Abstract
Paul Kim will share his long journey that has been focused on devising, offering, and evaluating educational access to the underserved children in developing regions of the world. In shedding light on how these fortuitous events, this narrative account of educational progress and change shares the research outcomes of a variety of mobile technology-integration projects at the K-12 level including: (1) literacy development in Mexico, (2) mobile math learning in California and India, (3) executive functioning assessment in Palestine, and (4) mobile science learning in El Salvador and India. Each country and school visited has its own unique story or set of stories and outcomes that can guide future developments of mobile learning technology including educational games, e-books, and other applications.

Paul Kim is the Assistant Dean for Technology & CTO for Stanford University School of Education. He is one of researchers for Programmable Open Mobile Internet (POMI) http://pomi.stanford.edu. He has been conducting research with multidisciplinary approaches and teaching graduate courses on technology-enabled empowerment and entrepreneurship. He is also working with numerous international organizations in developing mobile empowerment solutions for extremely underserved communities in developing countries. In the higher education space, he advises investment bankers and technology ventures focused on e-learning, knowledge management, and mobile communication solutions. His due-diligence engagements include early-stage angel funding and also later-stage private equity-based investments for large education enterprises.

Abstract

Running across freeways with labor organizers, speaking with taxi drivers and laborers, and visiting rural areas of Egypt convinced me during my fieldwork that neither social media technologies nor the youth that use them caused or directly led a revolution where people from every walk of life took to the street. Indeed, only 15% of Egyptians and other Arab Spring countries have Internet access and a small percent of them are active on social media. These dynamics replay themselves in the many countries and cultures that I have worked within - from Kyrgyzstan, to Native America, to India. Indeed, while re-telling a story that places heroic youth and wonderfully liberating technologies at the center ignores the masses, dismissing social media’s dramatic impact on journalism and high-end organizing in turn is equally shortsighted. This talk will bring up different arguments (sometimes in conflict with one another) of how networks of the street and networks of the Internet work with one another, placing working classes and community organizers side-by-side with social media users.

Dr. Ramesh Srinivasan, Assistant Professor at UCLA in Design and Media/Information Studies, studies and participates in projects focused on how new media technologies impact political revolutions, economic development and poverty reduction, and the future of cultural heritage. He recently wrote a front page article on Internet Freedom for the Huffington Post, an Op/Ed in the Washington Post on Social Media and the London Riots, an upcoming piece in the Washington Post on Myths of Social Media, and was recently on NPR discussing his fieldwork in Egypt on networks, actors, and technologies in the political sphere. He was also recently in the New Yorker based on his response (from his blog: http://rameshsrinivasan.org) to Malcolm Gladwell’s writings critiquing the power of social media in impacting revolutionary movements. He has worked with bloggers who were involved in overthrowing the recent authoritarian Kyrgyz regime, non-literate tribal populations in India to study how literacy emerges through uses of technology, and traditional Native American communities to study how non-Western understandings of the world can introduce new ways of looking at the future of the internet. He holds an engineering degree from Stanford, a Masters degree from the MIT Media Lab, and a Doctorate from Harvard University. His full academic CV can be found at http://rameshsrinivasan.org/cv

India’s 160 million Muslims differ geographically by language, socio-economic status, and culture. The Muslim-Indian community shares a common trajectory of challenges in their political power and socio-economic status. Their identity, in the eyes of the average Indian, is evermore monolithic and faith-based. To some politicians, Muslim Indians are now considered a security risk. In a talk held August 10 at the Commonwealth Club of California, Rafiq Dossani discussed the causes of their challenges and possible future.

Burning of biomass in traditional stoves is associated with a host of ills among an estimated 2.5 billion people around the world, even though cleaner and more efficient technologies exist that could mitigate the problems. This study examines what factors affect cooking mode choice and utilization, with the objective of developing an econometric model that is useful for efforts to encourage the adoption of improved biomass stoves. The project also seeks to offer insights on poorly understood processes of technology adoption among poor populations and to understand the magnitude of health, development and environmental benefits that might be achievable.

Japan leads, chased closely by South Korea, with China, on a vastly larger scale, not far behind. Not as mercantilist development states nor as threats to America's high-tech industry, but rather as the world’s most rapidly aging societies.  

A wave of unprecedented demographic change is sweeping across East Asia, the forefront of a phenomenon of longer life expectancy and declining birthrates that together yield a striking rate of aging. Japan already confronts a shrinking population. Korea is graying even more quickly. And although China is projected to grow for another couple of decades, demographic change races against economic development. Could China become the first country to grow old before growing rich? In Southeast Asia, Singapore also is confronting a declining birthrate and an aging society. Increasingly, Asia’s aging countries look to its younger societies, such as Vietnam, Indonesia, and India, as sources of migrant labor and even wives. Those countries in turn face different demographic challenges, such as how to educate their youth for global competition.

The third Stanford Kyoto Trans-Asian Dialogue will focus on demographic change in the region and its implications across a wide range of areas, including economies, societies, and security. Asia’s experience offers both lessons and warnings for North America and Europe, which are facing similar problems. Questions to be addressed include:

• What are the inter-relationships between population aging and key macroeconomic variables such as economic growth, savings rates, and public and private intergenerational transfers?
• How and why do policy responses to population aging differ in Japan, South Korea, and across different regions of China?
• What are the effects of demographic change on national institutions such as employment practices, pension and welfare systems, and financial systems?
• What policies can or should be pursued to influence future outcomes?
• How will demographic change affect security in the Asia-Pacific region?
• How have patterns of migration impacted society and culture in East Asia, in comparative perspective?
• How will demographic change influence the movement of people across the region and the prevalence of multicultural families?
• What lessons can Asia, the United States, and Europe learn from each other to improve the policy response to population aging?

The Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (Shorenstein APARC) established the Stanford Kyoto Trans-Asian Dialogue in 2009 to facilitate conversation about current Asia-Pacific issues with far-reaching global implications. Scholars from Stanford University and various Asian countries start each session of the two-day event with stimulating, brief presentations, which are followed by engaging, off-the-record discussion. Each Dialogue closes with a public symposium and reception, and a final report is published on the Shorenstein APARC website.

Previous Dialogues have brought together a diverse range of experts and opinion leaders from Japan, South Korea, China, Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia, Singapore, India, Australia, and the United States. The first Dialogue examined the global environmental and economic impacts of energy usage in Asia and the United States. It also explored the challenges posed by competition for resources and the possibilities for cooperating to develop sustainable forms of energy and better consumption practices. Last year’s Dialogue considered the question of building an East Asian Community similar in concept to the European Union. Participants discussed existing organizations, such as ASEAN and APEC, and the economic, policy, and security implications of creating an integrated East Asia regional structure.

The annual Stanford Kyoto Trans-Asian Dialogue is made possible through the generosity of the City of Kyoto, the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University, and Yumi and Yasunori Kaneko.