Sunday Posts

Last spring, people who could not understand, or could not accept, the difference between a Computer virus and a naturally occurring one, were pushing hard the idea that the Novel Corona Virus - which was raging through Europe and the Eastern Seaboard of North America at the time - was made in a Chinese lab and then sent out to the world. Whether or not one believed it then, come Winter 2021, there is no doubt that we have made this pandemic our own. Then, I believed that the simpler explanation - that the Pandemic occurred from Bats and through Pangolins - was more plausible; a price we paid for careless exploitation of the natural world. China was guilty, of delayed action, of obfuscation and of - at another level - allowing potentially dangerous practice of eating exotic meat, but not of making the Virus which would affect and kill a lot of their own citizens and dent its global prestige.  Now, as the contagion shows no signs of slowing down and the virus is creating new, potent...

I have spent a long time making the case for college education and I see I used two different arguments interchangably. The first of these was the human capital argument, the one about skills. Usually, given my line of work, this was about telling employers about work-ready graduates and students about jobs and income. After the universities, I used to cite 'graduate premium', not telling the whole story - that the figure is inflated out of proportion by the incomes of a few winners and collapse of the non-graduate income; most graduates have seen their income stagnate or decline in real terms ever since 2008. I used to argue that the quality of education is best expressed in the starting salary of the graduate (a desperate oversimplification that takes the labour market and all the implicit issues of race and gender out of the consideration) and that the countries should invest in colleges to gain competitive advantage in the knowledge economy.   The other argument was the de...

Post-Covid, will technologists save education? It certainly needs saving. We are perhaps looking a whole lost cohort - may be two - who will graduate in a terrible job market and struggle to make a start. Too many pupils, coming out of forced loneliness of a year, would struggle to adjust in colleges. Those who deferred their studies, will have to find the momentum again. And, as if after a great reset, the conversation what education is for has to start in earnest. Technologists will offer no answers to any to these big, burning questions. In fact, after the year when technologies became so embedded in education, it's role will be seen differently. In a way, this has been the best of the years and worst of the years for education technology: Technology's role as infrastructure has been recognised and technology's limitations to revolutionise education have been exposed. We now know that while technology may have answers to our many questions, technologists are often asking...

2021 has started with a whimper, for me. Fittingly I spent the last two weeks of 2020 in the sick bed, as the virus finally caught up with me. I never said so, but I had to learn first hand that this is no flu: It was a virulent disease that makes one feel really sick. Now that I am back in action, I am still feeling sub-par and tired all the time.  That was, however, a fitting end of a year in waiting. Nothing moved forward and my life went in cycles. The worst nightmares I was having when deep in fever were not imaginary, but real - that feeling how pointless everything I do have become. It is as if I got caught in time and never moved forward since 2011, when I used to be optimistic. However, the good thing of this illness and recovery cycle is that one eventually looks forward. As I get back on my feet, I am telling myself that it's time to be optimistic again. Of course, it's hard under the circumstances. Regardless of what I feel, the reality has not changed much outside....

I always wanted to be involved in higher education in India, but all my attempts so far have ended in disappointments. Sure, there is something in what I want and also who I am speaking with and people who speak with me often have a limited objective in mind: A British accreditation of some sort! But I am beginning to suspect that the special place of college in India may have a role in this failure to imagine college to be anything more than a place to get a piece of paper. My hypothesis is that this difference has something to do with the history of college in India. Its peculiarity - a colonial institution enabling social mobility within the colonial context - is well entrenched in the Indian higher education policy and how the middle classes see the college. In Britain and Western Europe, colleges were conceived as training grounds for clergy and lawyers, residential institutions which not only attended to academic requirements (which was very few in most cases) but also served as ...

  For as much one admires Darwin, we must remember that he offered a theory, a brilliant one, but only a theory. Darwin may have single-handedly changed science but his brilliance was more about the method. After Darwin, the scientific method combined the brilliant flashes of thought experiment with careful - painstaking is the word perhaps - examination of evidence. Darwin was not alone but he was the most famous among a nineteenth century club of equals, after whom science was not the same. And, we can attribute much of our experimental success thereafter to this methodological breakthrough. What it means to be doing science was different after Darwin and his contemporaries. But that did not mean that the content of his theory was all correct. Indeed, Darwin did not have a theory of inheritance - and his conjectures were off the mark on that one. Gregor Mendel was still too obscure and modern genetics was decades away when Darwin died. His evidence, based on what we knew through ...

 For a long time now, I have been promoting 'blended learning'.  The reasons are various. I have done enough online learning myself to know that the solitary, individualistic learning experience can be a poor alternative to what one may experience in a campus. Besides, most of EdTech is still focused on delivering educational content, but ask anyone about their college days a few years after the fact, all they would remember is the people they met and the experiences they had. Artificial Intelligence, if it ever matches the claims its evangelists make, may perfect educational content delivery but it may never deliver this, the most memorable aspects of an educational experience. But then, I went to school in India and apart from a few truly inspiring encounters, my educational experience mostly consisted of boring lectures and oppressive examinations. One could indeed say that those magical moments made all the drudgery worth it, but I wouldn't really ever want to go back t...