Exploring the overlap of virtual and physical
A recent meeting with a friend who is interested in technology in education, a NYTimes article More schools embracing iPad as a learning tool and recent flood of attention on the growing tablet PC market got me thinking about the potential of tablet PC’s (Apple iPad, Samsung Galaxy Tab etc) as a disruptive innovation for…
Up close with Bill Drayton On June 3-4, I had a rare opportunity to be up close with Bill Drayton, founder and CEO of Ashoka. He was invited as the keynote speaker at “International Conference on Social Entrepreneurship 2010”, an event hosted by Korea Development Institute (KDI) and Korea University in Seoul. I was asked…
On November 20, 2009 I made a presentation at ChangeON, a conference focusing on non-profits internet media, hosted by the Daum Foundation, the charitable arm of the Korean internet portal, Daum Communications. They just posted the video online. My presentation (in Korean) was entitled “UX for Good”, focussing on how internet technologies and social media…
Mister Splashy Pants, a whale named after Greenpeace held a naming competition in 2007 isn’t really news, but Alexis Ohanian, who is a founder of Reddit tells a great story at TED (in 3 minutes no less!) of how social media created a meme, took Greenpeace by surprise, won the competition, Greenpeace ceded control and…
Sugar running on Asus EeePC Finally got Sugar installed on my Asus Eee PC. My brother gave me a pink Asus Eee as a gift for my daughter about a year ago, but having used it for a few days I was convinced that the version Linux it was running and the lack of Korean…
Republished from UXforGood.org. Recently I’ve participated in brainstorming session for a premier university in Korea on how to make its lectures available online. Ever since MIT started offering its lectures through its OpenCourseWare (website) initiative in late 2002, many higher education institutions have been offering lectures online through various channels: YouTube and iTunes just to…
In a followup to a previous post, Breaking the Cycle of Poverty in Korea through Education: A Social Business Proposal I saw some very exciting news that the Korean government will move to provide long-term full tuition coverage student loans for poor students starting 2010. It even stipulates that the students are only required to…
Just launched a new blog UXforGood.org which tries to bring together my often intersecting interest in user experience (UX) and social change. In quite a visionary statement with far before the birth of the internet, Charles Eames said: Beyond the age of information is the age of choices. It is an understatement to say that…
Touch screen NYC ticket vending machine (photo credit: yuen_long / flickr) Here’s a comment I posted on Changemakers AshokaTech discussion board in response to question How would you use touch-screen technology for good? Following our blog post on touch-screen technology, I’d love to hear about your ideas on how we can make such technology work…
Preamble1 A couple of years ago I asked a friend in Korea with a single child if he considered having more kids. He told me that he wanted to give the best for his son, and he couldn’t really afford the education cost of a second child. He told me a his son was taking…