What is the purpose of teaching? Teaching is no longer an information delivery activity from the professor to the students. It is now an interactive process. It is an information exchange process. The professor acts only as a facilitator. It is now a learning process. The success of the learning rests mostly on the students. If the students are active, then the learning process can be expected to be a success.

In all my lectures, students are expected to read papers, to search additional information form the Internet, and to add more knowledge to what is contained in the papers (as most papers are already outdated, even if they are just published very recently) . Knowledge advances very fast.

The students are expected to make summaries of the papers, rewrite the papers with their own words, make necessary comments and criticism to the ideas presented in the papers, create a presentation file, and present their ideas in the class.

The class audience is also expected to participate actively in the discussion. Discussion increases our understanding and advances knowledge. In this way, we practice knowledge acquisition and management and be part of a knowledge society.

Prof Don Tapscott has written an very good book on collaboration. winning_with_the_enterprise_20.pdf

He also written Wikinomic. Here is a sample chapter of his book wikinomics_chapter9.pdf

The following file might be useful as well the-wikinomics-playbook-2008.pdf

As an example is teaching how to program a PC in a certain language : C, Java, etc. Students will not gain competency without actually program the PC him/herself. The lecturer in the class will only gives the students the theory, or at least a demo on teh steps the students should take to program the PC.

Knowledge as represented in books, papers, etc. are not free from errors. People say that “A thesis must have a flaw”. There is no perfect thesis. If there is a thesis, there should be an anti-thesis. Using a thesis and an anti-thesis, we can do synthesis.

Therefore, books, papers etc. are just records of observations, experiments, as viewed by the authors. Depending on the point of view, the same thing can appear different to different person.

What is your opinion on something is more important than the real fact of that something. Your own idea, even if it is wrong, is more valuable than a correct idea which is not your own.