"....semua makhluk ciptaan Tuhan samada manusia,binatang,tumbuhan, alam semulajadi dan sebagainya,saling perlu memerlukan,saling bantu-membantu kerana mereka berkait,terikat antara satu sama lain dalam satu kitaran yang berhubungan. Justeru, jangan diputuskan ikatan itu, kelak, seluruh kitaran akan musnah..." Ahmad Rais Johari
Thursday, March 29, 2012
Bangunan Suria KLCC Terbakar
Universities leading the way with education technology
by Steven Schwartz
Georgia Institute for Technology's Center for 21st Century Universities(C21U) is a self-described living laboratory for fundamental change inhigher education. Its mission: to foster and accelerate the innovation, validation, adoption and deployment of disruptive ideas-particularly those involving technology in the service of teaching and learning, industry wide.
Accelerate is just the right word. When it comes to change, we are reaching warp speed.
Sebastian Thrun's Udacity courses in building a search engine and programming a robotic car have attracted thousands (including me). Apart from teaching, Thrun has set himself the goal of democratising education; education should be free. Accessible for all, everywhere, and any time.
While I have your attention, drop in to the Khan Academy which, with a library of more than 3,000 videos covering everything from arithmetic to physics, finance, and history and 315 practice exercises, you will find that it too is on a mission to help you learn what you want, when you want, at your own pace.
For another glimpse of the future pop in to MITx where 90,000 people are studying 6.002x (circuits and electronics), and which has set itself the modest goal of organising and presenting course material to enable students to learn worldwide.
Writing for The Guardian's Higher Education Network, Matthew Draycottdeclared himself surprised that the impact of "disruptive technological methodologies" was not top of mind in UK higher education circles.
He is right to be surprised. I am surprised that he is not thoroughly gobsmacked. The future is all around yet many of us in universities have our eyes wide shut.
There is no need to go all apocalyptic over the technological 'disruption'. Bricks and mortar universities (particularly those made of very old bricks and ancient mortar) are not about to disappear.
But if they don't 'do something' then their hallowed halls (and their mischievous postmodern equivalents) will in some distant time reverberate to the sound of a melancholy, long, withdrawing roar (to borrow Matthew Arnold's peerless phrase) as many students leave to seek alternative forms of higher education.
And what will be the hallmark of these alternatives (or perhaps replacements)?
They will put students front and centre of all they do. Agrarian-legacy lengthy holidays will end and teaching will take place year round to cater to the increasingly busy lives of students. They will be able to study any time, night or day.
Students will study what they want to study, not what academics wish to teach.
Technology will be tailored to students' needs. Online offerings will be as familiar as YouTube, but they won't merely be images from a camera plonked in front of a traditional class with a traditional lecturer fumbling with a traditional Power Point presentation. They will be bespoke, well made, smartly edited videos or other visual presentations designed with the student in mind.
Universities will increasingly share resources with other universities – perhaps students at University A will study electronics by video from University B, which specialises in the field; while students at University A will study, say, ancient history presented by the specialists at University B.
These are just some ideas. What else do we need to do to adapt to the future that's already arrived?
Steven Schwartz is vice-chancellor of Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia
Wednesday, March 28, 2012
Khairy dilantik Pengerusi PUNB
Tuesday, March 27, 2012
Dato' Onn Jaafar - Negarawan Yang Mendahului Zamannya
Which countries have nuclear weapons?
Countries and their nuclear weapons | ||
|---|---|---|
| Country | Operational and strategic weapons* | Total arsenal** |
SOURCE: FEDERATION OF AMERICAN SCIENTISTS, AS OF 6 MARCH 2012
| ||
Russia
|
2,430
|
10,000
|
US
|
1,950
|
8,500
|
France
|
290
|
300
|
China
|
0
|
240
|
UK
|
160
|
225
|
Israel
|
0
|
80
|
Pakistan
|
0
|
90-110
|
India
|
0
|
80-100
|
North Korea
|
0
|
Fewer than 10
|
Pengaruh Reformasi Pendidikan Muhammad Abduh
The Real Leadership Lessons of Steve Jobs

In the months since my biography of Jobs came out, countless commentators have tried to draw management lessons from it. Some of those readers have been insightful, but I think that many of them (especially those with no experience in entrepreneurship) fixate too much on the rough edges of his personality. The essence of Jobs, I think, is that his personality was integral to his way of doing business. He acted as if the normal rules didn’t apply to him, and the passion, intensity, and extreme emotionalism he brought to everyday life were things he also poured into the products he made. His petulance and impatience were part and parcel of his perfectionism.
One of the last times I saw him, after I had finished writing most of the book, I asked him again about his tendency to be rough on people. “Look at the results,” he replied. “These are all smart people I work with, and any of them could get a top job at another place if they were truly feeling brutalized. But they don’t.” Then he paused for a few moments and said, almost wistfully, “And we got some amazing things done.” Indeed, he and Apple had had a string of hits over the past dozen years that was greater than that of any other innovative company in modern times: iMac, iPod, iPod nano, iTunes Store, Apple Stores, MacBook, iPhone, iPad, App Store, OS X Lion—not to mention every Pixar film. And as he battled his final illness, Jobs was surrounded by an intensely loyal cadre of colleagues who had been inspired by him for years and a very loving wife, sister, and four children.
So I think the real lessons from Steve Jobs have to be drawn from looking at what he actually accomplished. I once asked him what he thought was his most important creation, thinking he would answer the iPad or the Macintosh. Instead he said it was Apple the company. Making an enduring company, he said, was both far harder and more important than making a great product. How did he do it? Business schools will be studying that question a century from now. Here are what I consider the keys to his success.
When Jobs returned to Apple in 1997, it was producing a random array of computers and peripherals, including a dozen different versions of the Macintosh. After a few weeks of product review sessions, he’d finally had enough. “Stop!” he shouted. “This is crazy.” He grabbed a Magic Marker, padded in his bare feet to a whiteboard, and drew a two-by-two grid. “Here’s what we need,” he declared. Atop the two columns, he wrote “Consumer” and “Pro.” He labeled the two rows “Desktop” and “Portable.” Their job, he told his team members, was to focus on four great products, one for each quadrant. All other products should be canceled. There was a stunned silence. But by getting Apple to focus on making just four computers, he saved the company. “Deciding what not to do is as important as deciding what to do,” he told me. “That’s true for companies, and it’s true for products.”
After he righted the company, Jobs began taking his “top 100” people on a retreat each year. On the last day, he would stand in front of a whiteboard (he loved whiteboards, because they gave him complete control of a situation and they engendered focus) and ask, “What are the 10 things we should be doing next?” People would fight to get their suggestions on the list. Jobs would write them down—and then cross off the ones he decreed dumb. After much jockeying, the group would come up with a list of 10. Then Jobs would slash the bottom seven and announce, “We can only do three.”
Focus was ingrained in Jobs’s personality and had been honed by his Zen training. He relentlessly filtered out what he considered distractions. Colleagues and family members would at times be exasperated as they tried to get him to deal with issues—a legal problem, a medical diagnosis—they considered important. But he would give a cold stare and refuse to shift his laserlike focus until he was ready.
Near the end of his life, Jobs was visited at home by Larry Page, who was about to resume control of Google, the company he had cofounded. Even though their companies were feuding, Jobs was willing to give some advice. “The main thing I stressed was focus,” he recalled. Figure out what Google wants to be when it grows up, he told Page. “It’s now all over the map. What are the five products you want to focus on? Get rid of the rest, because they’re dragging you down. They’re turning you into Microsoft. They’re causing you to turn out products that are adequate but not great.” Page followed the advice. In January 2012 he told employees to focus on just a few priorities, such as Android and Google+, and to make them “beautiful,” the way Jobs would have done.
(Source - http://hbr.org)


