There was a long discussion on why Math is hard (for some people) in this talk on Thinking. It was a fascinating discussion. Some notes and quotes. Why do some children find Math hard to learn? I suspect that this is often caused by starting with the practice and drill of a bunch of skills… [Read more…]
January 22, 2012
Education hasn’t kept up with development in Big Data according to Deng. “We are facing a huge deficit in people to not only handle big data, but more importantly to have the knowledge and skills to generate value from data — dealing with the non-stop tsunami. How do you aggregate and filter data, how do… [Read more…]
December 28, 2011
On A Professional Programmer by Philip Greenspun (mostly written in 2004 but still true today) A professional programmer ought to be able to pick worthwhile problems to attack. Engineering is the art of building cost-effective solutions to problems that society regards as significant. A person who blindly does what he or she is told, without independently… [Read more…]
March 8, 2011
I found this quote while reading Exploring the State of Education Now. “in 1920 being illiterate meant not being able to read or write. In 2010 being illiterate means not knowing how to surf the net.” That got me thinking. Going beyond literacy, what are some of the new basic skills you need? So here… [Read more…]
September 13, 2010
This is brilliant. May be worth experimenting in a few classes especially since we are trying “project based learning”. Will it work for all subjects? instead of lecturing about polynomials and exponents during class time – and then giving his young charges 30 problems to work on at home – Fisch has flipped the sequence.… [Read more…]
August 9, 2010
I don’t really want my fictional characters to sing and dance while I am reading a novel. Having said that, I would love some animations in Science Fiction books. I would love to see some animations in technical books. Imagine that you are reading a chapter on a four stroke engine. Won’t it be nice,… [Read more…]
November 17, 2009
This post was triggered by an email I received for papers for a conference. One of the suggested topics was Intelligent Tutoring Systems. Here is what Wikipedia says about ITS: An intelligent tutoring system (ITS) is any computer system that provides direct customized instruction or feedback to students, i.e. without the intervention of human beings,… [Read more…]
November 13, 2009
I wrote this down a while ago when I heard a bunch of students complain how bad some of their teachers were. We were discussing how to tag teachers with a set of attributes. I came back home and drew a mind map. A Twitter exchange with a friend reminded me of this list. So… [Read more…]
November 10, 2009
In addition to teaching core engineering subjects, I think we need to add three (may be optional) courses. 1. Entrepreneurship 2. Learning and Thinking 3. Innovation The idea is to give students an appreciation of what entrepreneurship is all about. Students joining smaller start-ups learn every thing faster in the first few years (though may… [Read more…]
November 1, 2009
This is a great presentation. I can see this as a fun project for students to learn, enhance and retain their learning and even help other students learn better. Check out various ideas.
February 11, 2012
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