Google Earth and elementary school

There was a time and age when children required to be taught what to do. In this age of technology advancement, children learn to adapt to technology very quickly. I want to specifically talk about Google Earth and how it seems to have mesmerized my son. Yesterday I saw him climb Mount Everest and wonder why it was so difficult to clim down again from it. The other day I saw him trying to find out Eurasia. I think it wonderful that the advances in technology help students discover science and their spatial ability in a nice way.

The Power of Introverts (QUIET) By Susan Carr

Recently I attended the North- East Consortium's E-Learning Conference at Temple University in Philadelphia. At this Conference Lynda from the famous Lynda.com told us about this book called Quiet the Power of Introverts. Susan Carr in her TED talks speaks at length about how the titles Introvert and Extrovert do not make any sense in this day and age. She explains that people sometimes fall in between the spectrum of Introvert and Extrovert.  The best part of her TED talks was when she was nine years old and in a summer camp with a bag full of books and she thought that summer camp would not involve only reading. I think the power of quiet and introspection were very well explained in her talk.

Blendkit 2012 Reflection

Over the past two Monday's I have been attending the BlendKit 2012 Webinar and other activities on blended learning. One of the challenges that I faced in navigating this webinar is that it was completely upto the individual to participate in different kinds of online forums. They say that the "openess" of the web or the online world helps in learning but I think I would have preferred a little bit of structure. Structure especially in terms of how much can participants participate and in what kind of online forums, discussions, feedback, blueprint or blog. However, I must say that it was also extremely exciting to get to see so many features and different ways of reaching an audience. I would say Blendkit 2012 was a great example of a web 2.0 endevor. It allowed participants enrolled for professional development to not be consumers but people who can create in their own ways.

Instructional Design: Online Learning Thoughts and Reflections

I just watched the TED talks version of the new MOOC concept. I also was at a recent Distance Education meeting where a presenter was piloting a MOOC class for would-be lawyers which could then be tailored to other professions.

The idea that education can be everyone's right was fascinating. I think as I begin teaching another class sometime soon I would like to get my students to have a completely open forum.

Dinnertime conversation or Dinnertime and conversation?

What is it with men and women and how they define dinner? Ask any sane man, (I know a few) and they cringe at the thought of discussing anything during dinnertime. Ask any sane woman and you get a different perspective on the whole issue. Sometimes I wonder where the men would be without distractions such as the television, Internet, MP3, etc. etc., especially during times when they want to escape conversations.

Generally a man defines dinner as stuffing his face and filling his stomach with whatever is cooked, while flipping channels on the television. Ask a woman and she will tell you that dinner-time is the most important time of the day. It is the time of the day to catch up on what happened during the day, narrate it to a good measure and then ask the man about his day. Only to realize most men interpret conversation and dinnertime as separate things. As a result, the woman ends up getting monosyllabic or sometimes no replies from her man (depends on which channels the man is surfing and how much he can distract himself away from it). So, looks like men and women interpret dinnertime very differently.

The Worth of a Human Life

Whenever they talk about death and destruction on a large-scale, like the one caused by the South Asia Tsunami, I think, is that just a statistic or is it human life that is being reported? For some people, who cover news on a daily basis death, destruction, decomposing bodies and other details may after some time become more a matter of statistics. However, this morning, I read a BBC correspondent’s story that prompted me to think that even reporters and news correspondents could think otherwise. The correspondent recounted how he was horrified at the sight of the large-scale destruction in Aceh. He wondered about the lives of people that made the piles of bodies lying by the side of the road in Aceh. In light of the enormity of natural disasters one is forced to contemplate the worth of any human life. And then again in a given lifetime how could any human being make the best of it.

When we were growing up we were taught to do good and told that good would follow. Our scriptures state as much. Well, this in itself is a debatable point. More on that later. Last night I saw this movie called, ‘Groundhog Day’, which mirrors the sentiment that, if you live life virtuously it is worth much more than a lifetime spent selfishly. The main character in this movie, (Bill Murray) repeats the same day, i.e. ‘Groundhog Day’ again and again. Initially he uses the day to satisfy selfish pursuits, however he soon tires of living his life in this way. Finally he realizes he is happiest and most fulfilled when he invests his time helping others and spending it in pursuit of learning something worthwhile. Trapped in Groundhog Day, he aids people, rescues kids, stops a man from choking on a bone, learns to play the piano and to ice-sculpt amongst other things.

At this point it dawns on him that life is more than his cynical vision of a glass half-empty, and then he sees the dawn of a new day. I think that living life virtuosly is a worthy goal to follow.

At the Molecular Level it doesn't really matter

I gravitate towards people naturally, or should I say people gravitate towards me… These are people I share my commute with, friends and acquaintances. Well, it was at the train station that I met Sujata. Sujata is a post doc microbiologist. She and I started chatting under the strangest of circumstances. It was a particularly miserable day as the heavens opened up, and the wind howled in our ears, and the local regional trains ran approximately twenty minutes behind schedule. As we huddled under the near non-existent structure at a university station called a concourse, I happened to open my purse to look for the train ticket when she spied the photograph of Guruvayoorappan in my purse. Instantly her Kerala instinct was roused, and she came to me and asked in Malayalam where I was from; to which I replied, from Mumbai.
She then looked at me pointedly and repeated the question again and so I had to give her the spiel about how I am not a Keralaite, but my hubby is and I think he is from ‘so and so’ place in Kerala. That seemed a more satisfactory explanation to her and she stopped quizzing me on my origin. Well twenty minutes elapsed and yet there was no sign of our trains, so we started talking about this that and the other. I asked her what she does, and she said she is a post doc working in the University's biology lab. So I asked her about her subject, her thoughts on the different species and her views on cloning of the sheep Dolly. She came up with this very profound response… She said, "You know at the molecular level it does not really matter, all organisms including humans are the same." Not being a microbiologist, I found this information strangely disconcerting. Since we are humans for some reason, we think we are unique because we are thinking beings; but ask scientists and they will tell you it does not really matter, that we are all made up of the same basic cell structure, not unlike Dolly - the sheep that was cloned.