Akshat Rathi has a great article: Aakash is no silver bullet (it appeared -- without hyperlinks -- as an op-ed in The Hindu). Citing the failure of the OLPC project to live up to all the hype about how it would revolutionize education, he pours a lot of cold water on the idea that Aakash, somehow, is the magic gadget Indian kids have been waiting for.
Even if the government somehow, however difficult it may seem, is able to get access to cheap tablets, they are not going to help achieve its aims. Can a laptop overcome the negative impact of a bad teacher or poor school? Can it make children smarter despite the lack of electricity, water, toilets or playgrounds? Can it overcome the limitations of stunted growth among the malnourished? Can Aakash increase productivity of the workforce to counterbalance the money invested in it?
There is no evidence that it can do any of these things. [...]
He also has a follow-up post where he responds to comments.
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While I have nothing against the R&D project on Aakash (especially when it is coupled with small-scale experiments on technology-enabled learning), I do have a problem with the vast, massive social experiment that the government plans to build around it -- all in the name of education. This obsession with treating gadgets as magic wands just doesn't make sense -- especially when studies have shown that laptops for school children are not such a great idea even in rich countries (and if you want links to studies on OLPC in other countries, go to Rathi's post). Why then are Indian states like Tamil Nadu and Uttar Pradesh spending huge sums of money to give a laptop to their students?
I shared some of these and other similar thoughts with Samanth Subramanian who has a report on the turbulent ride the Aakash project has had in recent days.
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Interestingly, Satish Jha, an official OLPC cheerleader in India, has an article trashing the Aakash project. It's a bit rich, isn't it, that a man working for a hi-tech huckster admonishes his fellow citizens for not learning from the masters about how to develop low cost gadget. What is he going to do next -- sell snake oil? Oh, wait!
Today's Education Plus supplement of The Hindu daily carries an article Virtual learning spaces. It has some of my views on blogs as a boxed item (only) in the print edition. My thanks to the article author.
Ironical that the boxed item on 'online resources' doesn't appear in the online version of the article. Perhaps, in line with the purport of the article, it is meant to inspire only the off-line readers to go online.
I remember speaking to the article author about three months back on this over the telephone. What has appeared is, understandably, a heavily condensed version of it. Where it reads "...the blog... deals with nanoscience," understand it as the author's original writing.
The journal Science has an article by John Bohannon on measuring an individual scientist's fame and influence using "a data set based on the trillions of words within Google Books, which currently represents 15 million books, 12% of those ever published." The proposed unit for this fame is a darwin, "defined as the average annual frequency that "Charles Darwin" appears in English-language books from the year when he was 30 years old (1839) until 2000." There are just three scientists -- Bertrand Russell, Charles Darwin and Albert Einstein -- who have a fame of 0.5 darwin or more; so a more convenient unit for the others is a millidarwin (mD)!
Here's an excerpt from near the end of the article on what you can do to become more famous:
3. Write a popular book.
This is a risky business. You'll have to take a year off from full-time research to write a book, says Pinker, and "most of them are never read." But if you can pull it off, writing a popular book can launch you into fame. For most of his career, Pinker was a well-respected psychologist with about 1 mD of fame. But that changed dramatically after the 1994 publication of his book The Language Instinct. "That's when people started recognizing me in the street," Pinker recalls, "and I got an avalanche of unsolicited mail from strangers." And then came the invitations—to write articles on diverse topics, to take part in conferences in other disciplines—and "that was a godsend for me," he says.
In fact, once you've got a scientific career up and running, you might consider switching to full-time book writing. The extreme case is Isaac Asimov. His 183 mD of fame came not from being a biochemistry professor at Boston University, of course, but for becoming a titan of hard science fiction. Carl Sagan (152 mD), Rachel Carson (152 mD), Richard Dawkins (90 mD), and many others show the value of reaching out directly to the public. These days, that could take the form of a blog.
Apparently, this year marks the completion of a decade since the first blog appeared. Mint's four-part series uses this factoid as a hook to take a detailed look at the Indian blogdom.
The series is by Ayeshea Perera and Krish Raghav, and the first part is out today. I am one of the people quoted in the story. I think I'm entitled to an extra 15 nanoseconds of fame this time because I appear in a story that also features The Compulsive Confessor ...
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Okay. Let me just park my sound-bites here.
Here I am bitching about bemoaning the dearth of academics -- espeically social scientists -- among Indian bloggers:
In the US blogosphere, you would find a lot of academics with solid expertise—the economic and law blogs there are fantastic—the commentary they are able to drum up after an important Supreme Court judgement, for example, is phenomenal,. [...] That is yet to catch up here. We have some good law blogs, but there is really no economics-oriented blog worth its salt here—run by an academic economist who can make some comment on the RBI policy or the finance ministry.”
And here's another where I hold forth on the growing diversity in India's blogdom:
“There is quite a bit of diversity now —simply because a lot more people have entered blogging,” says Abhinandan. “The diversity is reflected in what is being blogged about—for example politics—very leftist to very libertarian. A lot of blogs that talk about Dalit issues and so on—these voices were not that prominent in the early days.”
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The first part of the series is here. I'll add the links to the remaining three parts when they show up on the web.
Like many of you, I too have my profile up on many, many sites (Orkut, MySpace, MyBlogLog, LinkedIn, Nature Network, Vox, and Facebook). Not (really) out of any great conviction that this is the way to go, but just to get a feel for this phenomenon called social networking. Sadly, I'm still not sure what all the rage is all about, but that may be because I am clueless.
In any case, given the sudden, steep and awesome rise in popularity of Facebook, it's only a matter of time someone realizes the great hidden potential of uSuckBook.
The January issue of The Chronicle, the monthly newsletter of IT-BHU alumni network, carries an interview with yours truly. It's largely about my blog avatar, and I indulge in a bit of BHU nostalgia near the end. The interview was conducted through e-mail by Yogesh, a fellow alumnus of IT-BHU, a very active member of ITBHU.org community, and a frequent commenter here.
Thanks, Yogesh!
The 9:00 p.m. show India This Week on NDTV featured the story on the 100 dollar laptop. Sorry, no links (yet)! Here's the link; but the video requires a subscription!
A member of the design team behind Children's Machine XO said some good things about the machine; then Ashok Jhunjhunwala of IIT-M talked about some of the home grown efforts to address the issue of technology for the masses -- particularly for the rural masses. The story ended with (almost) the last word from me. I'm just grateful that Amulya Gopalakrishnan, the reporter on this story, chose some of my my best lines!
There you have it: twenty seconds in a two-minute story embedded in a 60 minute show. All in all, an interesting experience.
About a month ago, Shashi Tharoor's column in the Hindu alerted us about the huge loss to India due to its doctors emigrating and staying on in the US. I used that as the starting point for elaborating on the Australian model of funding university education.
Tharoor uses his latest column to respond to his readers' comments, including mine.
In response to the "Australian model", he says:
The great flaw in this model, however, is that it does nothing to address the problem of doctors emigrating. If repayment is solely through the tax system, how will the government recoup its investment from doctors who, having emigrated, no longer pay Indian taxes?
Needless to say, I don't see this as a "great flaw" at all! It is just a minor problem (see below) that can be fixed easily, if only we apply our minds to it. Let me outline some of my ideas for addressing this "flaw".
India has tax treaties with many countries, and it should be easy to add a clause that mandates subjecting Indian immigrants to a small additional tax in the host country, which can send the extra money thus collected to India. Another way would be to allow the beneficiary to shift his/her loan burden (or tax burden) onto someone else. Yet another (rather blunt and unpleasant) way is to make the beneficiary repay his loan before emigrating.
In any event, the number of people leaving Indian shores is small, and with all kinds of great opportunities opening up right here in India, this number is only going to stay small. But the problem of subsidies for higher education -- with nearly 10 million students pursuing it -- is still a major and live issue. I wrote that post to address the larger issue of enabling access to higher education for a lot of people, without the government taking on all the burden.
As I see it, the problem posed by those who wish to leave India is really about the loss of talent and skill. Money may be the primary motivator for them, but it is not the main thing for us simply because the numbers are small (and, as I said, are likely to stay small). However, this doesn't mean that we should let them off from their responsibility to repay the country's investment in their education. I have just outlined some of the ways above. You may be able to think of better ways of doing it.
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Thanks to Kaps for the pointer to Tharoor's latest column. He also points out that Tharoor has misspelled my name!
Sometime ago, this Tehelka story quoted me on the 100 dollar laptops (aka OLPC or the Children's Machine XO). Yesterday, I was asked to give my comments on the same topic for an NDTV show, and my soundbites were captured on camera. I have no idea if -- and how much of -- what I said will make it to the show.
So, on NDTV one of these days (and probably on a Sunday), you may see a grumpy man looking sternly into the camera and uttering some serious (but somewhat incoherent) stuff about the 100 dollar laptops.
You have been warned. You don't want to scare your children, do you?
In any event, here's something that I wanted to say, and I have no idea how well I said it (heck, I don't even know if I said all of it!):
There is a technology appropriate for educating young children. It's called school. Not just any old school, but a school with other supporting technologies such as a classroom, a teacher, a blackboard, and yes, a toilet. An unbelievably large fraction of our children don't have access to these basic and essential technologies. We must concentrate on reaching these essential technologies to our children. This should be our priority.
We must not forget that these basic things are like bread. And we are absolutely right to say 'no' when someone comes along and says, "let them eat cake", ... and proceeds to set up a cake shop!
My own comment on an earlier post in this blog led to my views being sought a while ago on the almost-imminent change in the name of this great city of ours. Now, Ken Moritsugu of USA Today has quoted some of what I said in this story:
T.A. Abinandanan, a professor at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore and a transplant from the neighboring state of Tamil Nadu, says such concerns are exaggerated. Besides, he adds, Bangalore has a bad image among Americans whose jobs have been outsourced to India.
"When 'getting Bangalored' has acquired a strong negative connotation," he says, "becoming Bengaluru can only be a good thing for this city."
That concludes yet another episode of My 15 nanoseconds of fame. Not just any old type of fame; we're talkin' International Fame!
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Now, for those 15 nano-persons who are still reading this post, here's what I wrote to Ken:
While I'm not enthused by the name change, I don't have any strong reason to oppose it, nor do I find the opponents' arguments persuasive or convincing. So, I guess I 'm with the supporters of the name change !
Sure, the name change is a result of our politicians' desire to gain some short term advantage by claiming to take the city to its (linguistic) roots. However, if it makes the Kannada-speaking people happy without affecting the others -- like me -- much, we can't complain, can we?
Some people see grave dangers (to the city's identity, brand image, etc), but such concerns appear to me to be exaggerated. Quite a few cities in India have gone through such changes without a hitch (and in spite of similar warnings of similarly grave dangers): Mumbai, Kolkata, Chennai (where I grew up), Thiruvananthapuram .... I'm sure Bangalore's new name will become the norm within a short time.
I also see another small positive in the name change: when 'getting Bangalored' has acquired a strong negative connotation, becoming Bengaluru can only be a good thing for this city!
My blog, 'Nanopolitan', has a mix of long opinion pieces and short posts containing one or two links accompanied by brief comments. While it covers many different topics, it has a recurring theme: India's higher education system. Just how popular is my blog? Well, it attracts about 100-300 visitors every day (while the top Indian blogs get daily visitors in the range of 1000 to 10,000). Not a bad record for a blog which has very little to offer in politics, movies or sports.
What have I gained from my blogging experience? First and foremost, several tens of regular readers. All said and done, a blog is a medium of communication, and this medium is worthless if there were no readers. My blog's regular readers (together with their thoughtful comments on my posts) are the biggest return on my time investment. Thanks to blogging, I have also come to know -- and regard as friends -- quite a few people that I have yet to meet. Remember the articles you used to read in newspapers about pen friends? Well, I never had pen friends, but I now have quite a few 'blog friends'. And, of course, I get a minor thrill every time I see my blog featured in the top two or three pages on web searches (you might want to try googling 'cost of IIT education' or '100 dollar laptop').
The Indian community of bloggers is large and growing. It has created several mechanisms through which new and noteworthy blogs can be discovered. The first is the Bharateeya Blog Mela in which, every week, a volunteer aggregates interesting posts of the week with commentary and links. The second is DesiPundit, a group blog devoted to performing the same role as Bharateeya Blog Mela, but on a 24/7 basis. Yet another initiative is the annual Indibloggies awards, given to most popular sites in various categories.
While the Indian blog community is large, many large holes remain in its coverage. For example, it lacks professional economists with experience in government and policy-making. In fact, it lacks professionals in many fields such as sociology, psychology, political science, and philosophy. Even in fields that have some representation (information technology, management, advertising, journalism, literary criticism), there is space for a lot more than we currently have.
So, here's the take-home message: If you have something interesting to say, don't just say it to your family and friends. Blog it. There's a whole world out there that could benefit from your incisive and insightful perspectives and expressive power.
Prof. Sadagopan, the Director of IIIT-Bangalore, has one. Prof. Swami Manohar, one of the creators of Simputer, started one recently. And, guess what? I have one, too! I mean, a blog. That's the reason why I, a materials scientist, am here addressing you in an article on blogs.
To me, a blog is a personalized medium of communication, carrying your voice to the rest of the world through the Web. It allows you to take part in conversations on topics that interest you. It's easy to set up, and all blogging platforms support unicode, so you can write in any of the Indian languages. Blogs, together with associated technologies -- blog search, trackbacks and RSS feeds -- form a friendly ecosystem that sustains and supports bloggers, allowing them to find out, quickly and effortlessly, who is saying what, particularly about themselves!
As a CSI member, you probably know a lot more about these technologies than I could ever learn; explaining them to you, therefore, is a lot like describing to Rahul Dravid about a nifty defensive stroke I learned. So, let me focus instead on the multi-dimensional splendour of blogs using a set of metaphors, and conclude with a few observations about my blogging journey so far, and about the state of Indian blogdom.
Blogs as op-ed opinion pieces
Due to the very nature of newspapers' editorial pages, the opportunity to be featured in them is restricted to a few experts; there are only so many opinion columns in a year, but there are a billion of us! Blogs have had a great democratizing effect in making this opportunity available to everyone. They liberate 'the rest of us' from the 'tyranny of the few'! In addition, the blog format does offer some great advantages. First, there are no deadlines; you write whenever you find time and inspiration. Second, there is no editor to prune your insightful, 2000-word opus into the standard 800 word format. Third, you are also liberated from the tyranny of fixed size; your posts may range from a couple of paragraphs to long articles that have several argument threads.
Blogs as back-up brains
When we come across an interesting article on the web, many of us simply bookmark them (either on our browser or on social bookmarking sites such as del.icio.us. Blogs can be used to park such links, together with some of your immediate thoughts, opinions and questions. This private use can also serve a public purpose: your readers benefit from your good judgement: they get to read interesting articles you choose to link!
Blogs as newsletters
As members of CSI, a professional society, you receive a copy of this magazine. Imagine receiving the magazine, not as a hard copy or through an e-mail, but as a blog; not as a set of articles packaged in monthly issues, but as a series of blog posts, written as and when a good article comes along. With comments enabled, such a blog can work wonders in building a community. Well, CSI may not be doing it, but several others are. Slashdot is one such community-led discussion forum for techies, and its Indian equivalent, SlashIndia, has been up and running for a month or so.
This newsletter approach also works well for those who are interested in specific causes. Thus, we have blogs focusing on combating social ills such as eve teasing and ragging. NGO's such as Project Why, use blogs to disseminate important information to its members as well as to the public. In the area of e-governance, Mr. B. Dayananda, the Superintendent of Poice of the Dakshina Kannada district in Karnataka uses a blog to disseminate press-releases issued by his office.
Blogs as teaching tools
Many instructors use their blogs as a bulletin board for their courses. These blogs host reading materials, home assignments and exams, and forums where students can post questions and discuss them. In some courses (particularly in social sciences), students are required to write their own (group) blogs. Again, advantages are many: blogs are easy to set up, discussions are publicly available to everyone in the course, student interactions need not be confined to class hours. It's a win-win for everyone!
Blogs as coordination centers
The enormity of the disaster unleashed by the tsunami of 26 December 2004 demanded relief efforts at many levels. While the government and the mainstream media played their role in the relief efforts, a group of volunteer-bloggers also contributed to them through a collective blog: the South East Asian Earthquake and Tsunami blog (with an apt acronym 'SEA-EAT'), which acted as a coordination center for "news and information about resources, aid, donations and volunteer efforts". This model, which combines voluntarism and citizen journalism, has been replicated during several other subsequent natural disasters including the extraordinary downpour in Mumbai in July 2005 and Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. Such a model can easily be adapted to coordinating large projects involving many people, with blogs serving as public bulletin boards and discussion forums.
Blogs as news organizations
In principle, a blogger can be a journalist, gathering (and sometimes, investigating) and disseminating news through his/her blog. In this enterprise, he/she may also take help from the readers, who can be asked to pursue specific leads while investigating a larger story. Several such blogs have already sprung up in the US (such as Talking Points Memo), and it's only a matter of time before we see them in India.
When blogs perform so many different functions, it always amazes and irritates me when an ill-informed journalist describes blogs as just 'personal diaries'!
Blogging is the cover feature in the latest issue of CSI Communications, the monthly newsletter of the Computer Society of India, which claims that it is "the largest and most professionally managed association of and for IT professionals in India". I contributed a piece to this cover feature, which was published in the section on "sample opinions of bloggers", together wtih those by Kartik Kannan and Kishore.
Since CSI Communications is not available online [strange, isn't it?], I will reproduce my piece in three parts which are thematically different. The first part explores some metalphors for blogs: blogs as opinion pieces, blogs as backup brains, etc. In the second part, I hold forth on the state of Indian blogosphere, and in the third, I ruminate a bit about my own blogging journey.
The cover feature itslef has several fine articles:
