Software innovation takes care of its own iteration. You can roll out updates in a matter of minutes. There is a very large difference from a pure software innovator’s mindset, where when we consider a weekly innovation cycle a long time. By hardware standards, it’s actually a very short time.
That’s not really hampering, I would say it’s molding the local software talents into thinking in a time interval that is more fitting to the hardware innovation cycle, which is measured in months. Whereas most of the innovators in Silicon Valley who work on pure software plays, they think in terms of days or weeks. Does that answer your question?
Yeah. For example, if they innovate, for example, Pokémon GO, to use the example, they would see real-time what the user’s experiences are like, how they plan their events, how they gather around in this augmented reality trying to catch Pocket Masters.
Using those analytics, using those user behavior patterns, they can plan and update their software within the same day, if not the same hour.
It’s usual for a pure software company to plan new features, to upgrade their business model even, in a matter of weeks. For hardware, it’s impossible because you need to wait for the industry to roll out, for the distribution channel to work, and that takes months, not days or weeks.
I’m not saying they’re working for the wrong places.
I have many friends who work in say MediaTek and other companies. They would get offended if I say they work at the wrong places. I’m just saying, because...
No, it’s just they work in a certain tempo, and this tempo is determined by the hardware vertical, by the hardware sector that they are in.
It’s kind of hard, because they are pretty lucrative when a new hardware cycle comes. If you’re just working out of purely for-profit motive, then if you’re a Taiwanese software programmer, the natural choice is to join a larger hardware-oriented ecosystem.
It’s safer. It earns more money.
Yes. The hardware companies pay their software programmers pretty decently, and the risk is also absorbed over the hardware ecosystem. It’s not just purely absorbed in the software which is a much riskier, because as easy as it to roll our new features, it’s also easy for upcoming disruptor to enter the same market and winner-takes-all ecosystem. To do a software entrepreneur, one really need to change to a new mindset.
Pretty good stock options also, so it’s not just salary.
Yes. That’s what we’re trying to solve here. One of the things is that we’re trying to encourage people to form research service companies. Like for example Ethan Tu who was director of AI Research regional Asia Microsoft started a start-up in Taiwan called AI Lab. That is one of the few pure software start-ups in Taiwan that focus only on software.
There’s quite a few others that are working on, for example, disaster relief and recovery, geo-mapping, and things like that, but I would say they don’t get the same spotlight until a few years ago as the hardware companies do.
What we’re trying to say, as I mentioned when the CompuTEX took the InnoVEX track separately, what we’re trying to do from the national perspective is to highlight those software, AI, and so on service-oriented, more human facing, faster iteration cycle entrepreneurs as important as their hardware counterparts.
They both can learn from each other instead of one working in a subsumed group under the other.
No, it’s fine.
At least give an experimentation period on which we can try out the idea.
That’s right.
Invest, not give, but yes.
Mm-hmm.
You just described quite a few friends of mine.
We’re in the civic tech world. We see a lot of these dynamics going on. This can be answered in many different angles. I’ll try to be brief.
First, in the education, even the K-12 curriculum, we’re now emphasizing autonomy first.
That is to say, I think a lot of the social friction toward innovation stems from the assumption during the previous K through 12 education where it was skill-based. The curriculum was shaped so that people major in one of the five or six major disciplines and gets good at it and gets a stable job.
Taking initiative, being able to define one’s own missions and visions and charter out a course toward solving a problem in life or furthering some common good. I define it as not waiting for the teacher or the professor’s assignment. It’s the opposite of assignment.
Yes. The end goal is of course what we call 一生一課表, one curriculum per student. That is to say for them to charter out their course of learning.
Well, because the new curriculum haven’t passed. We’re at the moment currently in the review committee where they are talking about whether they need to study classical Chinese texts or something.
After they’re done with this review, we are rolling it out I think 2019. That’s the new curriculum.
Yeah, it’s good because it at least gives people some idea that there is a new 12-year basic education curriculum coming. It’s pretty revolutionary.
Because it’s been widely accepted in education circles thanks to a very avant-garde homeschooling experimental education law that’s been going on for a few years.
In the alternative education homeschooling fields, these values are firmly established, and many of the educators who work on alternative education have worked out how to transition for example a very conservative-minded primary school into this kind of autonomy-based education.
Then we took that into the new curriculum that is set to take effect 2019. It really is a radical change, because instead of skill-based, what we’re now doing is character-based education.
Now we’re doing character-based or 素養導向.
Well, we’re fixing that too. We’re working in the examination center. We’re discouraging, even at some points disallowing, teachers to compare, to rank students based on their examination scores. We’re also encouraging every school to develop their own specialty courses with the local community.
In essence, what we’re trying to do is that at the very beginning, at the primary school level, at age seven and eight, for the teacher to not try to teach the students so many things but rather spend time with students so they can grow their autonomy on such courses. It’s a pretty radical shift in the educational strategy on the K-12 level.
The three characters we’re trying to build instead of any particular skill is autonomy, interaction, that is, communication, as well as the common good. I think we’re the Asia’s first country to introduce media literacy critical thinking as characters in the national curriculum. I think it’s a very forward-looking curriculum.
To introduce media literacy.
That is to say critical thinking, because the teacher’s role in the new curriculum has changed. Instead of being just a lecturer, now the teacher is a co-learner, someone who learns along with students in finding resources online as well through social media and through Wikipedia and whatever.
The teacher need to develop a new, more interactive way of teaching things, but with that they’re going to be exposed to much more external information.
The external information of course need to be reviewed in more critical-thinking way, this is what we call media literacy, like not blindly believing things that’s printed in a certain form, like the more French philosophy class education where people try to argue both sides of things
This is what we call media literacy. It’s studied not as its own course but rather integrating with how all the different fields’ courses are studied.
It is, and initially when it was slated to take effect 2018, many people worried that, especially for STEM, for science, technology, engineering, math, teachers, there won’t be sufficient time for them to adapt.
Now because it’s been delayed by one year, the administrative education now actually has a pretty solid plan to try to get the teachers on board and, for the more rural areas, to adopt more interactive computer-based education, making sure that there is high bandwidth to every classroom, there’s projector in every classroom, so they can better use real time video conferencing or interactive-based materials that is supplementing the local teachers’ capabilities.
It will shake things up.
That’s exactly right.
Yeah, but for example, in Taipei city, there’s I think 66 primary schools that has already become early adopters to the new curriculum.
It’s easy for us to, for example, make the K-12 examination-free between the primary, and the secondary, and the senior high school. It’s trivia for us to ask the textbook writers to redo their textbooks so that it’s more exploratory and minimize the rote memorization.
All these we can do, and we already did that because I was part of the curriculum committee, but the one thing that we cannot change easily is for the parents to change their expectation of their children.
The thing is that when the teachers themselves were kids, were teenagers, and university students studying for becoming a teacher. They were one of the most conservative educational systems, the teacher training part. As you’ve said, it is difficult.
