Ban the Blackboard

Blackboards may soon be history in Kerala schools

Looks like Kerala's schoolchildren will no longer have to stare at a blackboard. A PTI report, which appeared in The Hindu, talks of an experiment by Bhartiya Vidya Bhavan in Kozhikode to replace the traditional blackboards with digital boards.

The Bhavan is implementing what it calls the 'smart class' technology in all its three schools in the district in a bid to make education more interesting and also to enable the teachers to dedicate more time for teaching.

Bhavan's Kozhikode Kendra has entered into a five-year contract with Educomp Solutions, which provides a variety of digital teaching aids, including graphics and working models that promises to herald a new era in the field of education.

"We first introduced the technology in our schools in Kochi last year and the overwhelming response from the parents to the scheme has prompted us to bring it to Kozhikode now," Bhavan's Kendra Secretary, Col (retd) M P Gopinath was quoted in the report. According to him, parents feel that the system has helped to better the overall education process in the schools. "Apart from improving the effectiveness of teaching, the technology is also expected to boost the performance of the students," says the Bhavan's principal Lalitha Nair.

The system is so designed that a single server will cater to plasma television sets in all the class rooms which the teachers can operate with a remote from any corner of the room. Besides graphics, animation and video clippings, diagrams and 3D images will also be processed by the server to make available all information as sought in the syllabus.

Read the full report at

http://www.hindu.com/thehindu/holnus/004200806141222.htm

Drop everything and read

Kerala can lay proud claim to being India's First State, as far as the fine art of reading is concerned. Naturally, therefore, observation of June 19 as Reading Day and the entire week as Reading Week was in keeping with the State's longstanding tradition of reverence for the written word.

The P.N.Panicker Foundation, in association with the State Government, Education Department and Public Relations Department, decided to observe June 19, the 9th death anniversary of P.N. Panicker, as `Reading Day'.

Panicker was the driving spirit behind Kerala's Adult and Non-formal Education activities, which began in organised manner with the setting up of Kerala Grandha Sala Sangham in 1945 with 47 rural libraries.

Panicker was able to bring 6,000 libraries into this network, transforming the libraries into community centres that were soon abuzz with impassioned discussions, seminars and symposia, all accessible to the public.

Fittingly enough, the Central Government decided to issue the P.N. Panicker commemoration stamp on the occasion of Reading Day.

Continuing the initiative, the current week - from June 19 to 25 - will be observed as `Reading Week' in the State, with special school assemblies to promote the reading habit among children.

Reading Clubs and P.N. Panicker Corners will be formed in the schools. There will also be exhibitions of books during the week.

It is heart-warming that Kerala is taking some pains in this direction, for, all over the world, respect and adulation for reading and the written word is under increasing threat, as critics of television soap operas and matinee cinemas never tire of reminding us. Closer home, witness the near-anaesthetic grip of prime-time soaps on Malayalam television channels.

Worldwide, initiatives are under way to stem the rot. In Malaysia, for instance, property developer Island and Peninsular Berhad (I&P) has come out with an exciting way to help students make reading an indispensable part of life. The company recently donated 300 books worth 8,000 Malaysian ringgitts (approx. Rs 92,000) to a secondary school in Selangor, for excelling in its campaign, DEAR (Drop Everything and Read).

I&P Corporate Communications Manager Izan Hussain told a Malaysian newspaper that the three-month-long campaign was aimed at helping to improve the standard of English among pupils by encouraging them to read.

"Our primary objective of starting the DEAR campaign was mainly to address the lack of interest in reading amongst the young. This vacuum in reading comes from the perception that there are more interesting electronic media such as the Internet and television," Hussain added.

Catching them young was also the motive behind Unesco's General Conference establishing, in 1995, April 23 as World

Book and Copyright Day. Each year, Unesco organises a string of events encouraging everyone, particularly young people, to discover the joy of reading.

Since 1948, Unesco has carried out an ambitious programme to translate and publish more than 1,000 representative works from the widest range of cultures. R.E. Asher's celebrated 1980 translation of Vaikom Muhammed Basheer's Me Grandad 'ad an Elephant was part of the Unesco collection.

Unesco is also backing regional co-publication programmes in Africa and the Asia-Pacific region, with an emphasis on books for children, women and those who have only recently acquired reading skills.

"Books and reading are as important today as ever," according to Milagros del Corral, director of Unesco's Division of Creativity, Cultural Industries and Copyright. "Reading means establishing an interactive dialogue with the virtual universe created by the author of a text - a universe of intellectual representations that differ according to the imagination of each reader," she said.

Ms del Corral - who is also in charge of Unesco's Publications - highlighted persistent inequalities in reading: "There are books on all subjects, for all public and for all times. But we must make sure that books be accessible to everybody everywhere."

That is the challenge ahead - more books for more people, more easily available.

Open learning

The recent move by the Indian Institute of Information Technology and Management-Kerala to ‘open’ up its courses is welcome, but much more can be done.

Late last year, around November 2007, as part of its move to promote quality education, the State-owned Indian Institute of Information Technology and Management-Kerala (IIITM-K), based in Technopark, Thiruvananthapuram, announced that it would soon offer its classroom courses in the “open mode”.

What this means is that the institute’s courses will now be available to a wider range of professionals, especially from the information technology (IT) field. IIITM-K believes that the opening up of its courses to IT professionals and the academia is “an important and logical extension of the Institute’s commitment to promote technology-enhanced education in the State.”

IIITM-K was established by the Government of Kerala in 2001 with the stated goal of advancing the state of the art in IT and its applications in science, industry and society through research, projects and teaching. The present move to extend its academic reach is part of that goal.

The courses will be taught by IIITM-K’s faculty, who hold doctorates from universities in India, the US and Canada. The Institute claims its faculty have over 200 scientific publications in national and international journals.

Their work spans a wide range of fields in Science, Engineering and Management, including Theoretical and Applied Computer Science, Software Engineering, Computational Sciences, Control Systems, Geo-informatics, Grid Computing, e-Governance and Rural Enterprise Management.

These are the subject areas to be covered in this year’s offering for professionals pursuing their career in and around Technopark, where they can spare a few hours every week to upgrade their knowledge and skills.

The idea is to offer a semi-flexible package, with rigorous instructional delivery combined with a degree of flexible timing, so that they can earn adequate number of credits through different courses, complete relevant project or term paper work and obtain IITM-K’s post-graduate diploma in information technology (PGDIT).

The institute is also upgrading its present PGDIT to a full-time M Tech programme. With Technopark’s working population of 15,000 set to grow further, the new open PGDIT programme is expected to help a number of IT professionals advance their capabilities.

While the idea of extending its courses to a larger population is commendable, what IIITM-K is offering is not truly “open” in the sense of the path-breaking OpenCourseWare (OCW) offered by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the US.

OCW is a free publication of course materialsused at MIT, which allows anyone with an Internet connection to get lecture notes, problem sets, labs and more, watch lecture videos and demonstrations, and study a wide variety of subjects. However, OCW is not an MIT education. It does not grant degrees or certificates, nor does it provide access to MIT faculty, and the materials offered online may not reflect the entire content of the course.

According to MIT, the OCW is an idea – and an ideal – developed, supported, and embraced by the MIT faculty, who share the Institute’s mission to advance knowledge and educate students in science, technology, and other areas of scholarship to best serve the world.

In 1999 the Faculty considered how to take best advantage of the Internet to advance education, and in 2000 proposed OCW.

In 2001 OCW was announced in The New York Times. In 2007 the OCW Web site traffic set a new monthly record of over 2 million visits. Publication of virtually all MIT courses has been completed, and next year will see the transition to “steady state” of 200 new and updated courses per year.

Now other institutions are working with MIT to create their own OCWs, and the first mirror site has been established in Africa. Importantly, OCW puts out all content under the Creative Commons licence.

The Creative Commons is a non-profit organisation devoted to expanding the range of creative work available for others legally to build upon and share. The organisation has released several copyright licenses known as Creative Commons licences, which, depending on the one chosen, restrict only certain rights (or none) of the work.

The Creative Commons licences enable copyright holders to grant some or all of their rights to the public while retaining others through a variety of licensing and contract schemes, including dedication to the public domain or open content licensing terms.

The intention is to avoid the problems current copyright laws create for the sharing of information. A Creative Commons license is based on copyright and applies to all works that are protected by copyright law, like books, Web sites, blogs, photographs, films, videos, songs and other audio and visual recordings.

Creative Commons licenses give the owners the ability to dictate how others may exercise their copyright rights – such as the right of others to copy your work, make derivative works or adaptations of your work, to distribute your work and/or make money from your work. They do not give you the ability to restrict anything that is otherwise permitted by exceptions or limitations to copyright, including, importantly, fair use or fair dealing.

These are the sort of options that institutions of higher learning like the IITM-K ought to be exploring as they seek to “open” up their portals of knowledge.