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Archive for the ‘Education’ Category

Warid Telecom Signs MoU with Punjab University

Posted by On November - 19 - 2009

Warid Telecom (Pvt.) Ltd. signs MoU with Punjab University, the largest University of Pakistan. Seen in the picture from rightDr. Mujahid Kamran, Vice Chancellor Punjab University exchanging MoU documents with Shahid M. Murtaza, General Manager Corporate Accounts and Enterprise Solutions, Warid Telecom along with Shahzad Rauf , Chief Strategy & Operations Officer Warid Telecom & Akbar Khan, Head of Corporate Sales and Strategic Alliances.

Warid Telecom (Pvt.) Ltd. achieves yet another milestone by signing MoU with Punjab University, the largest University of Pakistan. Signing ceremony took place on November 18th 2009 at New Campus Punjab University Lahore.

MoU was signed by Shahid M. Murtaza, General Manager Corporate Accounts and Enterprise Solutions, Warid Telecom and Dr. Mujahid Kamran, Vice Chancellor Punjab University.

This special offer aims at providing cellular and blackberry services to not only officials and employees but to the students of Punjab University as well. This will indeed help students in gaining more knowledge from Internet with the help of Black Berry services being provided by Warid Telecom.

Warid Telecom (Pvt.) Ltd. signs MoU with Punjab University, the largest University of Pakistan. Seen in the picture from right Dr. Mujahid Kamran, Vice Chancellor Punjab University exchanging MoU documents with Shahid M. Murtaza, General Manager Corporate Accounts and Enterprise Solutions, Warid Telecom along with Shahzad Rauf , Chief Strategy Officer Warid Telecom & Akbar Khan, Head of Corporate Sales and Strategic Alliances, Warid Telecom.

Business, Education, PTA, telecom companies, telecommunications

Innovation and Entreprenurship In Pakistan

Posted by On November - 18 - 2009

The recent MIT Conference on Corporate Innovation Entrepreneurship was an excellent proof that entrepreneurship activities in Pakistan continue to thrive. There are a number of dedicated and talented people who have taken the initiative and shown that given the right people and processes, an ecosystem of entrepreneurs can be nurtured.

Read Jawwad Farid’s latest blog post and see the pictures of this impressive event. Congratulations and Kudos to the MIT CEF BAP 2009 team for their work.

111409_0908_MITCEFBAP2012

Business, Economy, Education

Connecting Rural Communities Asia Forum

Posted by On June - 26 - 2009

This event (pdf brochure available here) is taking place in India. Parvez Iftikhar, CEO Of Universal Services Fund of Pakistan is speaking about the progress of USF in Pakistan. I hope the  proceeding summaries (or better yet details) will be posted as it should be interesting for many.

The topics covered in this conference include:

• How can governments best support the creation of self-sustaining rural connectivity initiatives that benefit local people?
• Step-by-step practical guidance on overcoming the most pressing technical challenges
• Developing a world-class telecentre rural development programme
• Progress on delivering the promise of the United Services Obligation Fund
• Realising the benefits of greater rural connectivity though the delivery of E-services
• Mapping the future need for connectivity: Identifying choke points in the delivery network
• Training and empowering rural populations to make full use of the potential inherent in greater connectivity

3G, BroadBand, Business, Economy, Education, telecom companies, telecommunications

Higher Taxes Lead To Lower Revenue: PTA Shows Futility Of Raising Mobile Taxes

Posted by On June - 26 - 2009

LIRNE Asia notes the efforts of PTA to convince the government that raising taxes will not result in more money coming in – the reverse is actually true as the Pakistan government got less revenue from the mobile market after tax increase.

The Pakistan Telecom Authority in their December 2008 quarterly review gives the reasoning behind the government’s decision to impose high taxes on mobile phone use. To reduce the high fiscal deficits, the government had increased taxes. The increase for the telecom sector was over 40 percent; for other sectors it was only seven percent. However, the end result was unexpected, though it could have been predicted from economic theory. In the two quarters after the tax increase, the tax revenue from mobile declined.

How was the telecom market affected? In the same report, a figure shows how the subscriber base increased over time. However, the rate of growth declined in recent quarters. In 2007, the rate of growth was 9.9 percent; 2008 ended with a minus 0.3 percent growth. The average revenue per user went from USD 3.1 in the last quarter of 2007 to USD 2.58 during the last quarter of 2008.

Similarly in Sri Lanka, government has seen the mobile industry as an easy source of revenue through taxes and levies. There may be lessons for Sri Lanka from the counter-productive outcomes of Pakistan’s efforts to milk the golden mobile goose.

LIRNEasia’s T@BOP3 study conducted in 6 Asian countries indicated that only 38 percent of households at the bottom of the pyramid in Pakistan have access to mobile phones. There are consumers waiting to adopt mobile phones. Shouldn’t the government make efforts to make them available to them? Getting more people connected and taking a reasonable share of their payments as tax would be more productive than imposing taxes that bar them from becoming customers and deprive the government of tax revenues.

The PTA is to be applauded for doing these kinds of analyses. One hopes that the government of Pakistan will take remedial action to get telecom growth back on track. One hopes that other regulatory agencies will conduct and publish similar studies.

3G, BroadBand, Business, Economy, Education, telecom companies, telecommunications

Ideas Project

Posted by On June - 20 - 2009

Very interesting site, stumbled upon it via HBR blog. It is a place where top thinkers of the world are highlighted and everyone is encouraged to share their ideas and thoughts. The site features talks about cutting edge technologies and concepts, such as social media. The site is sponsored by Nokia and here’s how they encourage input:

Share your Big Idea with the world! Our editors’ favorites will receive a Nokia N95 mobile device!

Submit your Big Idea to ideasproject.com, and join our conversation. For the next three months, our editors will be regularly highlighting their favorite ideas, and sending an Nokia N95 to the Big Thinker who contributed. We’ll also be featuring our favorite Big Ideas to feature along with the other ideasproject.com contributors.

Business, Education, telecom companies, telecommunications

OPEN Forum 09: Largest Gathering of Pakistani-American Leaders and Entrepreneurs

Posted by On June - 9 - 2009

OPEN Forum is widely recognized as the biggest and most distinguished gathering of Pakistan-American business leaders, entrepreneurs and professionals from across the US and Pakistan. OPEN Silicon Valley’s sixth annual conference is on June 13, only 1 week away. Don’t miss this once-a-year opportunity to build your network. Visit opensiliconvalley.org for registration and details. I will be going there too, let me know if you want to meet.

OPEN Forum ‘09 presents the richest program to date in the conference’s six year history. 55 top executives, thought leaders and industry influencers will speak in conference tracks on Technologym Media, Cleantech, Healthcare and Finance.

The event will be headlined by two extraordinary leaders: Tom Campbell, former Dean, Haas School of Business, economic adviser to Gov. Schwarzenegger and a Candidate for California Governor; and Masood Jabbar, former EVP of Global Sales at Sun Microsystems.

Entrepreneurship as a Stabilizing Force: Given the challenges in Pakistan, OPEN Forum ‘09 includes a special emphasis on how entrepreneurship can play a role in stabilizing the region and furthering Pakistan’s socio-economic progress. Join us and engage on how you can play a role.

Business, Economy, Education, telecom companies, telecommunications

Best Place To Be In The World For Inspiration. Once In a Life Time Opportunity

Posted by On June - 9 - 2009

TED Conferences are one of the best places to be, and sometimes it comes out to be a life time opportunity. On a journey of spreading ideas and going global TED Long Beach Conference ( TED 2009, The Great Unveiling) is followed by TED Global 2009 July 21-24, 2009 (The Substance of things not seen) in Oxford UK, and TED India (The Future Beckons) November 4-7, 2009.TED fellows program under the leadership of Tom Reilly is focused on getting together the world’s future leaders to get inspiration from current leaders of the world. The TED Fellows program is designed to bring together young world-changers and trailblazers who have shown unusual accomplishment and exceptional courage.

TED India’s focus is to get more and more candidates from Asia. So help spreading this word to as many brilliant doers in this region.Here is the full press release from TED. TED Fellows Program Accepting Applications for 100 TEDIndia FellowsOrganizers of the TED Conference has announced they would begin the search for 100 TEDIndia Fellows to participate in the TEDIndia Conference in Mysore, India, following upon the successful TED Fellows program launch at TED2009 this past February in Long Beach, California. The TEDIndia Fellows program will accept applications for fellowships from April 20, 2009 through June 15, 2009. The TEDIndia Fellows program is a part of the larger TED Fellows Program, a new international fellowship program designed to nurture great ideas and help them spread around the world.

This year, organizers will select 100 promising individuals from around the world to attend the very first TEDIndia Conference. At the end of the year, organizers will select 20 individuals from a pool of the TED, TEDGlobal, and TEDIndia Fellows to participate in an extended three-year Senior Fellowship, bringing them to six consecutive conferences. The principal goal of the program is to empower the Fellows to effectively communicate their work to the world.Benefits of the Fellowship include conference admission, round-trip transportation, housing and all meals. Fellows will also participate in a two-day pre-conference with the opportunity to present a short talk for consideration for TED.com, elite skills-building courses taught by world experts, social opportunities and surprise extras.

The TEDIndia Fellows program will have international representation with a distinctly South Asian majority, with approximately 75% of the Fellows representing the South Asian region, and 25% representing other regions of the world. South Asia is defined as including the countries of India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Nepal, Tibet, Myanmar, the Maldives, and Sri Lanka. For the global pool, applications will also be sought from the other five target regions: Africa, Asia/Pacific, the Caribbean, Latin America, and the Middle East, with consideration to the applicants from other countries.The program seeks remarkable thinkers and doers who have shown unusual accomplishment, exceptional courage, moral imagination and the potential to increase positive change in their respective fields. The program focuses on innovators in technology, entertainment, design, science, film, art, music, entrepreneurship and the NGO community, among other pursuits.

Applicants are generally between 21-40 years of age, though anyone over 18 and over 40 may apply. They must also be fluent in English; though moderate fluency will be accepted on a case-by-case basis. The program was inspired by the TEDAfrica 2007 conference in Arusha, Tanzania, in which 100 fellows participated in a first-of-its kind gathering that featured trailblazing, entrepreneurial individuals vested in creating change on the continent. The TEDAfrica fellows brought with them new perspectives, enormous energy, enthusiasm and ovation-generating talks. Propelled by their energy, TED decided to develop the full-scale TED Fellows program, which debuted at TED2009 in Long Beach, California.“TED2009 was a transformative experience for me, and several of my peers,” said Pragnya Alekal, TED2009 Fellow and now TEDIndia Fellows Coordinator. “For the first time, we were in a supportive community of enthusiastic innovators, all working to make the world better. And after only two months, so many new collaborative ventures and initiatives have come out of it.

Business, Call Centers, Education, telecom companies, telecommunications

Collaborative Learning in Pakistan Part 2

Posted by On June - 9 - 2009
This is a continuation from Collaborative Learning in Paksitan Part 1 which introduced the concept of collaborative learning using enhanced video technologies.Educators can also provide students with links to their lectures and assignments to tag as a class project. With this technology they can tag “chapters” and “topics” within the media file with a descriptive text for each tag. Additionally, all tags can be exported and distributed as a blog.

Once students tag a portion of a video or locate a tagged section of a video that is relevant to what they wish to learn, they may want to share the link with others. They can embed this as a deep link on their website, blog, or even in an email message. When other students click on the deep link, they will be taken not to the beginning of the video but to that precise section within the video.

Rather than conducting a search for keywords or tags that describe an entire video, students can conduct deep searches for tags that describe specific sections within a video and then immediately jump to that precise portion of the video clip. This saves time and facilitates education because students don’t have to watch a five-minute video to find a five-second nugget of information they need to understand.

How do these deep technologies specifically enhance learning?

  • They increase the granularity of indexed media, allowing specific parts of video lectures to be more easily remixed, linked, and reused.
  • They engage students to co-create content via annotation of lectures.
  • They make media as an instructional tool more efficient since reading or reviewing streaming video is more time consuming than print media.

Also, these deep technologies enhance the educational content. The more the commenting and annotating, the more valuable the learning asset becomes as the wisdom of numerous and diverse interested parties add layers of collective intelligence to the video. Furthermore, specific moments of time within these videos can be instantaneously identified and retrieved with the Learning 2.0 Platform search engine.

Consider the opportunity for enhancing the quality of education in Pakistan by harnessing thousands of video lectures produced by the top teachers throughout the country. This digital archive could be searched as indexed meta data by key words within the annotations. Not only would this video library compliment and extend traditional learning but it would also scale giving millions of students access to a quality education.

Hopefully, Learning 2.0 will be adopted in Pakistan as a complimentary component to the upcoming national curriculum, which would help foster a new culture of learning. It would be a positive step towards educating its students with the new literacy they will require for competing in the flat world global economy they inhabit.

BroadBand, Education, telecommunications

Collaborative Learning In Pakistan Part 1

Posted by On June - 5 - 2009
The technological evolution of Web 2.0 tools has produced a global platform that empowers the collective wisdom and intelligence of the crowd. Powerful arrays of technologies are emerging as ecosystems for extending, enhancing and enabling learning in an accelerated mode.Deemed Learning 2.0, these online collaborative, interactive, and just-in-time information delivery technologies are encroaching on mainstream education in developed economies. These new and innovative technologies are not intended as a replacement for traditional education, but rather as an extension for learning in deep and powerful ways.

Tagging, the practice of attaching a descriptive word or phrase to a piece of online content for the purpose of linking it to other related digital media, is a well-known web phenomenon. Students searching for those tags can retrieve that specific and relevant content; thus, facilitating just-in-time learning and creating new possibilities for creative expression.

The Learning 2.0 Platform for Teachers and Students in Pakistan has introduced a new technology that provides the capability to transcend the limitations of simple tagging for describing an entire chunk of rich media. This next generation of tagging and its derivative progeny – linking and searching – allows the creation of direct links to specific parts within a larger selection of media. By indexing metadata, which enables tagging specific sections, you get deeper data information with the descriptor “deep tagging”.

Consider the possibilities for just-in-time learning: educators record their multi-hour lectures with a simple webcam, tag and upload them to the Learning 2.0 Platform as small interactive chunks. Students can repeatedly review the relevant information without enduring the entire session. Deep tagging metadata allows them to jump instantly to that specific section within the video for the information they need to learn.

The above image illustrates how deep tagging enhances collaborative learning. Abdul Aziz Bhatti, Principal at the Federal Government Model School for Boys G-0/4 in Islamabad was videotaped giving a lecture about Chemistry. Students tag the video while watching and their tags are indexed and made available to all who subsequently watch the presentation. Students can also comment upon their peers’ tags and all comments are emailed to the teacher for response and interaction.

BroadBand, Education

Career Management Coaching For Students In Pakistan

Posted by On June - 5 - 2009

There are a few major milestones as important as finding your first job and defining a career path. One of the essential role of a good institution is that it provide information and coaching about the huge transition from a student to professional. As any successful professional will tell you, the combination of good academic credentials, well written resume / CV and preparation for interviews is needed to land good opportunities. A talented student could lose an opportunity because of a sloppy resume. So the first thing is that the candidates need to be well informed and well prepared. Once you have a CV ready then you need feedback from recruiters, managers and other experienced people.

I was browsing a social networking site and saw very positive comments about Career Management Workshops by Telenor in many universities across Pakistan. Of course, there are only so many students that one company can hire, but there’s no limit to the education which companies can provide to students. I hope that other companies follow Telenor’s approach and reach out to schools. Here’s a bit of information about Management Workshops (CMW) by Telenor.

The CMW sessions are conducted by experienced HR professionals with the aim to guide students interested in taking up a career in any industry.

The Career Management Workshop session includes a presentation by the university alumni working with Telenor Pakistan, followed by a summary on the hiring process at the organization. One of the highlight of CMW is the Student Excellence Program (SEP). This is an interactive session where the do’s and don’ts of CV writing and interviews are discussed for the benefits of the students. This is then followed by mock interviews with students selected randomly during the session. The workshop is concluded by collecting student feedback via survey forms.

I think that it is very important for students and companies to engage in this two-way communication. The companies get exposure and can spot exceptional talent. These sessions help students to a) understand the hiring process b) learn about the competencies which companies are looking for and c) how to present themselves in the best possible way. It is a shame if talented students lose opportunities to get an interview because of a sloppy CV.

I have been told that students have found these workshops very useful. If you are a student looking for a job, please share your experience of preparing CV and getting feedback on it. If Telenor has been to your university, tell us about it.

Business, Education, telecom companies