Emergic: October 27, 2005 Archives

Thursday, October 27, 2005

The Need for Education

Atanu Dey visited the Mercedes Benz International School in Pune: "[It is the] Rolls-Royce of schools in India. They follow the International Baccalaureate Organization’s curricula. About half their students are Indians and the others are the children of expatriates working in multinational firms in Pune...It is the kind of school that if you have to ask what the tuition fees are, you probably cannot afford it. With only 167 students, it is as exclusive as it is expensive. The annual fee is mind-boggling—to me at least—over half a million rupees a year. The top fees is Rs 5.7 lakhs ( approximately, US$ 13,000) and the one-time fixed cost is Rs 3 lakhs."

He concludes his trip report with the following observation: "When I look at the vicious cycle of poverty that the majority of India’s children are caught in, I have only one hope and that is education. If we can educate just one generation fully, we have some hope of solving India’s problems. That is the challenge but given the uneducated leadership, I am afraid that it may not come to pass."

Deeshaa (Rural Development) | PermaLink | Comments (10)

The observations are so timely. Just one educated generation can lift the moral , ethical and value levels at which our national leadership operates (not so much intellectual).

Taking this a little further, if education is indeed the void, why do we often connect good education with exclusive and expensive schools. There is no empirical evidence to suggest that exclusive and expensive schools provide good education. Intellectual skills and scholarship, maybe yes, but education , not neccessarily.

Posted by Colonel KPM Das

Col Das, I think it is an error to relate good education with exclusive and expensive education alone. Like a good nutritious meal does not have to cost too much, good education can be had for very little. The trick is to figure out what is a good education and provide those basic bits universally.

Posted by Atanu Dey

Universal education is indeed a laudable goal, but I think we can start with something simpler. One of the questions, organizations ask is that are we reaching the customers who really matter?
Similarily, one can ask - can we educate the people who really matter? That in turn can create a juggernaut and virtuous cycle that one hopes for. At Microsoft a lot of educational campaigns fell under the rubric of TTT (Train the Trainer) i.e. you train the trainer and then he/she will go out and train many others. So, from each one, teach one, you get to each one teach many. I think there is a lesson to be learnt (no pun intended) from the marketing behemoth.

How much does it take to educate? According to one of the well known action groups for education (ASHA) http://www.ashanet.org/index.php?page=sac you can support a child in $10 per month. At $120 per year, if we have to educate say 20% (240 million) of the population, that will take roughly $30 billion every year. That is a tall oder indeed, so we need to be creative in our use of resources (time, money, and knowledge) Can technology build a highly scalable solution?

But there is a broader theme to education. Is education only available in schools? How is it that some executives who are extremely well educated display poor ethical and moral values, where as some illiterate people are steadfast honest and upright. I think we need to think beyond the classroom education to education that spreads better values.

Posted by Tarun Anand

Though I am not associated with ASHA, I just used their figures. If someone has a different take, I would love to hear that, but even at some very small amounts, the total amount seems huge.

Tarun
http://tarunanand.typepad.com

Posted by Tarun Anand

Atanu: One key 'real life' constraint factor that you need to include for a more robust analysis is the reluctance of numerous parents to educate their kids. As a quick background, remember that India’s unorganized sector is perhaps the largest in the postindustrial world & may represent upto 90% of its total workforce. More important for our purpose, the unorganized sector is actually composed of millions of "mom & pop" type entreprenurs who are attemting to survive in a cut-throat environment. While most of this is in the retail sector, we should include in this millions of small farmers who own their own land because they are, in effect, running the equivalent of a mom & pop business i.e. they are as much occupied in the trade of farming as in trying to run a viable business. One of the things that are common to all these unorganized small operations is the need for cheap, reliable, malleable, long term labour i.e. hence the paradox in india that it is the poor (that can least afford it) who are producing more kids. From a parent's perspective, the less you educate your kids, the less "real life" options the kids have & better the chances of the kids sticking around, helping to run your daily business. I personally know of many rural youth in the U.P. area who have run away from their villages as soon as they get a little education or simply because they want to experience 'modern' life in cities. In most cases, this departure from the village can be both traumatic & get very ugly. In fact, I could make a case that as ASHA goes about trying to educate rural kids, it may be inadvertently adding to the 'immediate' hardship of farmer parents because the kids no longer want to work work the farm.

Sanjay

Posted by Sanjay Garg

"The mediocre teacher tells. The good teacher explains. The superior teacher demonstrates. The great teacher inspires." ~William Arthur Ward

I think the real problem with the Indian education system is that we are unable to produce teachers in sufficient numbers who can inspire, because they in turn are the hapless products of the same cramming system.

Look how bad our text books are. Surely it doesnt cost more to print better books than to print shabby ones.

The best part about the education business is - the more modest it is, the better it could actually be. I dont think we are at a disadvantage there. Its the people who matter.

Our system emphasises on "data" not information. We reward reproduction, not creativity. In the classroom, we dont try to incite curiosities, encourage independent thinking, experiment, digression. How can we expect innovation, original contributions in the numbers that we are capable of.

Those who do, do this inspite of the system, through parallel tracks of their own through their childhoods.

I also feel that the current system is the legacy of the British system which emphasised on producing clerks and not scientists and engineers.

After independence and in the 57 years since then we should have revisited effectively how we want our education system to be really like.

Each of our chapters should be talking about Whys and Hows and not only on Who, What and when.

It is perfectly possible to graduate through the Indian system of engineering through advanced subjects without gaining the ability to answer any original question on the huge syllabii covered.

India has probably the most excellent legacy of pedagogy in the gurukul system. We have known about methods of education long before the world even thought about it. There are some principles there. We only need to dig this up and reinvent it for the current times.

One quote that comes to my mind is of an Indian prof who began his class with "I dont like to cover the syllabus, I'd like to uncover small parts of it".

Posted by Abhijit

Its amazing to know about the fees that they are charging.

Posted by Leslie

Might have missed something somewhere, but I didn't understand what is the link between this seven-star educational centre and the need for mass education in India.

Secondly, I think it is also elitist to presume that only educated politicians can give (or would want to give) education to a country that badly needs it.

This is an invite to anyone wanting to share information via a simple and inexpensive ICT-based mailing list to kindly check out this initiative, which costs me $12 per year to run: http://puggy.symonds.net/pipermail/education-india (check the archives)

Posted by Frederick Noronha

Frederick, there is no link between the 7-star Mercedes Benz International School (MBIS)and the need for mass education in India. That is precisely the point of my post which Rajesh linked to. What India needs is some way of educating its 100 million inexpensively, not educate a few hundred at costs that only a vanishingly small number of people can afford.

I don't presume anything about Indian politicans except that most of them are venal. So I don't presume that "only educated politicians can give ... education to a country" as you put it. My position is that politicians cannot (and do not) do anything in general. Most of the time they prevent good things from happening. Given half a chance they will grab control of the most innocuous institution and run it to the ground. As long as there is a government institution run by politicians and their lackeys the bureaucrats which controls Indian education, Indians will not get educated.

Posted by Atanu Dey

diazepam | carisoprodol online | hydrocodone online

Posted by linda

Google Base

Charlene Li writes:

What are the implications? First, it will be a while before Google Base becomes a category killer, but it will exert pressure in much the same way that online job boards like Monster.com have been squeezing print recruitment classifieds for the past 11 years. The likes of Monster, CareerBuilder, and HotJobs didn’t have to worry much about start-ups like Indeed.com and SimplyHired, but when Google comes along and integrates database listings into general search results, then job boards should start worrying. This is because job-related search terms are a growing part of search revenues, with savvy company recruiters already advertising on those keywords (do a search on “technology jobs” and see who’s advertising).

Second, I would expect at some point for Google to tie self-publishing (e.g. Blogger), Google Groups, and Google Base together. For example, I could publish to my blog in a structured format (yes, this is akin to structured blogging), add some tags and have it appear on both my blog and also in Google Base where it can be populated throughout Google. So if I’m selling my car, I can choose a Google Base template and voila, I’m published throughout the Google Network.

Michael Parekh adds:

One can scarcely contemplate a world where all the major portals may participate in a Worldwide Crawl War (WCW) where each blocks the other's right to crawl any or all parts of its sites. Perhaps a Google vs. eBay/Amazon/Yahoo!/Microsoft/AOL coalition re-alignment may be in our future.

The worldwide web could go dark for users if that were to happen. No longer would we be conveniently able to put a query in a little search box and find our heart and mind's desires at the flick of the "enter" key.

Instead, we'd have to search a bunch of different sites separately.

Search Engines | PermaLink | Comments (0)

The Interesting Economy

Anil Dash writes:

What I'm wondering is, how is Flickr's interestingness different than the economy in Game Neverending? Than Second Life? (Or in Evercrack or Neverwinter or any of the other gaming platforms.) Is interestingness its own reward? Why don't I get to level up or power up when I create something interesting?

More to the point, the in-game economies of these games translate pretty cleanly into real-world cash, with eBay amplifying the efficiency of the currency conversion. And interestingness in other online media (like blogs) is rewarded by cash in a pretty straightforward way; I can sign up for TypePad, check a box to enable text ads, and pay for my account or point the proceeds to my PayPal account when I start getting lots of visitors.

But interestingness in Flickr doesn't pay. At least not yet. Non-pro users are seeing ads around my photos, but Yahoo's not sharing the wealth with me, even though I've created a draw. Flickr's plenty open, they're doing the right thing by any measure of the web as we saw it a year ago, or two years ago. Today, though, openness around value exchange is as important as openness around data exchange.

Software | PermaLink | Comments (0)

Who owns the Wisdom of the Crowd?

Jeff Jarvis answers: "The Crowd."

So who owns that collected wisdom of the crowd? I’d say the crowd does. Others merely borrow it if they continue to have the trust of the crowd and if they pay dividends back to that crowd. And if those others try too hard to control that wisdom, to limit its use and the sharing of it, then they not only reduce the value of it — under the theory (and it’s still a theory) that a smaller crowd is less wise — but they also risk turning away the crowd that creates this value.
...
I believe we start with the notions that:
* We all want to control our contributions.
* We all want the community to benefit if we in turn benefit.
* We expect mutual trust in the forms of transparency and honesty
* And we all — individual, collective, enabler — find uncivil behavior (spam, fraud, hate) unacceptable.

But there’s one more fundamental notion that informs this new society, a notion that big companies and institutions invariably forget because they were build in the old order:

This is no longer a centralized world, a world controlled by those institutions. This is a decentralized world, a world controlled by us.

General | PermaLink | Comments (0)

Next-Generation Broadband Primer

[via Om Malik] CED Magazine writes: "Several technologies are making leaps of speed on the ground and in the air. Some are here today; others are still on the horizon. Here is a quick snapshot of these different broadband access technologies, the capabilities they purport to provide, and the timelines in which they should appear."

Telecom | PermaLink | Comments (2)

It’s a pity the same thing doesn’t seem to be happening over here in the UK. But it’s not really surprising, since British Telecom have a tendency to resist the adoption of new technology for as long as they’re able - the UK didn’t get unmetered dialup Internet until the year 2000, or DSL broadband until 2001, and even when DSL was introduced it was a while until speeds higher than 512kbit/s became available to home users. At the moment, 2Mbps is (slowly) becoming the entry level, but we are quite a way behind the US.

government grants to start this business staff

Posted by DJac

Details via Slashdot. “Broadband Reports has a good read on the real deal behind next generation broadband deployments. In four years: half all Verizon DSL users should have fiber, half of all SBC subscribers should have 10-20Mbps DSL, and one tenth of all BellSouth customers should have 50Mbps DSL. At the same time cable companies should begin deploying DOCSIS 3.0 technology in 2006, eventually bringing 100Mbps speeds to end users.”
in hybrid car
net zero dsl
yahoo web based messenger
paypa
paypay
programs
texas criminal record

Posted by David

TECH TALK: India Empowered: My Views

India Empowered to me means India Educated, Infrastructure Everywhere, Innovation Ecosystem, Imaginative Entrepreneurs, Intelligent Enterprises, Internet Energised and Increasing Expectations.

India Educated: We cannot build an empowered nation without educating our people. Given India’s youthful population, the imperative to provide the right education is even greater. Even though we have made progress, there is a lot more to be done. We need creative ways to address the challenge of providing a quality education for hundreds of millions Indians. For example, can we use network computers and next-generation broadband networks to deliver the best, aggregated content to our classrooms across the country to counter the paucity of experienced teachers? Can we automate testing procedures using these technologies to ensure that students and schools can course-correct rapidly? Can we roll out these solutions in the next 12-18 months across India? Can we commit that by 2010 every Indian child will entered the school system to have access to least twelve years of quality education?

Infrastructure Everywhere: If we are not going to build our roads, ports, airports and our broadband networks, we are not going to end up removing the friction that is there for both individuals and businesses. This lack of proper infrastructure works as a drag to everyday transactions and that is something India can ill-afford at this juncture in time. We need huge investments over the next five years so we can have world-class infrastructure. And that does not mean a single Golden Quadrilateral project or just Mumbai and Delhi airports become world-class. Infrastructure needs to go broad and deep across the country. It is what we should have done over the past 50 years but we didn’t. We now have to do it in the next five – across urban and rural India.

Innovation Ecosystem: We will need to think out-of-the-box to come up with smart solutions. For that, we need to build an innovation ecosystem – combining the best minds across academia, industry and government. We need to work on ideas across the board, starting with education, energy, healthcare. We need solutions that are scalable rapidly. We need to foster a culture of innovation so that India can lead the world in key areas – use of solar energy as an alternate to fossil fuels is one example. To make this happen, we need to make our universities hubs for cutting-edge research. We need venture capital funds so that the better of these ideas can be commercialised rapidly. We will have failures, but the impact of the successes will far outweigh the downside of the projects that do not work.

Imaginative Entrepreneurs: We not only need more entrepreneurs, we need them to come up with big vision. We need entrepreneurs who are willing to run the risk of failure – so that they can change the game dramatically with their disruptive innovations. We need entrepreneurs who are not satisfied with building a small, profitable company but are willing to make big bets on building big enterprises. To take an example: what does it take for us in India to build the Google for Emerging Markets – build around tomorrow’s world of network computers, mobile phones and broadband networks and centralized services. We need to think of the future not as what others create but as an instantiation of someone’s vision. Can we make it our vision?

Tomorrow: My Views (continued)

Related Entries: [All]
TECH TALK: India Empowered: Indian Express Series (Part 3) [October 26, 2005]
TECH TALK: India Empowered: Indian Express Series (Part 2) [October 25, 2005]
TECH TALK: India Empowered: Indian Express Series [October 24, 2005]

Tech Talk | PermaLink | Comments (0)