ADAPTING to CHANGE

Keeping Up with Innovation     

Keeping up with times has never been a problem for me. Being curious by nature, I am an “information junkie” and have always been intrigued by envelope pushers. Sharing the acquired knowledge is another passion of mine.

That is why I consider teaching an avocation, rather than just a job. Consequently, throughout my teaching career at George Brown  College, I have endeavored  to develop and implement new programs and projects to keep up with the exponential growth of collective global knowledge, which has been estimated to increase 16 times every decade.

Some of my proposals resulted in implementation of innovative courses and programs like the College’s first microcomputer lab in 1978, then in 1981, the Energy  Conversion Technology, a three year  program in Alternative Energy and Energy Conservation, which was offered until 1989 (when the Prime Minister, Brian Malrooney closed down all the Alternative Energy sections within the Ministry of Energy), a $600 000 Ontario Government grant for an  Innovation Centre, and one of the most advanced Apple PowerPC training facilites in the nineties.

Already in the early nineties, before there were any computer training programs at George Brown College, as an active Board Member and later President of Club Mac, I was using the internet on a daily basis with First Class BBS for electronic mail and eWorld, an internet GUI developed by AOL for Apple before World Wide Web (implemented by Tim Berners-Lee in 1994). In 1990 I took an active part in the international workshop on New Technology Educational Tools in Paisley, Scotland, directed by professor Peter Williams of MEDEC, where  Joe Koenig from Toronto demonstrated his Electronics Workbench. EWB attracted worldwide interest from educational ministries and institutions as design and simulation teaching tool, including George Brown College with its Electronics Technician Distance Education Program. EWB was later acquired by National Instruments.  Also in the nineties within the PowerPC program, I was teaching National Instruments’ LabView, another powerful, GUI based data acquisition, control and simulation application.

After Y2K I got involved in GBC’s Teaching Excellence Project, and refocused on Brain Based learning. Then in 2008/2009, by mere coincidence (emphasis on co-incidence!) the opportunity arose to develop a lecture series on Operation Research for a group of wireless technology students from Punjab, which was a very interesting challenge. Managing large corporations like an airline, or a large scale project like design and assembly of a super computer or, very recently, the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Switzerland,  always intrigued me - in summer 1960, at the age of 18, just before I started University, I spent two weeks in Geneva visiting CERN to see the Proton Synchrotron, PS, which was just put in operation in 1959...

Already in the 1980's I got actively involved in the futurist orgaizations and studies, and recently discovered authoriative perdictions of imminent trends: Singularity around 2045, the colonization of Mars and the dizzying AI development and the concerns it stirrs, real and immagined. (E.g. in 1979, when teaching the first Basic Programming language, my students were writing a 15 step data collecting game in Basic, "Think of an Animal"). However in 2025, Ray Kurzweil published his new book, Singularity is Nearer, announcing that AI will be "taking over" before the end of this decade. Sam Altman, CEO of Open AI, gives it a couple of years. Check his interviews on Youtube (too many to link here), announcing the release of Chat GPT-5.

Since I prefer a more positive outlook on the future of humanity, I'm happy that this amazing "distant future" has become a reality during my lifetime. I always keep in mind my very first major project I took on as a thesis topic way back in 1968 in Stuttgart, Germany: Thin Film Photovoltaics. PVs are devices converting sunlight directly to one of the highest forms of energy: Electricity. The only light we see during the day comes from the sun. Sun is the only “functional” fusion reactor we have, and it’s “only” 8.6 light minutes away, approx. 150 million km or 1 AU (astronomical unit). Everything that exists on Earth drew energy directly or indirectly from this abundant energy source... It's what Sam Altman calls zero-cost enery, and it's  time we promote the implementation of solar based technology. I'm extremely happy that it's finally becoming a reality.