Is Cuil Cool(er)?

Cuil (pronounced "cool") - is all the buzz since its launch yesterday.

A new, and purportedly "better" search engine than Google, started by ex-Googlers, has received much press (odd term to use in the context of the Internet, I guess) in the past 24-48 hours.

Here are a few links -

• BBC - Search Site Aims to Rival Google
• WatBlog -Ex-Googlers Launch ‘Cuil.com’ - They Claim Its Bigger.. Better than Google!!
• Huffington Post - Cuil: The Latest, Baddest AntiGoogle Looks Like A Magazine
• and Ouch- Cuil Dominates Google Trends (IMAGES)

I will reserve my own comments until I have tried it out some more. I do like the look of the results pages, if only because they are a welcome change from the usual style of results pages on Google and other commonly used search engines.

A search on "Isaac Newton" (well, yes, my son was sitting next to me at the time) - threw up interesting results and interestingly laid out as well. The very first result is a german site! There were of course tabs that organized the results and the neat "Explore by category" widget on the right. Check it out...

On the other hand - a search on "cuil" on both Google and Cuil was super interesting. The search engine did not feature anywhere in its own search results, whereas it was top of the heap on Google! Go figure!

By the way, I do believe Cuil's claim that they crawl through more of the Internet. Why? Well, I came across an academic publication (that has my name among the authors) in the archives of University libraries that I had never seen in Google searches before (yes, I did compare how my "vanity search" results stack up :-))

Randy Pausch Lives on in Alice

[Update: I blogged about this originally on April 10th, 2008, but wanted to promote this to the top of the heap today as Randy Pausch passed away a few hours ago.

Here are a couple of great lines (lessons?) from his famous 'last lecture':

Experience is what you get when you didn't get what you wanted.

The brick walls are there to stop the people who don't want it badly enough. They are there to stop the other people.

RIP Randy Pausch...]

-------------------------------Original Post (from April 10, 2008) ---------------------

Or I should say "Randy Pausch will live on in Alice".

55 minutes or so into his now famous "last lecture" (more on that lecture later), Randy Pausch (47-year old terminally ill star professor of Virtual Reality at Carnegie Mellon) states

"To the extent that someone can live on in something, I will live on in Alice."

Well a post on Alice belongs in this blog, since so many posts have been devoted to talking about programming environments that help kids be creators rather than consumers of cool stuff like games, and digital stories and 3D worlds in cyberspace. These environments make it easy for kids to program i.e. make possible what is inherently pretty tough to do. In the process, they also teach kids to problem-solve and learn concepts of computer science like algorithmic ways of thinking and ideas like "messaging" and "objects" and "behaviours" or as Pausch calls it - the classic "head fake" - where you learn stuff without realizing that you're learning stuff (a great way to teach kids stuff that they think is too hard or beyond their reach).

So, what is Alice?

"Alice is an innovative 3D programming environment designed with middle and high schoolers in mind, that makes it easy to create an animation for telling a story, playing an interactive game, or a video to share on the web. Alice is a teaching tool for introductory computing. It uses 3D graphics and a drag-and-drop interface to facilitate a more engaging, less frustrating first programming experience."

There's a wealth of material on the website on how Alice can be used to teach computer science to Middle and High School kids through creating story-telling and 3D-gaming environments (with characters from the popular PC game 'Sims').

Randy Pausch says of Alice "To think that millions of kids are having so much fun learning something that is so hard (programming)...that's pretty cool ... that's a legacy I can live with".

Of the lecture here's all I will say, it's a must-see for parents, teachers and children (old enough to internalize the import of his lessons on life and living), delivered with the clarity of thought and passion that only comes from knowing that you have but a few months to live, and by a man who has obviously accomplished plenty, lived a rich life, and had a lot of FUN doing all the things he's done. Here it is....

The Human Side of Moore's Law

Really enjoyed reading this article by journalist Bob Cringely (shared by Vishu Singh on educatorslog.in).

Cringely asserts that while the performance of personal computers has increased a millionfold over the last 30 years (following Moore's Law), it takes about as much time (30 years) - one human generation - for waves of technological innovation to be completely absorbed by our culture.

He goes on to talk about the impact on education of the "empowerment" that these technologies have brought about among today's younger generation.

"We've reached the point in our (disparate) cultural adaptation to computing and communication technology that the younger technical generations are so empowered they are impatient and ready to jettison institutions most of the rest of us tend to think of as essential, central, even immortal. They are ready to dump our schools."

A few more interesting excerpts that resonate well with what I figure is going on in education today the world over, at varying speeds - in India perhaps slower than in others, but happening nonetheless.

"Google is the best tool for an aging programmer because it remembers when we cannot. Dave Winer, back in 1996, came to the conclusion that it was better to bookmark information than to cut and paste it. I'm sure today Dave wouldn't bother with the bookmark and would simply search from scratch to get the most relevant result. Both men point to the idea that we're moving from a knowledge economy to a search economy, from a kingdom of static values to those that are dynamic. Education still seems to define knowing as more important than being able to find, yet which do you do more of in your work? And what's wrong with crimping a paragraph here or there from Cringely if it shows you understand the topic?

This is, of course, a huge threat to the education establishment, which tends to have a very deterministic view of how knowledge and accomplishment are obtained - a view that doesn't work well in the search economy. At the same time K-12 educators are being pulled back by No Child Left Behind, they are being pulled forward (they probably see it as pulled askew) by kids abetted by their high-tech Generation Y (yes, we're getting well into Y) parents who are using their Ward Cleaver power not to maintain the status quo but to challenge it.

This is an unstable system. Homeschooling, charter schools, these things didn't even exist when I was a kid, but they are everywhere now. There's only one thing missing to keep the whole system from falling apart - ISO certification.

....

Well reputation still holds in education, though its grip is weakening. I know kids from good families who left high school early with a GED because they were bored or wanted to enter college early. Maybe college is next.

MIT threw videos of all its lecture courses - ALL its lecture courses - up on the web for anyone to watch for free. This was precisely comparable to SGI (remember them?) licensing OpenGL to Microsoft. What is it, then, that makes an MIT education worth $34,986? Is it the seminars that aren't on the web? Faculty guidance? Research experience? Getting drunk and falling in the Charles River without your pants? Right now it is all those things plus a dimensionless concept of educational quality, which might well go out the window if some venture capitalist with too much money decides to fund an ISO certification process not for schools but for students.

The University of Phoenix is supposedly preparing a complete middle and high school online curriculum available anywhere in the world. I live in Charleston, SC where the public schools are atrocious despite spending an average of $16,000 per student each year. Why shouldn't I keep my kids at home and online, demanding that the city pay for it?

Because that's not the way we do it, that's why.

Well times are changing."

@ NECC - 4: Education 2.0 in India

From my session on educatorslog.in at NECC 2008 - Education 2.0 in India: Community and Sharing through Blogging and Tagging...

More on Shirky's Here Comes Everybody

Having just returned from the NECC where there were buttons any direction you looked, I feel that the book cover of the UK version of Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations is so much more interesting and apt.

Talking about the idea of the "WE over I" - the name iPhone seems rather inappropriate, especially when you see people constantly conversing, communicating, collaborating over those sleek devices... wePhone would be so much more apt - or maybe wiiPhone! Not having one myself made me feel quite the outcast at NECC - a fact underscored by a remark Will Richardson made in jest - "Oh! You're SO 2007!"

Shirky's book was also at the center of an interesting session at EduBloggerCon 08 (see previous '@ NECC' posts); and here's an interesting post on the book on Jeff Atwood's blog Coding Horror.

Finally, here's a 42+ minute video of Shirky talking about his book at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School in Feb this year.



(My own distant connection with Shirky - if it can be termed "connection"...I wrote a letter of recommendation for a design student in Bangalore when he was applying for the Graduate Program at the ITP at NYU in 2005...he did get admission, and went on to take Shirky's course(s?) at ITP :))

@ NECC - 3:The Collective Over the Individual

It's not about YOU or ME or I today, it's about US, and what WE can accomplish together.

That seems to be the big message out at NECC that concluded today. Here's a video of the opening keynote address by James Surowiecki author of Wisdom of Crowds who described several examples that demonstrate time and again how the decision-making ability of a diverse group of people is more effective than that of individuals (even 'experts').

It was great that I had my session on educatorslog.in soon after the keynote, since the philosophy of sharing resources on educatorslog.in is much the same - that the knowledge of the collective is greater that that of any one individual who is a member of the online community.

As mentioned in my previous post, Clay Shirky's book Here Comes Everybody - about how web2.0 is revolutionizing the social order - also garnered a lot of interest especially at EduBloggerCon 2008.

@NECC 2008 - 2: EduBloggerCon 08

A few words about EduBloggerCon 2008 - the "unconference" or rather "collaborative conference" at NECC pulled together by Steve Hargadon. For more on the idea of an "unconference" - check this post by Steve.



I was unable to attend the various sessions as I was busy taking care of some snafus related to my session the next day and had to make a desperate run a few miles out to get some printing done. I did however enjoy the one I was able to attend - outside in the Second Life space late morning. I liked that it had an informal, unconference feel - in terms of the space especially and how everyone was sitting on couches and chairs, on the floor...some even standing around the periphery, but participating nonetheless...

I also enjoyed the discussions around Clay Shirky’s new book - Here Comes Everybody - The Power of Organizing without Organizations. Many quotable quotes in there, but here's one I'll add here--

"Revolution doesn't happen when society adopts new technologies - it happens when society adopts new behaviors"

We're clearly waiting for such a revolution in education.

It's always a pleasure for me to step out of the blogosphere and meet f2f with the active edubloggers from around the world who are shaping web 2.0 in education.

Thanks, Steve, for organizing this. Here's to more such open, collaborative exchanges in the future that help bridge the virtual blogging world with the real world.

A short video put together by Dean Shareski --

@ NECC2008 - 1

Well, here we are - some 15,000 educators - all passionate (to varying degrees) about technology in education - at National Educational Computing Conference (NECC) 2008 of the International Society of Technology in Education (ISTE ) in scenic downtown San Antonio, TX. A small percentage of us more passionate than most others about web 2.0 in education met up at the EduBloggerCon earlier today.

It's great, as always, to convert online connections to f2f ones every once in a while...Here's to convene * connect * transform at NECC 2008.

The Swedish Model

A recent article in the Economist with the same title as this post was shared on educatorslog.in recently - it's about Sweden's "Knowledge Schools" where students

"do much of the work themselves....(through) the Kunskapsporten (“Knowledge Portal”), a website containing the entire syllabus. Youngsters spend 15 minutes each week with a tutor, reviewing the past week's progress and agreeing on goals and a timetable for the next one. This will include classes and lectures, but also a great deal of independent or small-group study. The Kunskapsporten allows each student to work at his own level, and spend less or more time on each subject, depending on his strengths and weakness. Each subject is divided into 35 steps. Students who reach step 25 graduate with a pass; those who make it to step 30 or 35 gain, respectively, a merit or distinction."

So many of us have been talking for so long about personalizing the learning experience by leveraging tools of the new web, creating hybrid learning spaces - online and offline, with individual and group work, and each child moving at his/her own pace...Well, here is someone finally doing it, and succeeding, on a large scale!

Lessons to be learned, to be sure.

ZAC Browser for children with Autism

If you have not already come across this browser (and the related story of a grandfather who developed this browser for his autistic grandson), here is some info on and link to the ZAC (Zone for Autistic Children) browser.

"ZAC is the first web browser developed specifically for children with autism, and autism spectrum disorders such as Asperger syndrome, pervasive developmental disorders (PDD), and PDD-NOS. We have made this browser for the children - for their enjoyment, enrichment, and freedom. Children touch it, use it, play it, interact with it, and experience independence through ZAC.

ZAC is the zone that will permit your child to interact directly with games (a LOT of games) and activities (focused on MANY interests) that cater specifically to kids who display the characteristics of autism spectrum disorders, like impairments in social interaction, impairments in communication, restricted interests and repetitive behavior. ZAC has been an effective tool for kids with low, medium and high functioning autism.

ZAC focuses on the children and their interaction - But we also provide an excellent forum for parents, caretakers, teachers, and others to share their experiences, tools and resources and to unite as a caring, compassionate, and extremely knowledgeable community. It is said that "it takes a village to raise a child", and that is exponentially true for raising a child with autistic spectrum disorders. The power of your experience yesterday is going to be instrumental in helping someone successfully tackle the circumstances of today."

Parents and caregivers of kids on the autism spectrum, please do share your views and your feedback on this...

Marc Andreessen's Guide to College and Career Planning

I doubt that in all these years I have ever come across a more useful piece of writing to guide students on higher education choices, and skills development for a successful life than Marc Andreessen's Guide to Skills and Education (Part 2 of his guide to Career Planning). The fact that it resonates so well with all my beliefs and life learnings may well have a lot to do with the high points I am giving this article, but students will do well to heed a lot, if not all, the suggestions of this admirable man, who could be called the "father of the Internet Browser".

Marc Andreessen's Mosaic (which later became Netscape) browser, was probably one of the biggest early web innovations (that incidentally came out of Illinois and not Silicon Valley!) and it revolutionized how we interact with information on the World Wide Web. Those of us who have used the pre-Mosaic web can truly appreciate how Mosaic changed life for the better :)). He recently co-founded Ning - a social networking platform that many of us are familiar with. Marc A is clearly one of Silicon Valley's most successful entrepreneurs.

So parents and teachers, do read it and share your reactions to Marc's Guide to Career Planning Part 2: Skills & Higher Education. If you are a student wandering through here, this piece is a must-read - it may well change your life (for the better, I'm sure :))!

[Cross-posted on educatorslog.in]

The Ideal Technology/CS Curriculum for Middle School

This post is inspired by a curriculum question raised on educatorslog.in by a 'Computer Studies' (CS) teacher (an alternative moniker for a 'Technology' teacher in India).

So, what should kids aged 10-14 be taught by way of technology apps/tools in schools?

I think the question is better answered if we rephrase it to - What skills can kids aged 10-14 develop through technology apps/tools? In my view the 4Cs provide an excellent guideline to develop the curriculum - thinking about which technology tools will help kids with the following -

Communication

Collaboration

Creativity &

Critical Thinking

I’d like to preface my list of candidates tools and/or specific applications that could be considered, by underscoring the need for embedding the learning of specific technology tools in authentic tasks and integrating it in projects/assignments/artifacts that are part of the curriculum of core subjects such as Science, Language Arts, Maths and Social Studies. Technology taught stand-alone as a separate “subject” is neither necessary nor beneficial. The idea that technology is a “tool” can only be impressed on students when it is taught as a tool to achieve a larger purpose.

The other thought that I’d like to voice for consideration is the need to include elements of computer science rather than simply restricting the Technology/Computer Studies curriculum to the learning of software applications. This would mean exposure to the ideas of algorithms, data structures and data management. Programming is of course an important part of this, but programming alone is a very narrow piece that does not cover many of the elements of computer science that children could get exposure to, even at an early age. Such instruction should ideally be cleverly designed and appropriately disguised (a la Randy Pausch’s “head fake”) so that kids have fun learning relatively difficult concepts.

Enough rambling, and on to specific themes/tools... (Note that there are free alternatives to almost all proprietary ones that I mention here). I will try and organize this into a table at some point.

• Google Docs, Sites (Communication, Collaboration)
• Blogging & Podcasting (Communication, Collaboration, Creativity)
• Wikis (Communication, Collaboration)
• Publishing - Publisher (Communication, Creativity)
• Photo/Video uploading & sharing ((Visual) Communication, Collaboration)
• Audio Editing- Audacity (Communication, Creativity)
• Image Editing - Photoshop, Fireworks (Communication, Creativity)
• Movie making/Digital Story Telling - Movie Maker, PhotoStory, iMovie (Communication, Creativity, Critical Thinking)
• Concept-Mapping - CMap, FreeMind, Inspiration, many others (Critical Thinking)
• Presentation tools - Open Office Impress, Powerpoint, Google Presentations, Slide Share (Communication, Collaboration)
• Programming - LOGO, Star LOGO, Scratch, Squeak, Drape, Alice, Visual Basic/C++, C, (Critical Thinking, Creativity)
• Web Design, including HTML (Collaboration, Creativity)
• 3-D Modeling - Google SketchUp (along with Google Earth) (Creativity, Critical Thinking)
• Game Creation- Game Maker, Scratch, Squeak (Creativity, Critical Thinking)
• Animation - Flash (Creativity)
• Spreadsheets - Google Spreadsheets, Open Office Calc or Excel (Critical Thinking)
• Databases & Information Organization - Open Office Base, Access (Critical Thinking)

I think this is a fairly exhaustive list. These tools can be taught at the appropriate grade level and even in multiple grades through some sort of a spiral curriculum (building on basic skills taught in an earlier grade).

Web of Possibilities with Indic Tools for India

Barely 2 weeks ago I blogged about my brush with Indic Language Support in Blogger - a post which garnered several comments from the Hindi blogging world - with most of the comments being in Hindi. Most of the Hindi bloggers who left comments maintained solo blogs while being on several group blogs as well. One such group blog - Buno Kahani (Weave a Story) is an interesting attempt at collaborative story writing by a group of Hindi bloggers!

Clearly, that one post did much for my appreciation of a phenomenon that I was simply not (consciously) cognizant of - how a large percentage of India's populace is enjoying access to the several Indic language web tools that allow them to express themselves in an Indian language of their choice.

In the comments was also one by priyankar who urged me to take some time out to write a similar blog in Hindi - share my thoughts on education and technology in a language that will serve the Indian Hindi speaking and reading population as well -

"आपके शैक्षिक और तकनीकी अनुभव का कुछ लाभ हिंदी के माध्यम से भी देश के लोगों को मिलना चाहिए . इसके लिए थोड़ा समय निकालें - यही अनुरोध है"

Well, thankfully, Google's new English-Hindi-English translation tool obviates any extra effort on my part to make this wish come true! See the "Read this blog in Hindi" link on the top right of this page? Thanks to Google, an automated Hindi translation of this blog can be produced at the click of a button. Go ahead and try it - right here, right now!

Even though the translation is nowhere near perfect yet, the potential for this in India is HUGE! Think about it! Any page on the web in English hitherto inaccessible to someone who cannot read English, is now available in Hindi as well. Imagine what this could mean for education in parts of small-town and rural India where there is Internet penetration, but where English is neither spoken nor read. Vast amounts of educational content on the Internet in English were until now out of the reach of the non-English literate population of India. Not anymore!

Google's Translate toolkit toolkit also has a text translator which allows any text to be translated from English to Hindi or vice versa. For more information on all the capabilities of the toolkit - check out the Google Press Release - Google aapki bhasha mein (Google in your language).

Here's a snapshot of the educatorlog.in home page in Hindi. As you can see, the translation is not quite perfect, but still, one can get the gist of the text.
It's enough to get my head buzzing with ideas and possibilities :)

More on FOSS (aka Muft and Mukt Software) for Schools

Is it just my imagination or is the FOSS movement for schools truly gathering momentum? Anyway, just wanted to share some more on the idea of FOSS and the rationale for its use, especially in schools.

The first is the much-talked about article by Richard M. Stallman ("rms" - the father of the GNU project) - Why schools should exclusively use free software - in which he lists the following reasons (in brief) -

1. Cost - obviously the first good reason to go with software that is truly "free" (and not "donated" like some proprietary software is which has hidden costs and other strings attached)
   
   
2. "School should teach students ways of life that will benefit society as a whole."
   
   
3. Free software permits students to learn how software works. This is especially useful for older kids, and proprietary software rejects this thirst for knowledge of how things work.
   
   
4. "To teach people to be good citizens and good neighbors—to cooperate with others who need their help. Teaching the students to use free software, and to participate in the free software community, is a hands-on civics lesson."

The second is an argument (in favor of FOSS) that I will borrow from Why Free Software by Nagarjuna of gnowledge.org (and the Free Software Foundation of India). I think he explains it really well--

"The argument can be best understood if we focus on what happens when we digitize any document, whether text or other kinds of media. Digitization uses a computing model to write (encode) the data, and when we try to retrieve the data, the computer reads (decodes) it for us in a human readable form. Normally, we expect that the computing model used for encoding and decoding is part of computer science, and so we rely on it.

However, since code is by nature arbitrary, each company can invent (mind you an arbitrary invention is not necessarily an innovation) its own model of digitization and provides a computing service to its customers. The arbitrary computing model they use is protected under the various forms of IPR, and the current Governments not only respect this but also protect and promote the interests of the companies.

Free Software Movement (FSM) identifies this as the root cause of betrayal that happens in the digital society in various forms. The computing model used must be published, just as any scientific or technological models are published for use by the society. More important than providing access, by publication, is the freedom to use the computing model by other agencies. In addition to this, FSM also seeks the freedom to modify the model, as well as the freedom to republish the model either without any restrictions or with the restriction that other users cannot transform them into private property.

Considering that computer science is a strange mix of deep theory as well as sophisticated technology, it is very vital for any society to use this transparently. Else, we will let some agencies become monopolies. This is a serious danger to digital society because, the data that is digitized belongs to you and me, and not to the company. But, in reality today, our data has been handed over to the proprietary companies, since they alone have the license to decode our own documents. This will create a possibility for computer crime, which is happening all around our eyes. We let this happen."

(By the way, I've heard the expression "Muft and Mukt Software" to describe FOSS in India. I love the way it rolls off the tongue - it means Free (Muft) and Open Source (Mukt) Software in Hindi/Urdu.)

FOSS in Schools in India

Just wanted to highlight the Kerela story here that has also made it to the latest educatorslog.in Spotlight - Kerala Blazing the Trail for FOSS in Schools. I posted the story on a google group of people deliberating ICT in Education in India, and received some comments on the story from Anivar Aravind who is an information architect, in addition to being a self-proclaimed "hactivist, campaigner, FLOSSopher, initiator, and occasional writer", who also happens to know the inside story of the Kerela FOSS movement. I have embedded his comments (in quotes and in green) in the story just as he shared them in the googlegroup. Thanks, Anivar, for sharing your insights....

KOCHI, MARCH 4: Richard M Stallman—global free software guru, VS
Achuthanandan’s darling and almost a freewheeling adviser of sorts to
the Kerala Government—may now have more reasons to break out into
that jig that he abruptly did while being given a somberly
reverential welcome in Kerala a few weeks ago.

Kerala is all set to become the first state in the country to
completely banish Microsoft and allow only GNU/Linux free software to
be used in the mandatory IT test at the state SSLC examinations that
half a million students will appear for from next week. Till last
year, they could take the exam using either free software or the
Microsoft platform. Not anymore.

"Kerala selected free software because in the syllabus committee meeting
85% of the teachers opted for it (after 2 year experience of on the
platform & trainings and support by free software advocates - no state
help at till that point) But Because of it was a Anti-MNC position and
left-ruled Govt Media used all juicy stuff. Govt also captured the
mileage from it."

A few weeks ago, the Government formally ordered that only free Linux-
based software should be used for IT education in high schools, using
new the Linux text books developed by State Council for Educational
Research and Training and the Free Software Foundation of India.

"It was an old decision, on the starting of the academic year. Not few
weeks ago. This report was appeared just before RMS's visit to Cochin,
on March, end of the academic year "

The hardline Left’s familiar anti-MNC, anti-proprietory planks apart,
another major plus of abandoning Microsoft, claim state IT Mission
officials, is plainly the cost factor. “Going for a massive Windows-
based infrastructure cost a lot. Linux can bundle all applications
with the operating system facilitating a single installation kit”.

"Some official IT Mission has nothing to do with IT@School which is under
Education department. Kerala's IT policy clearly states the logical
reasons for Free software adoption of Kerala. And I think this Official
never gone through the content in text books"

The logistics for making Kerala the country’s Free and Open Source
Software (FOSS) destination—one of Achuthanandan’s pet Red obsessions—
may be daunting, but the state is coping with it. Since last
September, some 15 lakh students have been busy training on or
migrating to free software on 40,000 computers put up in 2,832 high
schools watched over by over 60,000 IT trained school teachers (some
86 private training institutions train the teachers) besides 161
master trainers and 5,600 school IT coordinators. “We checked. It’s
the world’s biggest mobilisation of its kind,” says K Anwar Sadath,
executive director of the state government’s IT@Schools mission.

Every high school in Kerala, including the over a thousand government-
run ones, will be wired to high-speed broadband Internet by this
July, which will be another first in India. All, of course, will use
nothing but free software. “We are now moving from IT education to IT-
enabled education in our schools, using only free software,” asserts
Education Minister M A Baby.

When Stallman, who fathered the GNU project and developed text editor
Emacs, flew down to Kerala for the first time in 2001—in his old
patched jeans, long beard, free flowing hair and crumpled T-shirt—and
told the curious who hadn’t heard of him in Thiruvananthapuram that
he was, really, “Saint iGNUcious of the church of Emacs”, the then
Congress-led Government was already busy getting the state’s IT drive
on keel, drawing in Intel and Microsoft. Achuthanandan, then
Opposition leader, was quick to demand that both be got rid of, and
launched a particularly vocal campaign against Microsoft being
allowed to train Kerala school kids, calling it “exploitative”.

The then A K Antony Government had not overly warmed up to Stallman,
who opened Asia’s first centre of his outfit, the Free Software
Foundation-India, in Thiruvananthapuram. But Achuthanandan was keen,
even when CPI(M) state secretary Pinarayi Vijayan originally favoured
the Microsoft idea. Stallman then began regularly dropping down to
Kerala. Two years ago, Achuthanandan, after vainly ordering Pepsi and
Coca-Cola out of the state, declared that all schools will go the
FOSS way.

Last year, in its state IT policy, the Left Government vowed to use
only FOSS in all e-governance projects and declared it would even
incentivise companies developing free software. Government
departments, beginning with the state Secretariat, soon began
switching from Microsoft to Linux. “There were some initial fears and
some understandable resistance, but things have been smoothing out
faster than we thought.” says a a senior state IT official. The
migration is at various stages in key Government arms now.

"First of all Kerala had a silent adoption history of Free software
solutions. I did a study&documentation on successful free software
project on public Enterprises for SPACE-KERALA in 2005. An Interesting
result we found is more than 95% of successful projects in all
e-governance are using Free Software solutions. (book is available at
http://www.space-kerala.org/downloads/foss-lr.pdf) IT policy is a result
of various civil society movements , adoption histories, their success ,
and awareness on bureaucratic & Politicians level. We welcome such good
initiatives from state. I mentioned it to point the errors in juicy
reporting "

Technology and Education - Prof. Yashpal's Perspective

[Although a bit dated (6 years old), these views of renowned Indian Scientist and Educationist, Prof Yashpal, may well be a reflection of the dominant perspective of several contemporary thinkers at the helm of the Indian Education System. As I prepare to leave for Delhi to be part of a consultation to draft a National Policy on ICT in School Education, I feel that the biggest challenge in drafting such a policy will be to strike that balance between doing what will continue to propel India into the Global New Economy of the 21st century, while not undermining India's rich cultural and regional diversity and languages (my previous post being a case in point); and keeping in mind the vast economic spectrum that India represents, as well as social issues such as gender discrimination, caste and communal bias.]

Technology and Education

Prof. Yash Pal
Schoolnet Lecture Series, India Habitat Centre. June 2000

I am a bit at a loss as to how I should constrain the scope of my remarks. You can say so much on science as also on education. Should one speak of ‘science in education’ or ‘education in science’ or about science and education quite independently? Since the constraints have not been explicitly stated I will go by the antecedents of the people who have organized this affair. As I understand they seem to believe that education, including that in science and technology could be tremendously improved if the infrastructure for delivery could be more technological. Besides improving the pedagogy of transaction, information from the world would become accessible to our students and teachers. And then we will be on our way to becoming a world superpower. Let me try to lend some perspective. I hope this is not seen as too censorious in respect of our present enthusiasm about information technology.

I am an enthusiast about information technology – have been for more than a quarter century. My enthusiasm has not been only passive. I have worked centrally on all the three aspects – technology, systems and the pedagogy of education and communication. In the last two of these engagements I have vested a great deal of effort and passion. There have been many successes but there have also been heart breaking failures, because the social forces and forces of vested interests have been much too strong. I do not want to oppose the use of modern technology but I do maintain that if we proceed on the basis of importing, not just technology but also the environment in which the curriculum is formulated and anchored, we will do great damage to our society. I wonder how much of this due to the fact that, like the flashy adds on our television, it is glossy and sexy looking. Also it is all in English, the rootless tongue of our rootless middle class (sorry about this bit of exaggeration). It is also not surprising that many affluent private schools (it is strange that we still call them public schools in our country) resonate with this enterprise because the parents also see excellence in terms of affinity with the external, the Western, the global.

Fertility of information increases if it can be seen to operate on intimate perceptions and observations, in dealings of people, in the state of the land, the price of vegetables, the manner in which the fruit vendor or kabariwala bargains, the arguments in the street, the problem of playing cricket on the road, the non-availability of drinking water, the smell of the earth after the first rain, the sudden buoyancy of spirit after the first rain of the monsoon , the scents of the mango season, the quality of chikoo, the grape, watermelon, banana, apricot, lichi, pomegrenate and so many things that make the summer not only bearable but also awaited with expectation. Instead of this we keep talking of April as spring when the temperature is 42 degrees, we talk of the fall when in many places most of the trees do not shed any leaves while in others this happens in the beginning of May followed by a flush of colourful flowers on the trees. It may seem that all this is only peripheral to the process of education. It definitely is not.

Severing the mind of children from life as it is can have two consequences. One that there is no need to observe, interpret and understand the world around and two that our life is somehow inferior and no worth while problems of great science or technology can possibly emerge from there. Both these are disastrous. De-coupled education and de-coupled science both tend to be sterile. The major problem of our formal system is that such de-coupling has been built in as a virtue. This hope can be belied in two ways, both of which seem attractive to many who are currently active in media education:

First is that great temptation to use packages considered excellent merely because they come from distant industrialized countries. We have some fantastic efforts in our own country. Why should we not learn from what grassroot organizations like Eklavya have done?

The second danger is partly in what I have mentioned above but needs re-emphasis. The dotcom education enterprises also have to make money ultimately. The venture funding implies that they will be nudged in this direction. This might be done through a version of e-commerce in which toys, equipment, software and other material will be pedaled or by concentrating on quiz mania and coaching activity demanded by our examination system. My friend Raju has heard me say, half in fun, that any good that IITs might have done to the country has been more than taken away by their impact on school education. Good schools concentrate on training athletes of information storage not on understanding or education. Some of them start this training right from the primary school.

I have been struck by another trend which might prove disastrous. Information technology is just a technology – not even like technologies of yesteryears. By itself it does not create new science, learning, insights or wisdom. It can enhance those who learn other things. It is becoming a replacement for learning every thing else. That way we might end up training only technical babus. The fact that such babus are in demand, in our country and abroad, does not mean that we should push our best brains in that direction only.

I would finally draw attention to a major factor that many of us in education tend to over look. Education is not an independent variable. I had stated this while forwarding our report Learning Without Burden (baste ka bojh). Most educationists still agree with the analysis in that report. But not much happens. Many State Governments have been more progressive than the Public Schools in which children below 4 years are admitted and made to struggle with reading and writing in a language which no one in their home speaks and in which they find impossible to express the concepts discovered over the most productive years of their learning life. This as anti education as you can be. This is also anti science, anti math and anti development. Learn all the English you want, but start it four years later. The Danes start it after the age of 10 or 11, without undue damage to the science and technology they do. The dominance of English will further stratify our society.

My Brush with Indic Language Support in Blogger

नमस्ते! (Namaste! in Hindi script)

Blogger (and some other Google products) have had Indic language support for a while now, but only today did I, for the very first time, really read a Hindi blog post on the very interesting Hindi blog of Mr. Gyan Dutt Pandey titled GyanDutt Pandey Ki Mansik Halchal.

It all started with an email I received from Mr. Pandey, who blogged about his (blog-worthy) meetings with my father, Dinesh Chandra Grover (of Lokbharti fame), a doyen in the Hindi (print) publishing world in India. (See this and this post of Mr. Pandey's as well).

I am somewhat embarrassed to admit that (given my background) this was the first blog post in Hindi that I read, comments and all (and there were many comments - this blog clearly has huge readership!). That said, going through the blog was a huge eye-opener for me...

Like getting a sense for the number of bloggers in India blogging in Indian languages (I'm sure Google has the figures); phrases used for the Search, RSS feed buttons, "Posts by categories" - "इस ब्लॉग पर सर्च का जुगाड़", "कृपया ब्लॉग-फीड सदस्यता लें", "लेखों का वर्गीकरण" respectively; options to read the blog in your favored script- choices were English, Gujarati, Bangla, Oriya, Gurmukhi, Telugu, Tamil, Kannada, Malayalam & Hindi (Indic to Indic online transliterations done courtesy girgit.chitthajagat.in, embedded slideshows in hindi (hosted on Zoho) and much much more....

A subsequent gmail exchange with Mr. Pandey (in Hindi script!) revealed that for composing his posts, he is in fact not using Google's online transliteration tool, but Baraha and Microsoft's Indic IME offline tools instead.

I cannot remember the last time a single blog post led to so many 'a-ha's!

iGoogle. Do You?

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(Playing around with iGoogle gadgets :))

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The Truth is Free...

(...as are so many things on the web these days (or at least seemingly so :))

Thus readeth the tag line of this amazing site for free documentaries that a friend shared last night. Freedocumentaries.org has about 125 documentaries that are also categorized by themes and regions of the world.

I spotted some well-known ones like those by Michael Moore and the Century of Self series from BBC, but there are several others that I know I will be watching over the coming days (and nights). WE: Arundhati Roy seems promising, as also this one titled The Slow Poisoning of India (it's all about one's context, isn't it?) -

"a 26-minute documentary film depicting the effects of modern pesticide use on local farmers. India is one of the largest users of pesticide in Asia and also one of the largest manufactures. Farmers often use the wrong chemicals, while others overuse."

Most of the documentaries load from Google Video or youtube (the shorter teasers/trailers) so I guess all this site does is point to all the freely available documentaries already up on Google Video. (Just an educated guess that it was not the other way around - it wasn't these guys that put up the stuff on Google Video and then pointed to it from here...)

Which made me curious about the rationale behind freedocumentaries.org (on their 'About Us' page) -

"a site where anyone with an internet connection can watch a movie to educate themselves or simply explore another perspective whenever they please. These movies aren't just for education but are also for entertainment.

As a secondary objective freedocumentaires.org allows independent filmmakers to have their message heard by viewers that they may not normally reach.

Our goal is to have everyone that watches a film at freedocumentaries.org learn something; whether it be a new perspective on a topic, simply understanding a conflict, or being more accepting of a certain belief system. We are proud to say that the vast majority of people that watch our films are glad they did so. In fact many people become addicted to watching documentaries after seeing a movie on our site."

Whatever the rationale, I'm glad for this effort, and hope teachers and parents will use it to educate themselves, their students/kids, and use these to trigger discussions and debate....