New World without Strangers - ChannelNews Asia TV series

Further from post summarising the first few episodes of the series  - New World without Strangers - a ChannelNews Asia TV series, episodes 8 and 9 are of interest and briefly overviewed / extended here. The series has shifted from highlighting the sharing physical resources – homes, meals, cars / rides and stuff – to sharing knowledge and ideas.

Episode 8 - sharing of ideas part one is of interest to educators. Examples of apps / sharing networks include:

Queri – help with homework – but also contribute to questions from others to earn tokens, which you can spend on getting others to solve your problems. See StraitsTimes article for more examples.

MOOCs in China with guoker and Coursera and rise of access to higher ed. covers Mooc production in China – QingZhou Education for teachers.

Pinyeke – lessons on mobile phone

Korea – Wisdom – courses taught by an expert in the topic.

Repair Kopi tiam – DIY ‘repair club’

The episode stressed the socio-cultural dimension of learning – internet and books can only go so far, meeting with people also needed to maintain motivation and trigger serenpidicious learning moments.

Also, Future Friday – Singapore – sustainable learning lab,

National design centre – one maker group, example of maker (Gabrielle Koh) a lifetime maker continuing work started as child with his father and uncle. Importance of working with your hands, got an idea – try to do it and learn by doing. In the process, you may find a better way of doing something.

China – had a history of innovation. However, presently thought of as ‘imitators’ and manufacturing cheap products. Need to change image to again invent – xinchejian (new garage)– maker space. No tech knowledge needed but collaboration across skills encouraged. China has a culture of valuing knowledge and innovation, so need to find what has always been there. Example of Argentinian entrepreneur with electronics knowledge leveraging off robotic / software expertise at xinchejian to produce prototype of a coding / robotic learning toy. Hackers in Singapore –National University of Singapore hack n roll – a 25 hour hackathon – brainstorming and making session to solve problems.

Episode 9 - This episode explores collaboration where by individuals work with governments to improve livability in cities.

How we make money, how we interact, how we live.

Korea – Kpop phenomenon – busking play – integrating busking into economy of a city. Promoting busking to Koreans, who did not understand the concept. From an audition video, aspiring buskers are screened and selected to be promoted – leading to more support from city government to provide ‘facilities’ and legislation for conducting busking – breathing new life into cities.

Code for Seoul – hackers who pick up public available data to improve civic goals. Dependent on governments releasing data into the public domain. Open data allows for more participative democracy to work.

Singapore – Social innovation hackertons. Geohackertons – assist non-profit organisations to produce apps / software to support their work. Example used on government opening geo-spatial information to allow for more efficient logistical type apps to be developed or for people with similar or complementary needs to meet / network / support each other (e.g. cancer patients and their supporters).

Episode 10 - last episode focuses on start-ups, how they acquire capital - social, physical. Allows entrepreneurs to get up and going.

Beyond buying and sharing to share money through ‘crowdfunding’ – an electronic version of depending on family and friends for seed funding. E.g. Kickstarter probably most common in Western economies. In Korea, 7 million (NZ8500) won can be raised by startups each year through crowdfunding. Pros and cons of crowdfunding are discussed.

Overall, the series provides a good (albeit quite long) introduction to how networking has changed the way in which we can now do things.