Internet+Education

Today education exists in a wide spectrum of quality and effectiveness.

For e.g. My own country India. It produces amongst the highest number of graduates (especially engineers) in the world while simultaneously suffering from the problem of low quality primary education.

India and a lot of other countries still have an ancient university system with outdated curricula and a poor research focus, while at the same time we see the emergence of internet based education models with courses on cutting edge topics via websites like Coursera and Udacity.

The internet has the capability to transform everything it touches, be it the way we shop, the way we communicate or listen to music; education should not and will not be an exception.

As internet based learning emerges, it is important to carry forward the good features of the traditional learning model and re-invent the rest. The above mentioned sites still seem like online classrooms, this is the right time to change the way we go about educating ourselves.

So, what can we do to make learning a truly 21st century experience?

Adaptive learning:Finland already does this for its physical classrooms! Not everyone learns at the same rate nor is everyone equally proficient at every thing. Similarly in a professional context, an employed person looking to expand his skills shouldn’t have to go through the same learning process as an undergrad trying to gain the same knowledge. Hence it important to manually or algorithmically tailor course content to the learner and measure you only against your own capabilities.

Modular learning: Divide and conquer, nobody loves classroom monologues anyway. Coursera is already doing this pretty well by keeping lecture length at around the 10 minute mark and fitting in just one concept per lecture. This also helps when you want to come back and revise just one aspect of a particular subject.

Focus on skills/Kill the degree: One big problem with traditional education is that the final outcome (and consequently the thing we focus on) is that piece of paper called the degree. Now is the perfect time to kill the degree and focus on what education is really about — understanding/skills. Eg: Instead of resulting in an abstract outcome of “Completed course on Computer Science”, you should come out with accomplishments like “Ninja in C++”,”Good with Web programming”,”Barely there with Complexity Theory”. Your grades can also do this but they’re not third-party verifiable. The OpenBadgeseffort is probably a first crack at this problem. Also, producing skilled people was the reason a lot of colleges were created in the first place!

Focus on projects/Kill the exams: Everyone agrees that standard exams are not good at measuring anything except the ability to take exams! How would you test me if I claim to be a good carpenter? Well, you’d throw me some wood and ask me to make a chair. Unfortunately,we make everyone from the astronomer gazing into the cosmos to the microbiologist peering into your cells, come to a classroom and condense all they know onto pieces of paper within a short timeframe. Instead we should develop learning in such a way, that the process is indistinguishable from the outcome; projects are the perfect way to do this.

Theory is your problem/Practicals are ours: This point is an amalgamation of the previous two. However much we improve the content or delivery of educational material, it will still be theory and there’s no fun nor use of it till you get your hands dirty, instead education should be about doing. This approach, now getting popularized as the inverted classroom is perfect for the internet based learning model. Why would you waste time lecturing up someone about a topic, when that information is readily available to him. Instead, any interaction with teachers should be about the hard parts of education i.e. actually applying what you’ve learnt. Also, internet based education tools need to link themselves with labs to make learning more tangible.

Collaborative learning: The internet has revolutionized communication, it should be able to do the same for communication within the classroom. Like an extended version of pair programming, we should learn collaboratively so that can skills and best practices spread faster. “The best way to learn is to teach someone”, by learning together we both teach and learn at the same time.

Hoping for a transformation.

Welcome to the Internet of things

Monica Rogati, a data scientist from LinkedIn joined Jawbone (popular for making the Jawbone UP device which tracks your movement).

Techcrunch says:

“Jawbone has made a key hire that shows some of the direction the company is headed towards when it comes to the quantified self and wearables development."

To me this shows the general direction in which this company as well as the world of electronics is moving in.

Tha Jawbone UP device by itself is merely a sensor, something which is by definition dumb. The power of this device comes from the what it senses i.e. the information it gives us.

Sensors gives us data not information

Say you wanted to track your running.

Scenario (1): Use an app like RunKeeper, it takes data from your GPS-enabled phone, measures distances, estimates calories burnt and gives you nice graphs of how you’re doing.

Scenario (2): Instead of running with your GPS-enabled phone and have an app track you, just remember a rough version of your route, use a map to get distance run and plot all those lovely graphs yourself.

The difference between (1) and (2) is that there’s not much of a difference, except that (2) is just more painful to do.

(1) and (2) are same as long as you don’t convert your data into information.

Enter the connected universe

The fun with scenario (2) is that the data you’ve created is now available for you to easily share with who ever you want,it is highly accurate and can be analysed easily.

Instead of just sitting there with you it can now be sliced and diced to produce insights: maybe you’re most likely to break your running streak on the third day, may be you run better in the mornings, all of this information is unlocked once once analytical intelligence is applied to the data you’ve generated. And you don’t have do this slicing and dicing yourself - there are tons of services and people ready to do it for you.

What’s my point? I’m trying to say that the device itself is nearly pointless — it is something that creates data, what really matters is who or what can take that data and convert it to information.

It is a natural trend that more and more devices are going to be connected and join a network.But unless we’re using these connections meaningfully, we’re going to end up having fridges with Twitter.

This state of all objects in your life being connected to each other is referred to as the internet of things. But the important part to remember in the internet of things revolution is that the things don’t matter, what matters is the information they can give you.

Information is the oil of the 21st century, and analytics is the combustion engine — Peter Sondergaard, Senior VP at Gartner

A relevant Facebook

Finally saw an article that takes a balanced viewpoint about the value facebook delivers.

Top complaint heard as a facebooker :”Oh! I barely see any relevant updates nowadays”

Truth: Your facebook feed will be as relevant as you make it to be.

Facebook today serves as not just a social network connecting you to friends and family but more as a contact list of every kind of connection you can imagine: alumni, friends, family, people you meet on roadtrips, Eminem and I fucking love science, they’re all here and vying for your attention in feed.

Facebook delivers a great experience provided you help us help you.

Quoting the article here again:

“My newsfeed is almost all signal. This is, in part, because I am ruthless.
If you’re a high school friend I friended just to be nice, I hide.

I hide unhesitatingly.

I hide remorselessly.

Hiding is your super power”

To add to that, hiding and the Acquaintances list.

If you don’t know what lists are, use this link to get started and organize your friends: https://www.facebook.com/friends/organize

Further than that if you’re really sure you don’t want even a single update from a person or page you’re connected to, just go down to their profile and uncheck ‘Show in news feed’

If you still want an analogy, think of these efforts as setting up filters, unsubscribing and marking as spam in Gmail. I actively unsubscribe from spammy mailing lists in gmail as soon as i get an irrelevant mail, if that fails, i create filters to block spammy sites. Because of this, my inbox has is a low volume, high signal area where the mails are absolutely relevant to me. This is the exact same approach i use for my facebook newsfeed.

Hope this helps.

Bye!

Shall be officially switching to Tumblr because of a host of reasons.
See you there

The Whatsapp payment model

If you haven't read it already, go right now and read Whatsapps blog post about why they don't sell ads.

If you dont know, Whatsapp is mobile only messaging service that works on data enabled phones. You can think of it as SMS over data. Of course, the service also offers the whole shebang of data enabled transactions like sharing images, contacts, etc. Alongside it also has a rudimentary version of a user profile including an updateable status.

And that's all folks. 

Whatsapp is a focused app that promises to do only one thing, allow you to comfortably have conversations with whoever you like. Whatsapp doesn't aspire to be a social network or feed based product. They just promise a simple, easy to use chat product and in return ask you to pay for it after using it freely for 7 months.

But why should you pay? Why pay when there are other services out there providing you the same functionality for absolutely free. Because Whatsapp makes a promise; the promise that it is exactly what it says it is, a simple messaging service and nothing else. They're charging you for exactly what they should i.e. providing a messaging service. They don't want your data to run better ads, run sentiment analysis or to spot what's trending. They don't give a shit. They don't want to forcefully monetize and make you indirectly pay for the service, instead they're upfront about what they will and will not do. You want a simple service, they'll build it but since the servers aren't free you're going to have to pay for them; it's a simple, no bullshit deal with no strings attached.

And this is exactly why i love it and it'll probably be the first software i pay for.

A lot of services think about monetization as an after thought which is a terrible thing to do; if people are using your service for free, whats stops them from switching to a competitor (actually nothing stops them even if they're but the likelihood to jump ship is lower for the former), it's almost an indication of not so great inherent value. Business should be about exchanging one valuable good for another in a clear well understood manner, it shouldn't be about suddenly waking one day to discover that you need to make money and then making efforts to monetize your users, monetization should come naturally where people know exactly what they've signed up for and are willing to pay for the value they derive from the service.

As the world embraces digital, it's time for digital to embrace some things the offline world is good at, getting people to pay for the stuff they want.

Bye Google reader

In what was a shock to many, Google decided to discontinue it much loved RSS reader product called Google Reader citing declining usage. This assertion though probably true doesn’t really paint the complete picture of why google may have scrapped the product.

RSS feeds grew in popularity along with the internet and were the primary medium of news distribution for a long time, though they were mostly used by power users. This phenomenon is something we can call the stream based distribution model where people subscribe to a source and receive all updates from it. Later on with the explosion of the internet and the rise of social media, we saw the rise of the newsfeed distribution model where people are subscribed/connected to a large number of publishing sources but receive only the updates that are deemed relevant. Slowly we’re entering a phase where who or what you are connected also is mapped out based on relevance, which basically means we’re replacing the part where we chose our sources and instead these are chosen for us automatically (Eg: Prismatic)

All this may make Google Reader seem like an antiquated and boring old RSS client; which it was! But the thing about RSS that makes it seem like a weakling: the fact that you get each and every update is in fact exactly what users want. Because users do not want what algorithms think is relevant to them but rather prefer to see what they deem is relevant to them.

So usually when you subscribe to someone RSS feed, you’re not just lending them a listening ear but almost giving then complete and undivided attention. Sadly however, this is not how most users of the internet function. They aren’t trawling the internet looking for awesome sources to subscribe to. Twitter has largely replaced the follow graph that was the bastion of RSS because it is simpler to use and understand. RSS has been relinquished to the realm of geeks and power users who however love the way it works because they take the trouble to filter, sort and classify their sources.

So what I’ve discussed above is the declining popularity of RSS as a follow graph on the internet due to the emergence of more lightweight and more social mediums.

But there’s probably another good reason why google shut down reader: Google+

Among the first things a human being does when he gets on to the internet is get an email. This is an area where Gmail has won the battle; they didn’t reinvent email but engineered the fuck out of it and fought spam like it was nobody’s business. The result was a super fast email product with tons of storage space and also a ton of benefits from other connected Google services like Gtalk. Now enter Google+, another attempt at enable social networking after Buzz and Wave. Google+ is apparently growing really quickly but what could be a really nice boost to the this network would be to provide a combined social and interest graph in one go with Google+.  You can easily imagine the product guys at Google thinking of : 'User meets internet, user gets email (gmail), user wants to hear/read about stuff on the internet, nag user about G+, profit' as nice growth sequence.

Whatever the reasons were, bye Google Reader we'll miss you.

Using the ThinkPad

Trying to put my old ThinkPad R51 to some good use, first and obvious thought, convert it to a server.
Used this really nice tutorial to get a LAMP stack up and running on my Linux Mint box in a couple of minutes.
Final goal is to setup a personal media cloud using either ownCloud or Subsonic or both.

Meta - Post

Writing is something i love doing and also a way for me to put down my thoughts and ideas in a concrete manner. Ideas floating around in your head do not have a concrete shape or structure but once you try to put down your thoughts and make them communicable, you are forced to think logically and reduce ideas to their essence which is good for both yourself and others as your ideas become easier to grasp and communicate.

A quick glance at the archives panel below will tell you that 2012 has been my least prolific year as far writing blog posts goes. Shockingly this comes after my most prolific year which was 2011! (in general the amount i wrote has been growing year on year).

This is sad trend but with an obvious cause; a job! I have important things to do and duties to fulfill but nevertheless, writing (and the structured thinking that precedes it) is something i shouldn't neglect.

So thats it, 2 posts a month guaranteed going forward.
Posts about newer realms of knowledge that i'm coming into contact with shall flow in soon.