You look very red.

Hi, there.

All right, cheers.

So we’ll make a transcript and we can go over it.

There’s nothing confidential, here? We can publish the whole thing?

Of course, now with much more publicity. It means they’re engagement programs are more successful than before. Otherwise, it’s the same relationship.

Not at all. I’m finding it’s exactly the same. I don’t actually give orders. That’s what anarchism means. I only help people when they come to me for facilitation. Because of that, the career public servants, they just call me Audrey. I’m not like a higher rank official. I’m still ...

Yeah, because there was this rule about Taiwan Ministers onstage, but there’s nothing preventing...

So in Paris, in the Open Government Partnerships I met, I actually was in the audience watching my avatar speak on stage with other ministers.

It’s pretty smart, it avoids obstacles and things like that. So I’ve been able...There’s no regulation in UN or any multilateral agreemen that says the minister cannot look at a video recording, even though it’s recorded two seconds ago.

It’s actually really cheap. You can rent it trivially. It’s basically an iPad on wheels. I can walk around and have a 360 view.

I have visited Madrid and Boston. Actually, I just gave a virtual talk in Sichuan, China, of all places, a couple of days ago.

I do telepresence through holograms, through like Pepper’s Ghost effects, virtual robotic doubles, and things like that.

It kind of morphs between the two avatar’s bodies. [laughs]

It’s working really well. This is one of those two-minute films.

We found a workaround, fortunately. Basically, we just sent my avatar.

Yeah.

It’s not all from Taiwan, but that particular line, it was informed by the Nesta study. We do work pretty closely with our counterparts around the world.

I think they informed a particular candidate’s platform during that election, Corbyn, who said we need to adopt massive online deliberation and whatever. That was straight from the report. [laughs]

Yeah, we did. Actually, before I joined The Cabinet, I was touring all around Europe. There was this Nesta UK that organized quite a few conferences about the experience we had with Uber and things like that.

Feel free to drop by. [laughs]

We start from the common good. From the common good, we really need to learn to interact with each other. After some interaction, people will become empowered enough so they feel autonomy. The other way around would be like individualist thing, which doesn’t quite work in Taiwan.

Yeah.

Exactly.

Now, the teachers understand that and actually agrees with that. Nobody wants an antagonistic relationship with their students. The same goes for the parents. That’s the angle we’re working on.

Exactly, and build around it. It would position this kind of new education reform as a way for students to see each other not as competitors, but as collaborators. To see teachers not as authority to be rebelled against, but a useful collaborator in their course of learning.

...so we emphasize that.

Everybody kind of agreed on the common good part...

I think for what we call character-based education, the spirits are, respectfully, autonomy, interaction, and common good. I think what’s good about Taiwan is that although autonomy and interactional communication is fairly new, especially for the teachers trained in the national normal university...

Right.

...but there’s cases that it worked really well. Those ideas spread. Now, we’re taking the best parts into the basic education curriculum.

Because of this, we already have a wealth of information from the alternative schools over the past five years, seven years, or so. To be honest, most of it actually doesn’t quite work...

Personally, I dropped out at 15, [laughs] but people can now begin at seven and eight, or whatever, and still enjoy the same resources as their counterparts in traditional school, and even go to school a couple days a week.

Also, because Taiwan is, I think, Asia’s prime example of alternative education, because a few years ago, we had this law of Education Experiments that allows everybody to own their own education. As long as it passes the board of the city level of the education board, anyone can be ...

Also, they grow up with personal computers, if not the Internet. They know the idea that you can’t really predict the world, how’s it like 12 years down the road? Once you have this mindset, you might become much more open to this kind of social innovation.

For people who were raised, like they’re 40 years or younger, those people are much more receptive.

I think it’s good for people entering the primary school level, their parents is actually born after the lifting of the martial law. The people educated under martial law would not adapt that easily to this.

There’s a social enterprise working with the Khan Academy internationally, and produced a locally translated version, and basically teach them the way that basically having those students dictate their own pace, and have the teacher basically be co-learners. They’ve done really, really well as a social enterprise and also as ...

If it’s a industry, making community, then there’s also social innovations happens around there, if it’s touristy, and so. It’s going to be much more integrated, and I see a lot of social enterprises now, because of the demand of the primary schoolers, they actually join these kind of programs ...

There’s a lot of interest, especially outside of the six metropolis, to actually get the education experiencing their local industries. If it’s a farming community, then it’s integrating with the social enterprise on that community.

It is a big challenge, but there’s like two years to meet that challenge. Some people, of course, work with the STEM community, with maker movement and so on. Some school now position themselves to be teaching philosophy, or whatever. [laughs]

Now, many people actually working in the primary school level doesn’t actually have much of experience doing that.

We also tell the primary school and the junior high school-level people that they have to work with their local community to design their own school’s curriculum. Every school will end up being very different from each other.

The main point being that we are moving from an examination skill capacity-based education model to a character, literacy, autonomy-based education model. Once we do that, we actually make the senior high school something like universities, where people pick their own curriculums, APs, and whatever.

We see a lot of K-12 level schools, seeking of this kind of community integration, mostly because for the new curriculum. We have a new basic education curriculum that’s coming in a year and a half. Before I joined The Cabinet, I was actually in the development committee for that.

Yes.

Very much so.

That’s what we call Buying Power award.

If any government ministry entities or government-owned corporations buy over MP $1 million of these things or services from a social enterprise over a year, then the minister without portfolio in charge of social enterprise will come and give an award. That’s me.

Right, which is why the civil society and social enterprises are now working on those collaborative gift packs. If you buy one, you actually get 12 stories or 20 stories. This is a great way to raise awareness.