying and even Rupert Murdoch has to fight for his corner, when in India, ever expanding newspaper circulation and 24x7 news channels seem to defy gravity. But, then, it could perhaps be seen across the world: Even the technologically advanced Japan, the newly resurgent Russia, and even inside the Facebook nation - a march of illiberal views, based on intolerance, rejection of the other, and increasingly, violence, at least of the verbal kind. Cass Sunstein argues that this is resulting from 'media personalisation', a new media phenomenon rather than the old media (...

It was a standard ministerial speech, but what Matthew Hancock, UK's Minister of Skills, said yesterday should be noted. Not that the ideas are anything new, educators like Ken Robinson has been talking about them for years, but this amounts to a Ministerial acknowledgement of some sort: That skills education needs to change fundamentally. ( See the transcript of the speech here ) The key idea that makes this speech notable is an acknowledgement that the education divide must end. Mr Hancock's point is to eliminate the divide between academic and vocational education, and the labelling that comes with it. As the credo of skills education spreads beyond Europe, this is an important message. One must acknowledge that this is a common refrain among Skills educators: They almost always complain being treated as 'Second Class Educators' by their Higher Ed colleagues. Mr Hancock, being the Minister of the department, may have only been giving voice to it. I am not claim...

My life is changing. Or, pivoting, as it should in the entrepreneurial journey. A year of bootstrap living teaches many things, not least what you truly desire, and I have reached the point of reconciliation with reality. This is, in a way, the time when I trade off my desire to change the world to the more modest aim of making the enterprise succeed. This is also the time when I understand what can and can't work - that I am no longer twenty year old and fit to the culturally acceptable stereotype of entrepreneurs - and finding other ways of making sense.  This starts with finding out what I truly want to do. Indeed, my efforts to build something meaningful allow this to come out in sharp relief. And, indeed, my efforts to build a global network business is not recent - I have been at it at least since 2007 - and therefore, what I know now is accumulated over time, through successes and failures. For example, despite my continuous protestation, the point of my work seemed to...

Technology changes education. If it sounds some kind of obvious, it is not: There are people who will argue that there is unchanging, unchangeable, soul of education. But this besides, there is a huge gap between the claims about how technology could change education and how it actually changes. The point of this post is have a closer look at this argument. To think about how technology can change education, one must think of not just technology in education, but technology in context. So, this discussion should not be just limited to how Fiber Optic connections make education through video ubiquitous, but about such technology creating new expectations, jobs and careers as well. So, it is not just that one should use video because it has become possible to do so, but because it will be a normal feature of the workplace or professions that the learner may go into.  This is something like saying that one needed to read books in college when jobs and careers were dominated ...

The last two decades were a great time for educational expansion. The ideas of mass education caught up, not just in the West, but also in the rest of the world. Population is no longer seen as a problem, but a source of strength, of consumption and of production, and 'demographic dividend' was added to our lexicon. Personnel quickly became Human Resources and then Talent, and in this transformation, education came to be seen as the key to unlocking the great wealth that lies hidden in the teeming masses. Especially in the last decade or so, schools, colleges and universities were built at a furious pace. Governments accepted the fact that they can't build the educational capacity fast enough, and looked for ways to build private capital into education, and entrepreneurs saw this as the new frontier of opportunity. The importance of education is one thing that everyone agreed upon. Now, it is perhaps time to look back at all that has happened, and start asking an unco...