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Showing posts with label DIY. Show all posts
Showing posts with label DIY. Show all posts

Tuesday, August 18, 2015

Cutting cost with 'DIY law'


Many people dread going to the lawyers as it means forking out hundreds if not thousands of ringgit in legal fees for their service.

However, Malaysians wishing to prepare uncontested wills and probate, documents on tenancy agreement, purchase or transfer of property, or even divorce petitions can be spared the dreaded trip to legal firms soon with the "Do-it-yourself law" set to become a reality, Nanyang Siang Pau reported today.

The "DIY law", which will be available free of charge online, will change the way how common legal matters can be dealt with.

According to the report, Bon Advocates, which has been pushing for "DIY law", is coming out with template agreements, allowing consumers to prepare wills and handle property purchases, loan agreements and divorces without relying on lawyers.

For example, the standard legal fee for a sale and purchase agreement for a property valued at RM150,000 is RM1,500.

With the DIY law, a property buyer can save this amount by filling out the relevant forms made available online.

Similarly, for wills, one can save between RM300 and thousands of ringgit the DIY way.

Edmond Bon of Bon Advocates told the daily that lawyers should be fighting for justice and rights of the people and not make profits from petty legal matters.

"Making wills, tenancy agreements, property purchases and transfers, etc can be done using template documents provided online, without the help of lawyers," said Bon, whose firm has been working with some law students on the DIY law on pro bono basis.

Bon said DIY law is a new concept in Malaysia, but it is common in the United States, United Kingdom and Singapore.

US and UK's Rocket Lawyer and the Law Canvas of Singapore are common DIY law, the human rights lawyer pointed out. - By The Sun Daily

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Sunday, April 29, 2012

A father's lament: The real world is not a game!

Learning should be fun, but that doesn't mean we should be trying to hook kids into playing computer games that just happen to teach. 

There was something about the Mama Bear family tech conference a week ago that creeped me out. I am the father of a 5-year-old boy, and perhaps a third of the people at this conference were trying to build apps for him. All the apps were well-intentioned. All were, at some level, educational.

Still, all the apps felt wrong to me. I wanted my son to have nothing to do with any of them.

I've been trying to understand why these educational apps were getting under my skin to this extent. It's not like I'm anti-technology when it comes to my child. He plays Angry Birds. We watch TV (together). He's a child of technology; how could he live in my house and not be?

A psychiatrist friend, listening to me rant about how these apps are trying to wilt my son's brain, sympathized, but not completely. Yes, he said, computer games can be addictive. In fact, in his opinion, teaching kids to expect the world to work like a computer game deprives them of learning real-world life skills.

But, he said, a truly good educational app can be effective like a book, or a teacher. You can't stick everything that pops up on a kid's iPad into the "evil" category.

So where are the really good apps?


The Vinci Tab II is an Android tablet preloaded with educational software for kids up to 5 years old. 
(Credit: Rafe Needleman/CNET)

A few days ago, I handed my son a Vinci tablet to try out. This is another well-intentioned product for young children. It comes with pre-installed educational games carefully geared to kids up to about my son's age (actually he's a little old for it, but I occasionally make him earn his keep as a product reviewer).

I had the same feeling of foreboding about this product as I did about many children's apps I see. The Vinci reinforced this, unfortunately. While the game did in fact have educational payloads, the mechanics were, for the most part, dumb. How does pressing a button at exactly the right time to jump over a beach ball on-screen teach anything but how to operate a game, no matter what the game says it's supposed to be about?

The boy liked the tablet and its apps. But it's how he liked them that bothered me. The software sucked him in, and whatever lessons it tried to teach him were obstacles that seemed about as interesting as the flatly drawn beach balls. The real red flag came when I told my boy it was time to put the tablet down. He was so dialed in to the game mechanics that he panicked. He wasn't in learning mode, he was in addiction mode.

Did he retain the factoids and basic math and spelling skills he learned while playing? I think so. But I don't want him learning this way.

There is hope, though.


On the DIY app, kids snap pictures of their projects. On the Web site, shown, family and friends can award badges.
(Credit: Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)
 
Yesterday, I read about the launch of DIY, a site and app for kids that's supposed to be a social destination for them to share their creative projects. They upload photos of stuff they've designed, built, written, or drawn, and then their friends and family members can award them badges.

Something about this site appealed to me as a father. Why was it better than all the learning games, with their impressive educational pedigrees? I couldn't put my finger on it. So I called up DIY's CEO, Zach Klein (formerly of Vimeo). Klein isn't a father himself, but he understands the child's mind. In a few words he crystalized for me what I find distasteful about most kids' programming.

"They are gravity-fed," he says. "There's a path of least resistance to get to the next screen." The player's job is to find that path, he says. Games like this "infantilize children."

The real world doesn't work like this. There are no shortcuts in life. You don't get a big reward for each tiny action. Real rewards take real work.

DIY, he says, "gives children more responsibility than they are used to, not less." And the rewards aren't programmed. They come from peers and family. "We want kids to feel satisfaction, but we're suggesting it will take time and craft and love to earn it."

DIY is in a very early stage, and is too basic at the moment. In the interest of protecting kids, there's no personal information anywhere on the system; kids' identities are masked behind handles, and if a family member awards a kid a sticker, the kid can't see who it came from. But the thinking of DIY is right, at least to me: Encourage kids to engage with the real world. Use social-networking mechanics to reinforce it.

I loaded the DIY app on to my old iPhone 3G. I plan to let my boy use the app on this device without supervision. It's the first app I've seen that passes that test for me. I'm not sure he'll use it, but I bet he will. And I like it, because it's an accessory to his physical world, not a replacement for it.

Rafe Needleman

Rafe Needleman

Rafe reviews mobile apps and products for fun, and picks startups apart when he gets bored. He has evaluated thousands of new companies, most of which have since gone out of business. Feeling lucky? Send pitches to rafe@cnet.com. And watch Rafe's tech issues podcast, Reporters' Roundtable.

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