Mobiles phones in education – When will policy makers realize its benefits?

It was rather disappointing when recently Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) in India, a prominent education standards body, banned the use of mobile phones in schools. The board feels that mobile phones are a major source of distraction in the classrooms and they are worried more about the misuse of cellphone cameras. Agreed that India may be slightly behind in thinking out-of-the-box and embracing technology but even the US has not been much ahead in leveraging the new technologies that are available today.

Instead of banning the use of these technologies, Governments and Institutions should figure out ways to use them to their benefit especially when every child is addicted and no matter what you do spend thousands of hours using them.

Every technology has its pros and cons but what matters is creating an ecosystem and policy that channel the technology into constructive and creative forms. Although OLPC and the Intel Classmate PCs are striving hard to get into the classrooms, one thing that already exists with most children is the mobile phone. So why not take advantage of it?

From machines to humans – How virtual are we getting?

Thanks to the green initiatives and cost-cuttings the latest buzz word in the high tech echelons today is virtualization – from machines to teams to supply chain to consumers… all are getting virtually connected in a huge complex matrix. While virtual servers abstract the hardware resources and share it efficiently to give a perception of a powerful dedicated machine to the end-user, virtual teams have to abstract location, vertical functional groups and leverage available employee resources efficiently to provide a single unified face to their end-users (who might be other internal groups/divisions, external customers, or the supply chain). However some of the biggest challenges in making this matrix work efficiently have not only been technological but also cultural in many ways especially when it comes to managing virtual teams.

Picture Credit -www.cs4fn.org

From technology point of view although there have been several innovations (VPNs, Remote Terminals, Webex) that made virtual teams and collaboration possible, new challenges are cropping up each day. As more and more data from corporations is being made accessible throughout the globe to many teams, and intranet boundaries merge with the extranets, security is becoming a key aspect. Moreover, with widespread adoption of mobile devices into corporate networks, corporations face new challenges in integrating and managing multiple platforms and devices in their networks. Companies such as Cisco, Avaya, Lucent and others are investing big bucks into tackling these problems through unified communications (bringing all data – voice, video, data into a single pipe), device agnostic access solutions also known in some cases as endpoint virtualization (technologies that abstract the devices at end-user) and instant anywhere access solutions (giving sales and marketing teams the edge in their negotiations when they need it). Additionally, the challenges are not only limited to virtualizing corporations internally but now extend into supply chains and end consumers, bringing collaboration across the entire spectrum.

While technology is great to solve problems, its adoption and success totally depends on overcoming cultural barriers. How many of you have had managers who prefer that you show up in the office and do your work when you can do the same work from home (virtually) and be equally productive (show the same or better results)? Isn’t it just a cultural thing… I need to see you, otherwise I know you are not working!