This weekend, I flew down to San Diego to check out the Tribal Digital Village project in North San Diego. Sukumar, one of the Fellows in the DVF Program, spearheaded the project when he was an executive at HP. Three years later, the Tribal Digital Village is blossoming and ready to take the next step on its own.
The headquarters to the Tribal Digital Village is home to a 45Mbps connection to the Internet. From there, Lucent radio systems broadcast Internet signals to various reservations across North San Diego Country. These signals are collected at and beamed across the reservations using 802.11b wireless technology. The entire network infrastructure was designed and built by tribal community members, including Matt Rantanen, a friend of mine from the old Blue Mountain days.
Earlier during the weekend, I hung out with friends from high school, including Jerry, Dave, Barrett, and John. I toured Joe around downtown La Jolla; he and I got a kick out of seeing the cute little seals at the La Jolla Cove. They are so fat and cudly on the beach; in the water, however, they are like guided torpedoes!
Geoffrey Chase sat next to me on the plane ride back to San Jose. He is the Dean of Undergraduate Education at San Diego State University. We had an enlightening conversation about the future of education and the importance of interdisciplinary classes for undergraduates. My most memorably classes at Stanford were those that had students from various disiplines such as mechanical engineering, computer science, business, and law. I feel strongly that incorporating interdisciplinary and multi-disciplinary coursework into the undergraduate education will do wonders to help prepare students for work (and life) in the 21st century. We’ve got to get away from the old ways of didactic teaching from the lectern.
More to write later. In the meantime, enjoy the photos.
tow.com 