Friday, May 23, 2014

Dartmouth experiments with future

Burlington Free Press

Dartmouth experiments with future

Narain Batra 12:11 a.m. EDT May 11, 2014

Calculus and Shakespeare are forever but what will be the shape of Dartmouth when the school celebrates its 250th anniversary in 2019? Dr. Phil Hanlon who assumed the college presidency last year has a plan: cluster the faculty brainpower and create experiential learning for students, among other initiatives.

The purpose of developing faculty clusters, teacher-researchers who straddle across disciplines and push the boundaries of traditional thinking is to tackle society’s most troublesome challenges through collaboration. The hope is that disruption of boundaries might result in disruptive innovation if, let’s say, information technology, humanities, business and politics were to cohabitate.

American society has become more open and tolerant of diversity. But academicians live in intellectual silos, most of us publishing in journals that very few people read outside our disciplines.

Bring down the walls; but what better place to do than Dartmouth where bold and innovative thinking is not an uncommon phenomenon. Think of the most recent: the Dartmouth Center for Health Care Delivery Science, which has generated a trailblazing new field of graduate study, promoting international collaboration between researchers and medical practitioners to develop new models of low-cost high-quality health care.

Across-the-discipline collaborations from diverse areas leads to opening up of what the evolutionary biologist Stuart A. Kauffman called as “the adjacent possible,” the door that opens unto another door and creates new possibilites. That’s the potential of cluster faculty.

The cluster hiring initiative that began at the University of Wisconsin at Madison in 1998 and later was adopted by several universities is now receiving global attention because our problems are global in scope and scale. But it is never too late for Dartmouth, UVM, Middlebury and Norwich to explore its potential, building on the strength of their core disciplines, and challenge their faculty and students to work out solutions to mankind’s big messy problems through collaboration and pooling of multidisciplinary brainpower amplified by digital technologies.

Digital technologies not only can enhance the collective brainpower of the clustered faculty but they can also facilitate the personalization of learning via online learning platforms such as massive open online courses (MOOCs). But in the emerging environment of MOOCs, when Johnny Digital doesn’t have to go to the classroom, experiential learning becomes absolutely necessary.

Experiential learning, popularized by educational psychologist David A. Kolb, is a holistic approach where knowledge is gained through reflective observation and hands-on do-it-yourself experimentation. Students learn outside the classroom where a sponsoring organization provides structured programs to supplement their classroom academic experience leading to enrichment of learning and skills. It’s the site where the Millennials (Pew Research Center calls them: “Confident. Connected, Open to Change”) interact with the Boomers (Always worried about retirement and health care).

How to bring experiential learning to hundreds of undergraduate students in the age of MOOCs is going to be a big challenge especially for Dartmouth and Vermont schools because of their isolation from metro areas, places where students normally find opportunities for experiential learning, on-the-training jobs and internships.

Dartmouth has embraced MOOCs and digital learning, which according to MIT president L. Rafael Reif, “is the most important innovation in education since the printing press.” The printing press broke up the stranglehold of the religious establishment and liberated the European mind. Digital learning is questioning us as to why we teach the way we do. Why does Jane Digital have to spend four years on the UVM campus?

Changing four-year on-campus undergraduate learning to a blended three-year on-campus and one-year off-campus supervised experiential learning model will result in highly employable youth. Most of all it will free the faculty from excessive routine teaching and enable them to collaborate across disciples and schools to do research on society’s pressing problems.

Narain Batra, of Hartford, is author of The First Freedoms and America’s Culture of Innovation, teaches digital media, law, ethics, and criticism, as well as diplomacy at Norwich University.




Sunday, May 11, 2014



Building the "India Cloud"


The country needs to protect its data from international spying and develop a competitive advantage in data security

Narain D Batra  
April 27, 2014 Last Updated at 21:48 IST

From Business Standard


India is a big data nation. Consider the magnitude of a Unique Identification Number for more than a billion people, Indian pharmaceuticals' worldwide ambitions to provide inexpensive drugs, information technology (IT) industry servicing the corporate global, just to name a few.

India needs to not only protect its data from international spying; it must also grab a fair share of the growing global cloud-computing infrastructure market, as it has done in software and consulting services. Major Indian IT companies, perhaps in partnership with the public sector and the states, could pool their resources and digital brains to build a cloud for India that's as secure and impenetrable as Swiss banks. There's a fortune in security.

According to a report for the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, the global market for cloud services is likely to grow from $148.8 billion in 2014 to $207 billion in 2016. But this projection should be considered in a wider context of the McKinsey & Company's report, "Disruptive technologies: Advances that will transform life, business, and the global economy," which estimates that the cumulative economic impact of cloud-based services and technology could be $1.7 trillion to $6.2 trillion annually in 2025. There is an unfathomable fortune in the cloud. What will be India's share?

The European Union (EU) has woken up to the challenge and is planning to build its own cloud. Even before the National Security Agency (NSA) disclosures about surveillance, some European officials were worried that data stored in American IT companies' clouds were not safe from the US government. The European Commissioner for Digital Affairs, Neelie Kroes, for example, has argued that cloud computing's immense benefits to economy depend on two things: first, scale and second, trust in the data that must be stored protectively. Scale is important because if each nation has its own cloud-computing services then it becomes very expensive. And since the EU is a large geopolitical and economic bloc, it can certainly create its own cloud-computing infrastructure. And, of course, that is true of India too with its intellectual resources and global digital footprints.

Most importantly, cloud infrastructure needs to create trust. Total data protection is a legitimate expectation of doing cloud-based business. If international businesses or governments think that they might be spied on, as has been the case with the NSA's ubiquitous spying, the trust in the cloud infrastructure will be diminished.

Kroes rightly asserts that "Privacy is not only a fundamental right; it can also be a competitive advantage. Companies focused on privacy need to start coming forward into the light…. That includes European companies who should take advantage of interest to provide services with better privacy." And the best way to accomplish this objective is for the EU to build its own cloud infrastructure as the European Cloud Partnership Board has recommended. Recently Angela Merkel, Germany's Chancellor, whose cell phone was tapped by the NSA, made a similar proposal.

The idea to create an alternative system to American cloud infrastructure - just as in the 1960s when European countries established the European Space Agency to compete with the National Aeronautic and Space Administration and a European consortium aircraft manufacturing company, Airbus, to compete with Boeing - is very tempting.

American IT companies that control 85 per cent of the global cloud computing market, are seriously concerned about the threat to their business. In an open letter to US President Barack Obama, major tech giants voiced serious concern over the government vacuuming their consumers' data for national security reasons.

They asked the government to ensure that "surveillance efforts are clearly restricted by law, proportionate to the risks, transparent and subject to independent oversight." They asked that the government's authority to collect users' information be limited; and it should be based on transparency and subject to oversight and accountability. In order to enable the free flow of information and avoid international conflicts, it is necessary to build "a robust, principled, and transparent framework to govern lawful requests for data across jurisdictions, such as improved mutual legal assistance treaty or MLAT processes. Where the laws of one jurisdiction conflict with those of another, it is incumbent upon governments to work together to resolve the conflict."

Unfortunately, IT companies' concerns have seized neither the US president's or the US Congress' imagination. Even the recently announced disclosure rules by the Obama administration that will allow internet companies, in a very limited way, to inform their customers about the data asked by the government will not restore complete trust.

The loss of trust is compelling Europe to build its own cloud. But what can India do? There are two ways for Indian IT companies to protect their burgeoning global market for cloud-computing services. They can allow customers to move their data to servers outside the US that promise high-level protection, for example, Swisscom's proposed "Swiss Cloud" in Switzerland, where extreme secrecy is highly valued. Or Indian IT companies could federate and collaborate as a consortium to build the "India Cloud" that not only keeps Indian big data absolutely secure, but also creates business opportunities for them in the growing data-security market. Bangalore should shout from the housetop: you can trust us.

I'm tempted to say: if India can launch the Mars Orbiter Mission with a paltry sum of $75 million, it can certainly build its own secure cloud that creates total trust and sucks in billions of dollars of global business as well as generate thousands of new jobs. In the digital age, India needs to think big and bold. India must compete.


The writer is professor of communications and diplomacy at Norwich University, US and the author of The First Freedoms and America's Culture of Innovation

Copyright ND Batra 2010