Sunday Posts

In my first job, back in 1993, I used to carry around a printed list (this was before PowerPoint) with me: Customers often asked why email may be better than fax, and I thought carrying around such a comparison with me would save a lot of time.  While that issue was satisfactorily resolved, I am still having to answer a similarly challenging question: Does online learning work? The comparison, this time, is with the classroom learning. I would accept that this is not exactly a rerun of fax-vs-email thing, nothing ever is: However, there are common elements in the conversation, particularly two. First, those who tell me that online learning doesn't work with most certainty have never done any, just as the skeptics eschewed emails in my previous experience. Second, my answer that it is better for certain kinds of activities while Fax may be needed for certain other kinds of things perhaps could be repeated - I usually say classroom training is very good for certain things that ...

Next week, the electioneering in India will start. It is set up like any other election: With parties lined up on either side, politicians trying to get maximum advantage, money being spent like water, with the noise, promises, processions and frustrations like the other times. But this is not like any other election. There is an existential threat to the Indian Republic and what it stands for. This is no exaggeration. The leading candidate, though by no means certain, is a man with an agenda: Narendra Modi is trying to convince Indians that he will bring the development that Indians crave for, and will run a corruption free administration. But he has an ugly record of abetting a genocidal riot in Gujrat back in 2002, and he and his apologists are trying to see that it does not matter. In fact, in a shocking TV interview, Lord Bhikhu Parekh, the champion of multiculturalism in Britain, was trying to argue Mr Modi's case saying that we should not be talking about the past and ...

As it happens, during the course of last few days, I came across two very specific instances of questioning the value of freedom. One was specifically about academic freedom, and the other about freedom in general. Set in context of the rhetoric that freedom is central to progress, these are rather surprising points of views, hence demand further exploration. In the first instance, I am referring to John Morgan's China on Fast Track in Times Higher Education of 19th December. One of the central issues this article grapples with is whether the lack of academic freedom will stall the progress of Chinese universities in the global league tables. Indeed, academic freedom is sacrosanct in the Western academic circles, and that one can conduct meaningful research and teaching without the freedom to explore anything that inspires curiousity and without the freedom to express one's opinion sounds deeply anachronistic.  Various interviews presented in this article tell of a d...

We are often told that knowledge has become abundant, available, and commoditised : In short, it is not important anymore. Some of these claims are rested on the idea that Google has changed everything. The skills of memorising, retrieving and reproducing information, a task which we took as synonymous to knowing, can be done by computers and smartphones easily, quickly and cheaply. Progressively, the machines can translate, contextualise and correlate better, and it is fair to expect this process nearing perfection over our lifetime.  I am currently reading Tom Standage's ' Writing On the Wall' , a history of social media, where he described Cicero, when he was made the Governor of Cilicia, a province in today's Southeast Turkey, requesting his friend Marcus Caelius Rufus to keep him in the loop by sending the political news of Rome. Caelius, the ever faithful friend, therefore sent him copies of the daily 'acta' ( 'acta diruna populi Romani' , or...

An Ernst & Young report looks at the Australian universities and come to interesting conclusions. The British universities, which look at their Australian counterparts with envy these days, may take note of this: The report offers some insights which may have universal significance, and universities all over the world, barring the few at the top of the pyramid, may have to reassess their strategies in the rapidly changing context of today's Higher Education. In summary, the report points to five disruptive forces that confront what it calls a 'thousand year old industry' (though many in Britain will be affronted by the 'i' word): First, 'democratization of knowledge and access' , which means not just the MOOCs, but more fundamentally, Google, and YouTube, and the like; as well as the expansion of Higher Education systems in the developing world, based on the emerging consensus on Higher Education as the key to good life. Second, 'contes...