Sunday Posts

Let us defeat fear with hope. Let joy overcome the gloom.   Darkness no more, let the morning bring   The task of building a future of our own.   No, we have said.    Now, let us begin yes.

I have forever been preparing for this, but now I am starting it. I want to write the history of the colonial university in India.  I was supposed to start this in 2019, but Covid and various personal crisis kept me from it. I am living through yet another crisis, but that only tells me that there would be no better time and that I should get started. The upside of this current crisis - if there could be any upside at all - is that I am completely grounded and now I won't think of travelling, for work or for leisure, for a very long time. I am recalibrating all my work and focusing on what I can do in the UK, first time in the 22 years I have lived here, and this gives me the stability and focus a project like these demands. Indeed, I am expecting archival work to be done in India and elsewhere, but that is different from spending time in airport lounges. In summary, I am embracing a quieter, boring life, with my only pleasure emanating from doing this work that I always w...

Project-based Learning (PBL), in its various forms, has many benefits, not least that it puts application at the heart of learning and allows learners to connect their knowledge more effectively to their lives. But I came to appreciate it from another angle altogether: sitting in the classrooms of a top university, as a mature immigrant who spoke English as a second language, I have come to see how much one takes for granted in traditional university education and how subtle, unintentional exclusion can work. Projects, particularly those that allowed me to work with my peers, enabled me to learn differently, with my eagerness and work ethic making up much of the cultural deficit I initially faced. Thereafter, I have consistently been an advocate, dedicating my entire career to exploring and refining it. Because it does need perfecting! My work in PBL usually involves two kinds of negotiation: one with educators who think PBL results in poor learning, cannot be adequa...

 Photo by Vance Osterhout on Unsplash The standard approach to enhancing employability outcomes in Higher Education takes the form of additional soft skills and technical skills training, internships, career counselling and renewed efforts to ensure campus placement. All of these have their place but the changes in the employer expectations, structures of the professions and breakdown of the traditional career paths demand changes in the traditional, one-size-fits-all approach. As such, there are five key factors why the standard approach isn't enough and must change: 1. Different student motivations: Students in higher education today are different from the students in large, traditional universities. They are often older, from ethnic minority ba...

                                                                 Photo by Lachlan Donald   The idea underlying all my work is this: At the time of great technological and social change, learning by practice gets better results than academic study. Having invested myself in finding better ways to organise learning by practice and in designing better measurements to assess its impact, I am aware of the objections this position might give rise to. At a time of great change - and the resulting uncertainty - it is better to focus on what does not change, human universals, as practice focus may lead to superficiality. The real change, it is true, happens at the fringes. If one really wants to get a sense of what's happening in AI, they are better off at a Research University today than interning ...

When The Economist starts saying that debt levels are unsustainable and a market crash is imminent, one should take notice. This was a lesson I learnt in 2007, before many others woke up to it.  If anything, this time it would be different. In my mind, 2008 was just the beginning of the breakdown. This time, we have multiple bubbles to burst: All those extra money from the bank bailouts, all those extra money from Covid, and all those valuation excesses from AI - the world economy is just several times bigger than what it should be. I am not a doom-monger, and right now, I am terribly unprepared for a market meltdown. Everything that could go wrong has gone wrong for me in the recent days and I am not ready for another crisis. But purely intellectually, this appears like the judgement day. That the global financial system works like a giant hoover, sucking labour, time and ideas from people who believe in hard work, good work and honest work, has been clear to me for some time. Thi...

What is an Indian education? I stumbled upon the debate pretty much unknowingly, attempting to call out a hoax ( see here ). Before that, I worked for ten years setting up Computer Education centres in hundreds of towns and cities across the Indian subcontinent but never questioned the cultural significance of my work. After that 2008 post though, I couldn't unsee it anymore. It became the focus of my academic work, which I took up only subsequently.  If anyone asks what my big goal in life is, it will still be to return to India and set up, together in a community of fellow travellers, a truly Indian university. I consider all my current work to be a preparation, daily attempts to understand and to perfect my craft, so that, one day, it can all come together. Periodically, therefore, I get interested in projects in India and excitedly promote projects which show promise. However, within India's current privately driven mass higher education and its crass...