Sunday Posts

  Popular belief may hold that there is nothing better than getting out of the building and learn from doing things . Still, the cha otic, costly and unique nature of experience means that these may not translate into meaningful learning. The data bears it out: Though the employers give weight to relevant work experience, the correlation between work experience and work performance is at best tenuous. This is a serious limitation for all work-based learning models, including apprenticeships and co-operative education .   The key to learning from experience is a prepared mind. It is not enough to have the experience , but the person having the experience must be able to engage consciously in the activity . Always be learning should be the motto, and each action should be understood in its context. To construct a learning system that enables our learners to do this, we educate our learners through a learn-connect-lead cycle.   Learn-Connect-Lead   Learning is ...

Should Education become more local, or global? This was a question posed to me in a conversation: As in these cases, I improvised an answer. But, as usual, the obvious answer is not necessarily the right one, and is indeed worth interrogating. Most education, at the present time, is locally focused. This is because Education, at least mostly, is a part of the State, that funds its existence and direct its agenda. Many educators around the world work for the State, or at least, their wages are subsidised by the State. Even in cases where a global institution sponsors education - Church is the most prominent example - the State controls it tightly, through curriculum and credential.  The dynamic of work and commerce, however, has been global. The WTO-inspired globalisation touched far corners of the world over the last few decades, as did the crumbling of the cold war politics. English as a language has gained currency, even in China, and the Internet and the Worldwide Web ...

I wrote previously about the College Trap ( see here ) - how college can't be denied to anyone in a democratic society and yet, the prevalence of college may privilege one kind of learning over others and undermine democracy itself - and, as someone pointed out to me, this is quite antithetical to my own ambitions of setting up a college eventually. At this point, my broad point about the inaneness of college education needed more empirical justification.  For a concrete example, I thought of picking Research Methods, that one thing that legitimises an academic degree, that magic wand that baptises a graduate. My choice is deliberate: I hated it and have long thought about why I hate it. And, the affectionate place that it holds in the academic imagination - in fact, it is itself the academic imagination - makes it a suitable candidate for interrogation.  I shall provide some more justification in case you are wondering what the fuss is about. Let's start with the qu...

I wrote a post earlier about my reading enterprise in 2016 ( see here ), something of a narrative account of my book diary and a Goodread's Reading Challenge that I indulged myself with. As an aggregate, it showed a failure - I only finished half as many books cover to cover as I set out to do - and fragmentation of goals and enterprises, as I followed several different agenda and did not complete any of those in any form. In a way, this is fine. I wanted to follow my heart in what I chose to read, and it really could not have been otherwise. In a sense, I want my relationship with my books to be impulsive yet profound, momentary yet forever remembered, free of commitment but laden with meaning. This is what I am, perhaps: Long ago, someone promised me a relationship with 'all the dimensions, but no destination', and though all the details of that conversation have faded, the idea remained with me, and now morphed into a quest for me to be lived in the books. But,...

There is a philosophical justification for learning from experience: That it connects us to real life with all its complexities and detours, and allow us to escape the 'one size fits all' assumptions of grand theory. Learning, at the messy swamp of practice, where human life is really acted out, is real - and therefore, useful.  However, now, we have further arguments for learning from experience based on new breakthroughs in cognitive sciences. As our understanding of human brain and memory improves, we are discarding deeply-held assumptions that lie beneath our institutions, approaches and even language. There are many things that we are learning anew, but one aspect in particular - how our memory works! Right now, the breakthroughs in cognitive sciences are altering our idea of the memory: Its ideal, as a retention device that accumulate useful bits of our life to carry forward, is seriously being doubted, and it is now being seen as an active construction device, ...

As we speak to employers about what skills they value, they often talk about Critical Thinking. When we talk to colleges and universities, at least in the UK, Critical Thinking comes right at the top of the list of the things they want their students to be able to do. Someone I know, who has been working on the Educator-Employer interface for more than a decade now, tells me that even if they are using similar language, they mean different things by Critical Thinking. According to him, this creates the disconnect, and this is why while 70% educators may think the students are ready for the workplace, less than half the employers think so. With this in mind, I was engaging with educators and employers to figure out what the different definitions of Critical Thinking may be. It seems that both employers and educators mean the same thing - the ability to test and validate the assumptions that underlie a decision - when they talk about critical thinking. They are both talking about n...

It is fashionable now to talk about knowing-doing gap, but this emanates from the underlying assumption that knowing and doing are two different things, to be undertaken differently (See my earlier post, Knowing and Doing - Are They Different? ). This dualism, which separates thought from action, ideas from deeds, and reflection from activities, is institutionalised in our universities, which is perhaps creating the knowing-doing gap by design. Notwithstanding the popularity of capstone projects, study tours and work placements, which, by design, remain off-curriculum and almost reluctantly indulged, the idea of the university promotes itself as a safe space to do the thinking outside the challenges of our daily lives, accentuating the dualism rather than seeking to reconcile it.  It has become, more by default than design, my occupation to seek to bring learning and work closer together. This prompts me to think and to question, as I am attempting now, the model of the learn...

Ed-tech has come of age. Gone are those days of HTML scripted pages with two big Next and Back buttons, the databases merely reporting how many seconds someone looked at a page and document repositories to be downloaded and printed at convenience. But how this came about may be slightly more contested. One may think it was video, made possible by robust bandwidth and multimedia in everyday computers, that changed everything. Yet others will think, like everything else, it was mobility, the ability to hold in hand a powerful enough device with a screen that does not tire off the eyes, that facilitated a different level of engagement with all things electronic. Social is also a big thing, and its advocates will claim that connecting with others electronically is changing everything. And, yet others will point to the emergence of the cloud, or affirmation of what they used to say in older times, 'the Network is the Computer', that changed computer from a box on a desk to a space...

Our minds love classifications, neat boxes that we can put stuff in. But, often, these boxes are just created by us rather than being a fact of nature, though we seem to assume that nature is indeed organised in neat boxes as we want them. The dualism that we apply to knowing and doing is one of those false classifications, which we created perhaps to preserve the dignity of what we call wisdom from the messy realities of the world, but as we keep pushing the boundaries of what we can do, this dualism has been outed as false, and even dangerous. Indeed, I am just quoting Dewey more or less in saying that Knowing and Doing are actually one and the same thing. There is no knowing without doing and doing for a sentient being involves some knowing all the time. This is the principal difference that human beings have from other animals, for whom doing and knowing may not be connected - and indeed, therefore, an animal may not know anything at all. So, this argument that one must l...

What's the relationship between Education Technology and Teachers?  The most common sense answer is that education technology is the new mode and the teachers are the old mode, linked somewhat in an asymmetric relationship like the one between the weavers and textile factories. The former is just an inefficient form of doing things which technology can do much better, or at least, be able to do much better when it becomes smarter eventually. Others take a kinder view of teachers and teaching. They actually contend ed-tech will be good for teachers. The advent of ed-tech, in this view, is the panacea for the 'cost disease' of education, because, as the economist William Baumol has affirmed, education is one of those trades where the 'productivity' of the Professor does not go up much, though their salaries keep going up. This problem is at the heart of the runaway costs of education in the developed world, particularly in the US, where college fees beat inf...

How to design an institution where students learn how to learn? One would hope there may an easy formula somewhere, but the 'institution' gets in the way: Within an institutional setting, learning is often about how to master the institutional system and not about opening up to other possibilities. Within an institution, the rhetorical often trumps the philosophical.  Yet this dependence on rhetoric is perhaps a fatal flaw when social changes dislocate the institutional position. A rhetoric-bound institution, one that champions the skills of mastering its own system, can quickly become out of sync with everything else: No wonder employers today complain that the universities don't speak their language! Learning to learn, in more ways than one, is a philosophical exercise. It is a dialogue with oneself, rather than pursuit of intellectual superiority, and often achieved through learning things one would later discard (like understanding Newtonian physics at the ...

Online Learning is poor experience! How much was I reminded of my past life, when I was an young e-mail evangelist and was forced to comparative charts of fax and email, when I was confronted with that statement. There was an element of surreal in the setting too: I was talking to a Senior Manager in a large corporation based in Philippines who do most of their work remotely anyway. But the tone was sincere - it was not an attempt to end the conversation as the coffee had even arrived - and this was a point being made, as I guessed, from the person's own life experience.  This is a difficult debate to engage into. Because it is difficult to argue against experience: If you had a bad meal in a restaurant and I had a good meal there, I can't convince you that the restaurant is good. I can only convince you that your experience was not typical, as much as you can convince me that neither was mine. There was a lot going on in online learning, and every tom and his friends hav...

I wrote about the contrast between John Dewey's concept of Learning from Experience and the conventional ideas of Experiential Learning ( See here ) and the limitation the latter may have, despite its popularity, as we climb into a future with smart machines and pervasive globalisation. I see Dewey's concept of creating engaged individuals to be central to the system of education we ought to build - and indeed see that the modern education system, with its focus on creating humanoid workers, is precisely its anti-thesis - and believe that we need to promote the concept of experience not as isolated special events but as an opportunity to interact with one's world.  The key difference that this different approach to experience makes is in the idea of inquiry. Learning from Experience depends on the emotional engagement with the world and asking questions: This much everyone agrees upon. But it matters what kind of questions we are asking, because they shape our abiliti...

The claim: The age of average is over. Tyler Cowen says this, so does Tom Friedman, Andrew McAfee and others. All those middle class jobs, Administrators, Receptionists, Secretaries, Accountants, are going, and will be gone in the future. 47% of all of today's professions, mostly the refuge of the average among us, will disappear. The only jobs left will be those which require extra-ordinary capability and professional skill of some kind.  In short, middle class is doomed. The economists have a solution - a sort of a negative income tax, or tax credit as it is known in Britain - to provide for them. All those who complain about dole must take note: We are heading for an universal dole of some kind. Though this does not sound very promising, this is at least better than those practised in some developing countries, where, if you missed the bus, you are left to fend for yourself. Welcome back Welfare State, though this shows we are running out of ideas. In a way, 'avera...

I am working towards a framework for developing global expertise. In my mind, it starts with a disjuncture, a disconnect, when things don't turn out the way it should. This should indeed be easy, it happens all too often when one travels to another country or starts working with someone from a different culture. Or, so we think. In reality, though, it does not happen that way at all. Even when we travel, or start working with someone from a different culture, we still remain within our own context: The disjuncture does not happen, we reject anything odd as an anomaly, an exception. So, my starting point is how one could establish the starting point - the disjuncture! Also, most of this may happen in a classroom or workplace setting, rather than travel (which I am now getting to think about - whether I start working on a travel learning model) and hence, I have to find a way to simulate 'disjuncture'. I don't think this is a particular challenge though, because dis...

In my work, I often act as an interpreter, not of the linguistic kind but of culture. Because the two sides of my working equation are my Western colleagues, partners and collaborators, and my Asian clients, students and customers. The fault lines of cultural cross-overs are therefore very real for me. Besides, I often get to play the role of a reluctant India expert, because of my origins, and very regularly the apologist for the country, when various not-so-encouraging stories hit the press. This could be quite an enjoyable learning experience: With more than fifteen years spent outside India, I am getting used to seeing the country and its quirks from outside. Though I still don't think the way my British or American colleagues would do, I have gotten used to see their point of view. I loved my time in Southeast Asia, and always feel more comfortable dealing with people in that region. So, in a way, this role of go-between is the best I can get, which makes my work, love a...