Essays and longer write-ups. For the short stuff, see Notes.
September 15th, 2014 Systems thinking is the process of understanding how things, regarded as systems, influence one another within a whole. In organizations, systems consist of people, structures, and processes that work together to make an organization “healthy” or “unhealthy”.
Read MoreAugust 28th, 2014 The EDiversity “We Need Choices” Education Conference is taking place on October 11 and 12 at Hong Kong University. Yesterday, Nick interviewed one of the speakers, Mr. Niko Lindholm. Formerly with the Finnish National Education export program — “Future Learning Finland”, he consulted policy makers in Saudi Arabia and countries in East Asia. Mr. Lindholn is currently a Visiting Scholar at Fudan University, Shanghai, a PhD Candidate at University of Tampere, and working for Tribalearning, bringing Finnish developed personalized learning to the world. He holds a master degree in Social Sciences from University of Turku in Finland specializing in politics of education reforms in East-Asia.
Read MoreIn the fall of 2008, CUUSOO SYSTEM and the LEGO® Group teamed up to launch the LEGO® CUUSOO crowdsourcing experiment. Initially, the site was only available in Japanese but this first step led to the launch of the international LEGO® CUUSOO beta site in the fall of 2011. This crowd sourcing platform, which led to a number of successful product launches for LEGO®, such as LEGO® Shinkai 6500, LEGO® HAYABUSA, LEGO® Minecract, LEGO® Back to the Future, LEGO® NASA Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity Rover, and LEGO® Ghostbusters 30th Anniversary set. With success of the platform, following agreement with CUUSOO, LEGO® now runs the site as <a href=“https://ideas.lego.com/“ target=“_blank">LEGO® Ideas, based on the LEGO® CUUSOO platform. All projects, supports, comments, profiles, and other data from LEGO CUUSOO has been automatically migrated to LEGO Ideas. You can sign in to LEGO Ideas with a LEGO ID, find your old LEGO CUUSOO account, and connect to it on LEGO Ideas We are grateful for the many years of collaboration and experimentation between our two companies and wish continued success of LEGO® Ideas.
Read MoreSystems thinking is the process of understanding how things, regarded as systems, influence one another within a whole. In organizations, systems consist of people, structures, and processes that work together to make an organization “healthy” or “unhealthy”.
Read MoreAfter the recent events that caused me to focus my research on “Can we teach children to become empathetic leaders”, I started to interview empathetic leaders in my network. I want to find out how they grew up to become the person they are today. Last Friday, I interviewed Patrick Newell. Patrick lives in Tokyo and he started Tokyo International School 13 years ago because he couldn’t find any school that “taught 21st century skills to 21st century children”. I met Patrick in 2010 when I volunteered at TEDxTokyo, he and another good friend of mine, Todd Porter, were the founders of a pilot program originated from the TED conference, which later became TEDx! Patrick also founded Living Dreams, an NPO that enriches the lives of over 2000 orphans in Japan, and co-founded Impact Japan, a lighthouse for entrepreneurship and innovation in Japan.
Read MoreOn Sunday, Bobby from YES Network met up with Mabo, Mulberry Tree Unschool’s head teacher, to give him a crash course on how to interview people effectively. The reason for this was because Mabo will be going on a grand tour of kindergartens and children’s museums in the US. Mabo used to work on the frontline at the kindergartens and Children’s Museum in San Francisco. Now, he has been living in Hong Kong for four years, and Hong Kong is lagging completely behind in Early Childhood Education. He’s looking forward to this trip to catch up with the latest and bring the knowledge back to Hong Kong.
Read MoreEver since reading about Pauline Hawkin’s Animal Farm Lessons, I’ve had one of the outcomes stuck in my head: “Every once and a while, I will have a student who stands up and leads, not as a dictator, but as a leader of the people. He will accept every suggestion and value everyone’s input, even if some of the suggestions are ridiculous. I’ve had only a few students who have actually led that way over the years, but I always hope that those few students find their way into politics.”
Read MoreDear LEGO CUUSOO members, In the fall of 2008, CUUSOO SYSTEM and the LEGO Group teamed up to launch the LEGO CUUSOO crowdsourcing experiment. Initially, the site was only available in Japanese but this first step led to the launch of the international LEGO CUUSOO beta site in the fall of 2011.
Read More“I’m a lucky mommy, my daughter was accepted into St. X, one of the most sought after kindergartens! In K.1, I just let her play, I didn’t sign her up to any after school activities or tutor schools. It was OK, but now in K.2, her classmates can WRITE, in English, a story! They can do additions, 2 digits with 1 digit! And multiplications!! I have no choice but to push my daughter too, otherwise, come interview time, she may lose everything…”
Read More“my place” - Innovative Children’s furniture launched by 3 students Launching your own product is a dream many people all over the world has. For three students at Aoyama Gakuin University, Hitomi Kimura, Eri Nakatsugawa and Kyoko Takeda, their dream became reality with CUUSOO.
Read MoreA few weeks ago, a friend sent The Next Web’s The Past, Present and Future of Crowdfunding article to me. My friend knew I’m a big fan of CUUSOO’s Kohei Nishiyama and had worked with him to launch their super awesome LEGO official crowdfunding site! I was eager to read this article about crowdfunding’s history, hoping to see CUUSOO’s name in it. Unfortunately, Paul Sawers didn’t mention it. Not even LEGO CUUSOO.
Read MoreIs it just me? Or is Hong Kong’s adults quite hostile to young children? I had previously written hospital staffs treating children like objects, my experience taking my son Luc for an X-Ray. It’s such a daily part of life here that people don’t see anything wrong with it. I’ve gotten so used to it that I was shocked when I flew to Okinawa last October for the Regional Startup Weekend Organizers Summit and my family tagged along for a mini vacation. Everyone there, even the security guards at the airport, were super friendly to my “naughty” children.
Read MoreCUUSOO System hires former LEGO Creative director to lead international expansion On the back of the success with LEGO CUUSOO, Kohei Nishiyma, the pioneer in online user innovation, returned as CEO in 2013 to focus CUUSOO on international expansion and is therefore proud to announce that former Senior Creative Director at LEGO, Paal Smith-Meyer has joined CUUSOO as Chief Creative Officer. Smith-Meyer joins with extensive experience in both leading design and pioneering collaborative businesses between consumers and the Danish icon as seen in Mindstorms, LEGO Architecture and Architecture studio, LEGO CUUSOO and LEGO Life of George. With our international focus, we will take the learning from LEGO CUUSOO and apply in connecting creative people to small and medium size manufacturers all over the world, living up to our promise of “Launch Made Easy”. Paal joins a new leadership team that is completed with COO Tsukasa Sugita, who brings his expertise in engineering, product marketing and business development from Six Apart, where he held the position of Corporate Officer of Product and previous positions at Opera Software and Mitsui Co.
Read MoreLAUNCH MADE EASY I remember how exciting it was to reconnect with high school friends on Facebook. LinkedIn took away my burden of punching in contacts in an excel spreadsheet. I use Path to share private photos with my family. My network is extended and communication is frictionless.
Read More“I had just turned 14. At school, I overheard one of my childhood friends talking with his teacher. “My top high school choices?! I don’t even know if I can score high enough to get in. Ah well, worst come to worst I’ll just join the gangs.” I had grown apart from this friend since we entered middle school but we used to be really close. I started to feel bad, “why hadn’t I pay more attention and remained close to him?!” I didn’t know what to say, so I just pretended I didn’t hear him. Inside my head, my mind was racing - “What went wrong? Was it family problems? A failure in education? Or is it just fate?”…
Read More5 Things You Mustn’t Do If You Don’t Want To Ruin Your Child’s Life External Command (dictating your child’s life with reward and punishment, especially when using the withdrawal of parental care and concern as a threat.)
Read MoreLast Friday, we met up with my good friend and mentor in Early Childhood Education, Sarah Vincent, to interview her about her experience with Hong Kong parents.
Read MoreWe went to Polytechnic University today to interview Angel Hor Yan Lai, a Ph.D. candidate in Social Work specializing in Childhood Poverty and Youth Development. She also has a master in Child Development specializing in Clinical Developmental Psychology. Since 2007, Angel has worked across the globe, from India to the United States, for the betterment of child and youth development. Most recently, she helped launched a mentoring program for disadvantaged primary school aged children in the low-income, new immigrant district of Hong Kong. She’s continuing to examine the longitudinal effects of mentoring quality on the development of adolescents with Polytechnic University’s Network for Health and Welfare Studies.
Read MoreWe went to Polytechnic University today to interview Angel Hor Yan Lai, a Ph.D. candidate in Social Work specializing in Childhood Poverty and Youth Development. She also has a master in Child Development specializing in Clinical Developmental Psychology. Since 2007, Angel has worked across the globe, from India to the United States, for the betterment of child and youth development. Most recently, she helped launched a mentoring program for disadvantaged primary school aged children in the low-income, new immigrant district of Hong Kong. She’s continuing to examine the longitudinal effects of mentoring quality on the development of adolescents with Polytechnic University’s Network for Health and Welfare Studies.
Read MoreThis week’s 100 Village + YES Network weekly meeting, Bobby, Thousand and Michael demonstrated a very elegant process of extracting useful information from our interviews with Jeffrey Ip and Allison Lee.
Read MoreAfter encountering the difficulties of parent interviews and learning of Narayan’s strategy to interview experts first, we laid out the experts we know with our networks and started contacting them
Read MoreGraphical Faciliatation or graphical note taking is a useful skill in developing empathy. Today, we’re lucky enough to have Narayan Silva, whom I gave a brief intro here, to give us a crash course on it. He himself had paid a lot to learn it from the masters at a transformative school in Sweden! Isn’t it amazing how knowledge gets transferred from afar?
Read MoreAfter months of secondary research, using Systems Thinking to better understand our perspectives on the situation, creating Network Pyramid Diagrams to find our network of influence, characteristic spectrum of different types of parents, coming up with hypothesis, objectives and topics… we are now in the process of honing in on the parent profiles. Today, we revisited our “topics journey” and reflect on how we successful / unsuccessful we’ve been using it to interview parents so far.
Read MoreThe first big team meeting after Mrinalini comes back from India. Last month, I came upon an opportunity to join forces with a Montessori educator whom I’ve know for almost two years to open a new school. So far I’ve been organizing many free playgroups to both learn from local parents their situations, and teach the parents how to observe and let their children lead in their own discovery and learning. Now, with The Mulberry Tree Progressive Unschool, I’ll be getting more hands on experience in shaping what we aim to become the best, locally developed early childhood approach that will become an example for others to follow.
Read MoreSeptember 15th, 2014 Systems thinking is the process of understanding how things, regarded as systems, influence one another within a whole. In organizations, systems consist of people, structures, and processes that work together to make an organization “healthy” or “unhealthy”.
August 28th, 2014 The EDiversity “We Need Choices” Education Conference is taking place on October 11 and 12 at Hong Kong University. Yesterday, Nick interviewed one of the speakers, Mr. Niko Lindholm. Formerly with the Finnish National Education export program — “Future Learning Finland”, he consulted policy makers in Saudi Arabia and countries in East Asia. Mr. Lindholn is currently a Visiting Scholar at Fudan University, Shanghai, a PhD Candidate at University of Tampere, and working for Tribalearning, bringing Finnish developed personalized learning to the world. He holds a master degree in Social Sciences from University of Turku in Finland specializing in politics of education reforms in East-Asia.
In the fall of 2008, CUUSOO SYSTEM and the LEGO® Group teamed up to launch the LEGO® CUUSOO crowdsourcing experiment. Initially, the site was only available in Japanese but this first step led to the launch of the international LEGO® CUUSOO beta site in the fall of 2011. This crowd sourcing platform, which led to a number of successful product launches for LEGO®, such as LEGO® Shinkai 6500, LEGO® HAYABUSA, LEGO® Minecract, LEGO® Back to the Future, LEGO® NASA Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity Rover, and LEGO® Ghostbusters 30th Anniversary set. With success of the platform, following agreement with CUUSOO, LEGO® now runs the site as <a href=“https://ideas.lego.com/“ target=“_blank">LEGO® Ideas, based on the LEGO® CUUSOO platform. All projects, supports, comments, profiles, and other data from LEGO CUUSOO has been automatically migrated to LEGO Ideas. You can sign in to LEGO Ideas with a LEGO ID, find your old LEGO CUUSOO account, and connect to it on LEGO Ideas We are grateful for the many years of collaboration and experimentation between our two companies and wish continued success of LEGO® Ideas.
Systems thinking is the process of understanding how things, regarded as systems, influence one another within a whole. In organizations, systems consist of people, structures, and processes that work together to make an organization “healthy” or “unhealthy”.
After the recent events that caused me to focus my research on “Can we teach children to become empathetic leaders”, I started to interview empathetic leaders in my network. I want to find out how they grew up to become the person they are today. Last Friday, I interviewed Patrick Newell. Patrick lives in Tokyo and he started Tokyo International School 13 years ago because he couldn’t find any school that “taught 21st century skills to 21st century children”. I met Patrick in 2010 when I volunteered at TEDxTokyo, he and another good friend of mine, Todd Porter, were the founders of a pilot program originated from the TED conference, which later became TEDx! Patrick also founded Living Dreams, an NPO that enriches the lives of over 2000 orphans in Japan, and co-founded Impact Japan, a lighthouse for entrepreneurship and innovation in Japan.
On Sunday, Bobby from YES Network met up with Mabo, Mulberry Tree Unschool’s head teacher, to give him a crash course on how to interview people effectively. The reason for this was because Mabo will be going on a grand tour of kindergartens and children’s museums in the US. Mabo used to work on the frontline at the kindergartens and Children’s Museum in San Francisco. Now, he has been living in Hong Kong for four years, and Hong Kong is lagging completely behind in Early Childhood Education. He’s looking forward to this trip to catch up with the latest and bring the knowledge back to Hong Kong.
Ever since reading about Pauline Hawkin’s Animal Farm Lessons, I’ve had one of the outcomes stuck in my head: “Every once and a while, I will have a student who stands up and leads, not as a dictator, but as a leader of the people. He will accept every suggestion and value everyone’s input, even if some of the suggestions are ridiculous. I’ve had only a few students who have actually led that way over the years, but I always hope that those few students find their way into politics.”
Dear LEGO CUUSOO members, In the fall of 2008, CUUSOO SYSTEM and the LEGO Group teamed up to launch the LEGO CUUSOO crowdsourcing experiment. Initially, the site was only available in Japanese but this first step led to the launch of the international LEGO CUUSOO beta site in the fall of 2011.
“I’m a lucky mommy, my daughter was accepted into St. X, one of the most sought after kindergartens! In K.1, I just let her play, I didn’t sign her up to any after school activities or tutor schools. It was OK, but now in K.2, her classmates can WRITE, in English, a story! They can do additions, 2 digits with 1 digit! And multiplications!! I have no choice but to push my daughter too, otherwise, come interview time, she may lose everything…”
“my place” - Innovative Children’s furniture launched by 3 students Launching your own product is a dream many people all over the world has. For three students at Aoyama Gakuin University, Hitomi Kimura, Eri Nakatsugawa and Kyoko Takeda, their dream became reality with CUUSOO.
A few weeks ago, a friend sent The Next Web’s The Past, Present and Future of Crowdfunding article to me. My friend knew I’m a big fan of CUUSOO’s Kohei Nishiyama and had worked with him to launch their super awesome LEGO official crowdfunding site! I was eager to read this article about crowdfunding’s history, hoping to see CUUSOO’s name in it. Unfortunately, Paul Sawers didn’t mention it. Not even LEGO CUUSOO.
Is it just me? Or is Hong Kong’s adults quite hostile to young children? I had previously written hospital staffs treating children like objects, my experience taking my son Luc for an X-Ray. It’s such a daily part of life here that people don’t see anything wrong with it. I’ve gotten so used to it that I was shocked when I flew to Okinawa last October for the Regional Startup Weekend Organizers Summit and my family tagged along for a mini vacation. Everyone there, even the security guards at the airport, were super friendly to my “naughty” children.
CUUSOO System hires former LEGO Creative director to lead international expansion On the back of the success with LEGO CUUSOO, Kohei Nishiyma, the pioneer in online user innovation, returned as CEO in 2013 to focus CUUSOO on international expansion and is therefore proud to announce that former Senior Creative Director at LEGO, Paal Smith-Meyer has joined CUUSOO as Chief Creative Officer. Smith-Meyer joins with extensive experience in both leading design and pioneering collaborative businesses between consumers and the Danish icon as seen in Mindstorms, LEGO Architecture and Architecture studio, LEGO CUUSOO and LEGO Life of George. With our international focus, we will take the learning from LEGO CUUSOO and apply in connecting creative people to small and medium size manufacturers all over the world, living up to our promise of “Launch Made Easy”. Paal joins a new leadership team that is completed with COO Tsukasa Sugita, who brings his expertise in engineering, product marketing and business development from Six Apart, where he held the position of Corporate Officer of Product and previous positions at Opera Software and Mitsui Co.
LAUNCH MADE EASY I remember how exciting it was to reconnect with high school friends on Facebook. LinkedIn took away my burden of punching in contacts in an excel spreadsheet. I use Path to share private photos with my family. My network is extended and communication is frictionless.
“I had just turned 14. At school, I overheard one of my childhood friends talking with his teacher. “My top high school choices?! I don’t even know if I can score high enough to get in. Ah well, worst come to worst I’ll just join the gangs.” I had grown apart from this friend since we entered middle school but we used to be really close. I started to feel bad, “why hadn’t I pay more attention and remained close to him?!” I didn’t know what to say, so I just pretended I didn’t hear him. Inside my head, my mind was racing - “What went wrong? Was it family problems? A failure in education? Or is it just fate?”…
5 Things You Mustn’t Do If You Don’t Want To Ruin Your Child’s Life External Command (dictating your child’s life with reward and punishment, especially when using the withdrawal of parental care and concern as a threat.)
Last Friday, we met up with my good friend and mentor in Early Childhood Education, Sarah Vincent, to interview her about her experience with Hong Kong parents.
We went to Polytechnic University today to interview Angel Hor Yan Lai, a Ph.D. candidate in Social Work specializing in Childhood Poverty and Youth Development. She also has a master in Child Development specializing in Clinical Developmental Psychology. Since 2007, Angel has worked across the globe, from India to the United States, for the betterment of child and youth development. Most recently, she helped launched a mentoring program for disadvantaged primary school aged children in the low-income, new immigrant district of Hong Kong. She’s continuing to examine the longitudinal effects of mentoring quality on the development of adolescents with Polytechnic University’s Network for Health and Welfare Studies.
We went to Polytechnic University today to interview Angel Hor Yan Lai, a Ph.D. candidate in Social Work specializing in Childhood Poverty and Youth Development. She also has a master in Child Development specializing in Clinical Developmental Psychology. Since 2007, Angel has worked across the globe, from India to the United States, for the betterment of child and youth development. Most recently, she helped launched a mentoring program for disadvantaged primary school aged children in the low-income, new immigrant district of Hong Kong. She’s continuing to examine the longitudinal effects of mentoring quality on the development of adolescents with Polytechnic University’s Network for Health and Welfare Studies.
This week’s 100 Village + YES Network weekly meeting, Bobby, Thousand and Michael demonstrated a very elegant process of extracting useful information from our interviews with Jeffrey Ip and Allison Lee.
After encountering the difficulties of parent interviews and learning of Narayan’s strategy to interview experts first, we laid out the experts we know with our networks and started contacting them
Graphical Faciliatation or graphical note taking is a useful skill in developing empathy. Today, we’re lucky enough to have Narayan Silva, whom I gave a brief intro here, to give us a crash course on it. He himself had paid a lot to learn it from the masters at a transformative school in Sweden! Isn’t it amazing how knowledge gets transferred from afar?
After months of secondary research, using Systems Thinking to better understand our perspectives on the situation, creating Network Pyramid Diagrams to find our network of influence, characteristic spectrum of different types of parents, coming up with hypothesis, objectives and topics… we are now in the process of honing in on the parent profiles. Today, we revisited our “topics journey” and reflect on how we successful / unsuccessful we’ve been using it to interview parents so far.
The first big team meeting after Mrinalini comes back from India. Last month, I came upon an opportunity to join forces with a Montessori educator whom I’ve know for almost two years to open a new school. So far I’ve been organizing many free playgroups to both learn from local parents their situations, and teach the parents how to observe and let their children lead in their own discovery and learning. Now, with The Mulberry Tree Progressive Unschool, I’ll be getting more hands on experience in shaping what we aim to become the best, locally developed early childhood approach that will become an example for others to follow.