Progressive Classroom – ‘Required Change in Culture’ - By Eswar Vadya

Progressive Classroom – ‘Required Change in Culture’  - By Eswar Vadya

Today’s top 10 jobs did not exist a decade age in 2005 e.g.: Social Media, Data Scientist, Sustainability Manager, SEO Optimization, SEM Specialist, Cloud Computing, Mobile Applications, Robotic Engineering, etc. as discussed in the recent World Economic Forum: 65 percent of today’s grade school kids will end up at jobs that haven’t even been invented yet. These changes mean that students are currently learning information and processes that may well be outdated by the time they enter the workforce.

Today’s students are tomorrow’s workforce, they are going to play significant roles in the society, by being part of an organization – for profit or non-profit, by policy making, or by becoming entrepreneurs.  As famous Clark Aldrich quoted "Each child has a spark of genius waiting to be discovered, ignited, and fed. And the goal of schools shouldn’t be to manufacture “productive citizens” to fill some corporate cubicle; it should be to inspire each child to find a “calling” that will change the world. The jobs for the future are no longer Manager, Director, or Analyst, but Entrepreneur, Creator, and even Revolutionary." 

Traditional teaching, as most of us have experienced, is classroom-based and consists of direct instructions conducted by the teacher. This teacher-centered method emphasizes learning through the teacher’s guidance at all times. Students are expected to listen to lectures and learn from them.  Also tests are the most significant indicator of student performance and degree of learning. Classrooms were designed for lecture and crowd control, with the teacher as the central figure of knowledge and authority.  The teacher had knowledge to impart through direct instruction and the current classroom structure works pretty well for this. This basic classrooms structure is the same, though in some schools, the chalkboard has been replaced by the interactive “Smart Board.” Students who belong in the same class sit down and take a single set of examinations, which they should pass. Most of the examinations are taken from fundamental resources, such as textbooks and other publications that are relevant to the subject.

Modern Era’s education is developed based on the principles of manufacturing assembly line, perhaps to support then industrial need. This process prepares students to work in a culture where given a task and expect the execution. However, manufacturing is entering a dynamic new phase; in today students have to learn to operate in environment which is so very dynamic, the phase "The only constant is change itself" is ever true, this is the time- full of innovation.

The first Industrial revolution began in Europe in the late 18th century with the mechanization of the textile industry.  Prior to this, economy was mostly driven by natural resources and manual labor, in the following decades the use of machines to make things, instead of crafting them by hand, spread around the world. The second industrial revolution began in America in the early 20th century with the assembly line, which ushered in the era of mass production.  However, Manufacturing is not monolithic anymore; the Internet, Green Electricity, and 3-D Printing are ushering in this era, as manufacturing goes digital, a third great change is now gathering pace.  New 3-D technology becomes more widespread, on site, just in time customized manufacturing of products will also reduce logistics costs with the possibility of huge energy savings.

How can today’s learning’s prepare students for jobs that don't yet exist?

Perhaps by looking into innovative methods for advancing STEAM (science, technology, engineering, art, and math) education, and amalgamating with PBLS – Project Based learning.

Modern Era’s education is developed based on the principles of manufacturing assembly line, perhaps to support then industrial need. This process prepares students to work in a culture where given a task and expect the execution. However, manufacturing is entering a dynamic new phase; in today students have to learn to operate in environment which is so very dynamic, the phase "The only constant is change itself" is ever true, this is the time- full of innovation. 

Its well documented fact that there is a crisis in American education today; Too often modern day science education fails to engage student interests and is separate from their everyday experiences. 

Students are connected to the Internet everywhere except in current school. Most kids carry around a world of information in their pockets on their mobile devices, tablets, and yet we force them to power down and disconnect, and we confine them in obsolete computer labs. A progressive school needs to have connectivity everywhere and treat computers more like pencils than microscopes. The structure of the class room desperately needs a change: small groups of kids working together, project work, and student presentations require rethinking this model.  At the same time, Computers, tablets, and other electronic devices alone are not going to change the classroom. It is the change in culture that will make the difference. Part of such culture is to understand and accept that the teacher is not the only expert in the room; however, challenge is how to address teacher attitudes toward several shifts in teaching practice. Authentic assessments can be subjective, which is often a new approach for teachers who are most comfortable determining grades based on objective tests and worksheets. Additionally, in integrated programs, teachers find themselves forced to learn new content, material that likely does not come easily to them. Evaluation studies of existing programs found that the teachers’ collective attitude toward implementing the program had a direct impact on student learning. Building a culture of collaboration, respect, and trust is key to a successful progressive classroom.

We are living in Digital Era!

To nationalise or not – that is the question

Lindsey Graham, the Republican senator, Alan Greenspan, the former chairman of the US Federal Reserve, and James Baker, Ronald Reagan’s second Treasury secretary, are in favour. Ben Bernanke, current Fed chairman, and an administration of liberal Democrats are against. What is dividing them? “Nationalisation” is the answer.

In 1978, Alfred Kahn, an adviser on inflation to President Jimmy Carter, used the word “depression”. So angry was the president that Mr Kahn started to call it “banana” instead. But the recession Mr Kahn foretold happened all the same. The same may well happen with nationalisation. Indeed, it already has: how else is one to describe the actions of the federal government in relation to Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, AIG and increasingly Citigroup? Is nationalisation not already the big financial banana?

Much of the debate is semantic. But underneath it are at least two big issues. Who bears losses? How does one best restructure banks?

Banks are us. Often the debate is conducted as if they can be punished at no cost to ordinary people. But if they have made losses, someone has to bear them. In effect, the decision has been to make taxpayers bear losses that should fall on creditors. Some argue that shareholders should be rescued, too. But, rightly, this has not happened: share prices have indeed collapsed. That is what shareholders are for.

Yet the overwhelming bulk of banking assets are financed through borrowing, not equity. Thus the decision to keep creditors whole has huge implications. If we accept Mr Bernanke’s definition of “nationalisation” as a decision to “wipe out private shareholders”, we can call this activity “socialisation”.

What are its pros and cons?

The biggest cons are two. First, loss-socialisation lowers the funding costs of mega-banks, thereby selectively subsidising their balance sheets. This, in turn, exacerbates the “too big to fail” problem. Second, it leaves shareholders with an option on the upside and, at current market values, next to no risk on the downside. That will motivate “going for broke”. So loss-socialisation increases the need to control management. The four biggest US commercial banks – JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Bank of America and Wells Fargo – possess 64 per cent of the assets of US commercial banks (see chart). If creditors of these businesses cannot suffer significant losses, this is not much of a market economy.



The “pro” of partial socialisation is that it eliminates the risk of another panic among creditors or spillovers on to investors in the liabilities of banks, such as insurance and pension funds. Since bank bonds are a quarter of US investment-grade corporate bonds, the risk of panic is real. In the aftermath of the Lehman debacle, the decision appears to be that the only alternative to disorderly bankruptcy is none at all. This is frightening.

The second big issue is how to restructure banks. One point is clear: once one has decided to rescue creditors, recapitalisation can no longer come from the debt-into-equity swaps normal in bankruptcies.

This leaves one with government capital or private capital. In practice, both possibilities are at least partially blocked in the US: the former by political anger; the latter by a wide range of uncertainties – over the valuation of bad assets, future treatment of shareholders and the likely path of the economy. This makes the “zombie bank” alternative, condemned by Mr Baker in the FT on March 2, a likely outcome. Alas, such undercapitalised banking zombies also find it hard to recognise losses or expand their lending.

The US Treasury’s response is its “stress-testing” exercise. All 19 banks with assets of more than $100bn are included. They are asked to estimate losses under two scenarios, the worse of which assumes, quite optimistically, that the biggest fall in gross domestic product will be a 4 per cent year-on-year decline in the second and third quarters of 2009 (see chart). Supervisors will decide whether additional capital is needed. Institutions needing more capital will issue a convertible preferred security to the Treasury in a sufficient amount and will have up to six months to raise private capital. If they fail, convertible securities will be turned into equity on an “as-needed basis”.

This, then, is loss-socialisation in action – it guarantees a public buffer to protect creditors. This could end up giving the government a controlling shareholding in some institutions: Citigroup, for example. But, say the quibblers, this is not nationalisation.

What then are the pros and cons of this approach, compared with taking institutions over outright? Douglas Elliott of the Brookings Institution analyses this question in an intriguing paper. Part of the answer, he suggests, is that it is unclear whether banks are insolvent. If Nouriel Roubini of the Stern School in New York were to be right (as he has been hitherto), they are. If not, then they are not (see chart). Professor Roubini has suggested, for this reason, that it would be best to wait six months by when, in his view, the difficulty of distinguishing between solvent and insolvent institutions will have gone; they will all be seen to be grossly undercapitalised.

In those circumstances, the idea of “nationalisation” should be seen as a synonym for “restructuring”. Few believe banks would be best managed by the government indefinitely (though recent performance gives some pause). The advantage of nationalisation, then, is that it would allow restructuring of assets and liabilities into “good” and “bad” banks. The big disadvantages are inherent in organising the takeover and then the restructuring of such complex institutions.

If it is impossible to impose losses on creditors, the state could well own huge banks for a long time before it is able to return them to the market. The largest bank restructuring undertaken by the US, before last year, was that of Continental Illinois, seized in 1984. It was then the seventh largest bank and yet it took a decade. How long might the restructuring and sale of Citigroup take, with its huge global entanglements? What damage to its franchise and operations might be done in the process?

We are painfully learning that the world’s mega-banks are too complex to manage, too big to fail and too hard to restructure. Nobody would wish to start from here. But, as worries in the stock market show, banks must be fixed, in an orderly and systematic way. The stress tests should be tougher than now planned. Recapitalisation must then occur. Call it a banana if you want. But bank restructuring itself must begin.

By Martin Wolf - FT.com March 3 2009

Household Debt Vs. GDP

This chart tracks the relationship between household debt and gross domestic product. You'll see two years when Americans' debt becomes 100 percent of GDP -- 1929 and 2007.
It's the chart that made Columbia professor David Beim say:
"The problem is us. The problem is not the banks, greedy though they may be, overpaid though they may be. The problem is us... We've been living very high on the hog. Our living standard has been rising dramatically in the last 25 years. And we have been borrowing much of the money to make that prosperity happen."

Laura Conaway, NPR Org

How Nationalization Found a Way Into My Vegetable Soup

SAN FRANCISCO -- One recent morning I awoke with a funny feeling. It had just struck me: I've been partly nationalized.

With huge influxes of taxpayer dollars flowing into some of the nation's biggest companies, the invisible hand of government suddenly has its fingerprints all over my life. My mortgage was first financed by J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. They've gotten a large chunk of federal bailout money. So has GMAC LLC, the parent of Homecomings Financial, which bought the mortgage six years ago. So did Countrywide Financial, now a renamed Bank of America Corp. unit, which bought the mortgage from them in part, I assume, because these banks want our mortgage considerably more than we do.

I don't have a car from General Motors Corp. or Chrysler LLC -- both effectively government wards now -- but I do take the train to work. San Francisco's Bay Area Rapid Transit System, or BART, doesn't always have an air of efficiency that makes you think it's run by anything other than a government.

But you wouldn't expect it was swept up in the bailout mess either. Still, BART has a lease-swap agreement with American International Group Inc., the insurer now in government receivership. When I scan BART destination signs for stops at Millbrae, Mission and MacArthur, I'm seeing federal bailout dollars at work.

Despite a lot of hand-wringing about how nationalization is making America look like a socialist nation, I'm not yet lining up for three hours to buy groceries, or housing four families in my apartment. In other words, government intervention hasn't drastically reshaped daily American life yet.

But the new ethos is an adjustment for someone who grew up in an era characterized first by the forceful antigovernment rhetoric of Ronald Reagan, then by a Democratic president declaring, "The era of big government is over." I can only hope it eventually leads to a Euro-style world when I get all of August off work, and three-hour lunch breaks are the norm.

But wait -- there aren't that many degrees of separation between lunch and the Brave New World now. I'm paying for my bowl of steamy vegetable soup with a corporate credit card issued by American Express Co. -- which, you guessed it, has also been backed with government money. Even if I were paying on my own dime, I'd use my personal card from Citigroup Inc.'s Citibank which -- well, you know.

Some thinkers argue that we should welcome the government at the table. "In Europe, it's considered a good thing to have the government involved," says Lars Perner, an assistant professor of clinical marketing at the USC Marshall School of Business.

Jeff Stuart agrees. Mr. Stuart runs a ballet academy in which he instructs little girls in tutus, including mine, in the art of the arabesque. Between classes, he deposits our checks into his business account at the Bank of America. Before the federal injection of cash into the bank last fall, he says, "I wanted to take all the money out and put it in my pillowcase." Now, he's sleeping more soundly: "I'm glad I'm with the [bank] and feel more secure."

Still, it's hard to see how these ballerinas and many kids still unborn won't be shouldering debt for years to come as the government pumps taxpayer dollars swelling into the trillions. Amid a credit crunch that has dried up lending, Americans have been handed a massive, national home-equity loan that we'll be paying for a long time. This brings new meaning to the term "ownership society."

Many of us have voluntarily given money to big institutions before. (I don't mean taxes.) In our case, it was for the local firemen's association and victims of the Indonesian tsunami.

The federal bailout extends this kind of involvement to levels unheard of in recent years, even if it's only in indirect and minute ways. Corporate giving, for example, which these days is more like corporate regifting. Wells Fargo & Co. and Bank of America -- both recipients of bailout dollars -- are among the biggest corporate givers to our school district's annual fund-raising campaign.

For the 2008-2009 year so far, Wells Fargo has shelled out up to $25,000 to the campaign, while Bank of America has handed over up to $10,000. Julia Burke, the fund-raising coordinator at the local educational foundation, says the money from corporate donors pays for math and music enrichment classes.

"I was amazed we got all the banks to contribute this year," says Ms. Burke.

On behalf of all taxpayers, you're very welcome.

By PUI-WING TAM -FEBRUARY 27, 2009 -The Wallstreet Journal

ERP Made Easy? Software developers are rediscovering the virtues of user-friendliness

In the early 1980s, the designers of Kwik-Chek, Intuit's first personal-finance package, set a bold goal: a novice PC user should be able to install the software and print a check within 15 minutes. Developers whisked people off the streets of Palo Alto, California, and timed them with a stopwatch, tweaking the program after each test. Thus began a whole new facet of software design, focused on making sure high-tech products were user-friendly.

A quarter-century later, entire companies are built around the need for software usability, and research centers and academic journals are devoted to it. Microsoft alone has 43 usability labs. Nevertheless, a funny thing happened on the way to software-usability nirvana: while many consumer apps became easy enough for a five-year-old to use, much business software continued to baffle grown-ups.

"Ten to 15 years ago you had better software at work than at home," says Dan Matthews, the Sweden-based chief technology officer of IFS, an enterprise resource planning (ERP) vendor. Then the Web took off. "The Internet produced an instant mass market. Developers building a service [for consumers] on the Internet couldn't call the user to come in for a training session, so their tools had to be designed to be picked up intuitively."

Meanwhile, business apps like enterprise software became more and more complex. In a survey conducted last year by IFS, 20 percent of enterprise-software users said their top causes of wasted time were learning different modules and applications and just trying to find task-related information.

Data like that should rattle managers. For one thing, says Matthews, productivity is not just about doing things faster, but also about not wasting time. Also, the success of ERP rollouts hinges on end-users actually adopting the applications in their daily work. "If you ask CFOs, they don't really care about how delighted employees are about using the new software," Matthews says. "But they do care about how many months there are between when the software goes live and when employees are regularly updating time and expense reports in the system, or project managers are using it for planning."

Mass Appeal
In what looks like the beginning of a welcome trend, some enterprise- software vendors are putting renewed emphasis on usability. IFS is currently testing an Enterprise Explorer interface that emulates the look and feel of consumer applications, predominantly a Web browser. "No one knows all the information there is on the Internet; enterprise software is the same way," Matthews says. "We have 7,000 different forms in the IFS applications." With the new interface, IFS users can navigate via hyperlinks and search windows instead of modules and folders.

Agresso Software is currently working on a new version of its ERP system with help from a user-interaction and -design company. The challenge is to come up with a design that has broad appeal. "In the past when you developed finance systems you were covering the core of a company, maybe 100 users," says Ton Dobbe, vice president of marketing. "Now the number of users is six or seven times that."

Microsoft is taking a tailored approach to usability with its Dynamics NAV software. The system features the company's "role tailored" user interface, which is designed around the individual user and his or her job function. The goal of role-tailored design is to "take out the 90 percent of the app that is not needed in that job," says Jakob Nielsen, a principal user-experience manager at Microsoft. To develop the interface, Microsoft built a customer model that describes 61 corporate "personas," or user profiles, and the core activities, interactions, pain points, and psychographics of each. One persona, for example, is Phyllis the Accounting Manager, for whom an acute pain point is the tedium of correcting posted transactions.

Design of the Times
With this refreshed perspective on usability, ERP developers are vying to make their software attractive to young workers, who have grown up with a new generation of technology. This may require looking beyond the browser model. A piece of business software doesn't have to look and feel exactly like, say, Apple's iPhone, but it needs to be "a designed product," says Matthews. When a company rolls out a new ERP system, employees should be excited about taking that first test drive, he says.

Well, maybe. Given how uninspiring most ERP software is right now, that may be setting the bar too high. Most users (and executives) would be satisfied with software that makes tasks simple to execute — as simple as, say, printing a check.

Vincent Ryan is a senior editor at CFO.