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Two Beautiful TED Talks on Education

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Sugata Mitra: Build a School in the Cloud Sir Ken Robinson: Do Schools Kill Creativity?

Do you need Push or Freedom?

There are two types of people Who work only when there is a lot of pressure on them. They need to be pushed through deadline, appraisal, assessment, training etc. Who are self motivated. They work better if they have freedom. We can belong to any of the above categories. Actually, we belong to both depending upon the task. Let us take the example of Virat Kohli, He might need a push in bowling. Does he need any push in batting? obviously not. In my opinion, if he is pushed for batting, his performance might decrease. In other words, he needs freedom in batting. In General, the freedom could be in setting your deadline, choosing the style of working , identifying the set of tasks to reach the goal  etc. Do you need full freedom? No! If given full freedom you might not perform at all.Let me take my own example, In semester vacations, my productivity is lower than normal semester days.I generally start my vacation with full enthusiasm with some ambitious goals.For first fe...

MOOCs for All?

I think there is need of MOOCs for all the levels of education (Primary,Secondary, Senior Secondary, Higher Education) in different educational medium(Hindi, English, Tamil , Telugu, Gujarati etc). The main advantage of MOOCs is its accessibility, thus it can help us in addressing the problems related to Quantity. Refer my old blog-post for categorization of problems in education. It can also cater to the Quality of education provided that MOOCs are created by top schools. one such example is NPTEL, where professors from IITs, IISc and other premier institute contribute for quality MOOCs. NPTEL is focused only to Engineering courses.There is need of developing such MOOCs in social sciences and humanities also. In my opinion, we can develop MOOCs for K-12 education as well. Schools across India differ in terms of quality, pedagogies and curriculum. We can ask top schools of India such as DPS,Chinmaya vidyalaya, Kendriya vidyalaya etc to come up with MOOCs. In this way, we will be able ...

The race

Let me describe one common scenario "The race". Two persons A and B are running on parallel and straight tracks in a 5 day race. A person is considered as successful at any stage if he is ahead of other. A started with a point 200 km ahead of the point from which B had started. In other words, A had head start of 200 Km. A travelled with 20km/h and B travelled with 15 km/h for first day. Next day, A travelled with 20km/h and B increased its speed to 20km/h. On the third day, B further increased its speed to 25km/h while A travelled at same speed 20km/hr. Who is ahead at the end of 3rd day? Obviously A is ahead by 2000km as he was already having a head-start of 2000km. even though B has outperformed A on day 3, he hasn't won the game. Wait! Game is not yet over. However, B can take two decisions at this stage: a) Even though he is trying harder than A, he is still behind A and hence he should give up. b) He should give tougher fight to win as he has travelled more ...