Thursday, September 18, 2008

A laptop and love liven up the Footpath University

Bella Jaisinghani | TNN

In this long narrow alley lined with hutments and paan shops, it is tough to identify a proper landmark. The Teach India volunteers ask you to wait at R K Studio at Chembur, and walk ten minutes to fetch you from there.

It is here, in this most nondescript of neighbourhoods, that the campaign is making a mark thanks to the combined effort of partner NGOs and volunteers. The Sondhis are a young couple with a shared interest in social work. Tanvi Sondhi is a 29-year-old human resource professional while her husband Vikram, who is a year older, is a chartered accountant. Both work with the Aditya Birla Group which has given a number of volunteers to Teach India.

For four hours every Saturday, the couple teaches slum children in a little room in an SRA building in Chembur. The semi-formal school is run by the Thane-based REAP Foundation. “Both of us wanted to volunteer with an NGO that works for children and had been calling helplines for names and numbers,’’ says Tanvi. “But the NGOs all requested money. This was something we disagreed with. Most people give money anyway, so we felt this would duplicate resources. We wanted to give of our time to make it more personal.’’

The couple found the right match in Teach India. The Panjrapole centre they have been allotted is a five-minute walk from their house, and the afternoon timing suits them well. Vikram is off on Saturday, but Tanvi is on call and sometimes has to rush all the way to office in Andheri east. “Thankfully, my husband is with me in this, else it would have been tough,’’ she says.

The 20-odd children from impoverished Muslim families live in the nearby colonies of Gautam Nagar, Rajiv Nagar and Bhole Nagar. The few Hindu students have skipped class that day to go pandal-hopping. Most of the children’s mothers work as housemaids or ragpickers while the fathers drive autorickshaws or do odd jobs. The parents dislike formal schools that tie the children to attendance sheets and exams. “Most of the kids have younger siblings whom they look after,’’ says REAP’s regular teacher Jyoti Pawar, who runs these classes in her small apartment. “In fact, few attend class for four hours at a stretch. They have to go home in between to check on the little ones and fill water.’’

Vikram and Tanvi soon learnt that informal was best. “During lessons, the kids break into an impromptu dance or get into a rough and tumble over a perceived slight,’’ says Tanvi, who sometimes packs a treat for the kids, not that she needs to break the ice. “The first time we met them they grilled us in a fulllength interview,’’ she laughs. “They wanted to know who we were and why we were there. But once satisfied, they happily allowed us into their world.’’ Chocolate is a temporary attraction—nothing binds the children like Vikram’s laptop, which they first mistook for a TV. The unruly bunch is absolutely riveted by the moving images of dogs and cats padding across the screen.

“We decide upon a theme the day before class, say the four seasons, or fruits and flowers, and then download study material from the Internet,’’ says Tanvi. “But much of the stuff is typically American or British, so we have to narrow our search to include only those items relevant to India.’’ Now and then Vikram tests their memory by making an animal sound and then asking them to identify the animal—in English. In his haste to be first, the class clown Naushad identifies a “bow-wow’’ as a “c-a-t, cat!’’ and is deeply embarrassed when his friends burst out laughing.

The Sondhis also impart lessons in etiquette. To the kids’ credit, it must be said that they now have the grace to blush when they are caught using swear words. “Shut up!’’ is all the English they knew before. Now “Thank you’’ and “Good afternoon, teacher’’ have softened their vocabulary.

REAP
Reach Education Action Programme is a mass literacy movement run by Fr Trevor Miranda from Thane. The aim is to take education to the doorstep of marginalised people, wherever they may be. The organisation has a network of 350 non-formal education centres in Mumbai and the surrounding areas upto Nashik. Each year the NGO’s Footpath University covers more than 10,000 students. REAP also runs 140 self-help groups for women’s empowerment, a boarding school for tribal girls in Dolkhamb, Shahapur district and nursing and beauty courses for female dropouts.

A NEW BLACKBOARD: Nothing binds the children like Tanvi and Vikram’s laptop, which they first mistook for a TV. They are riveted by the moving images of dogs and cat.

Schoolbuses will soon be must for kids...

Anahita Mukherji I TNN

Mumbai: Here’s a brand new government order that’s set to decongest Mumbai’s chock-a-block roads and simultaneously ensure the safety of children going to school. The state government has formed a committee to formulate a policy that will ensure all children travel by schoolbuses.

While the policy will eventually be implemented across Maharashtra, it will first be tested in Mumbai. The committee—formed after a recent government resolution—is chaired by transport commissioner S S Shinde, and includes officials from the education and traffic department as well as the Maharashtra State Road Transport Corporation. Indrani Malkani, architect of the model schoolbus system implemented in Cathedral and John Connon School, is also a part of the committee.

“I’m glad the model schoolbus system, which I formulated along with the traffic police and Cathedral school authorities, is now being used to solve traffic woes across the city and provide safe transport for children,’’ said Malkani.

“Besides decongesting roads, universalising the schoolbus system will also reduce class differences between students. A student who owns a BMW and one who travels by rickshaw will now sit side-by-side in the schoolbus,’’ said Shinde.

“This system will also encourage wealthy children to use public transport later on in life,’’ added Malkani.

According to Shinde, at least 30% to 40% schools in the city have their own grounds, so schoolbuses can enter the school premises where children can board and alight, enhancing safety.

While children will not be allowed to travel to school in cars, those who live close to the school can walk to and from school; the rest can choose between the school bus and public transport.

“Getting nearly all schoolchildren onto the schoolbus is no easy task. In addition to facing parents unwilling to forgo the comfort of a private vehicle, we will also have to tackle the issue of finding enough buses for the job,’’ said UPS Madan, project manager for the Mumbai Transportation Support Unit, who is one of the members of the committee on schoolbuses. Private bus operators will have to be hired on contract for the schoolbus system.

The committee has considered seeking permission from the BEST to park schoolbuses at BEST stands for the night. “We’re also thinking of providing incentives for private bus operators to run schoolbuses, such as a discount on passenger tax,’’ added Madan.

The use of software to draw up efficient bus routes has also been considered by the committee which is in the process of deciding how many students should travel on one bus, as well as the kind of vehicles that should be used as schoolbuses.

The recent government resolution on schoolbuses also calls for the constitution of a permanent standing committee which will co-ordinate the schoolbus service.
anahita.mukherji@timesgroup.com

IIT-B gets $5 million assistance...

TIMES NEWS NETWORK

Mumbai: The Indian Institute of Technology-Bombay (IIT-B) on Wednesday received a cheque of $ 5 million from Romesh Wadhwani, founder of the Symphony Group, for its six-year-old biosciences school. The announcement about the grant was made at an alumni gathering in the Big Apple. The money will be used to set up the Wadhwani Research Centre in Biosciences and Bioengineering.

The centre, which will be a part of the bio-sciences school, will focus on research in certain types of cancer, fighting bacteria, which will include slowing bacteria division and growth and thus ultimately addressing bacterial diseases like tuberculosis. “Several international institutes that are involved in world-class research in these areas will be a part of the advisory board,’’ said Wadhwani, an electrical engineer from the class of 1969.


With the earmarked area for the school now cleared, construction will soon take off. However, the donation will not be used to create the building. “The endowment will help us establish contacts with leading bio researchers through the Wadhwani Foundation,’’ said Ashok Misra, IIT-B director.

D Panda, head of the bio-sciences school at IIT-B, said that the aid would help the school to invest in high-end research in healthcare such as cell signaling, bio stem cells, telemedicine.

Star Trek goes to school: Desks get touchy-feely

Washington: Scientists at Durham University are developing world’s first interactive classroom, which may result in a ‘Star Trek’ style makeover for schools.

With the researchers’ efforts students will be able to learn in environments using interactive multi-touch desks that look and act like a large version of an Apple iPhone.

Researchers at the Technology-Enhanced Learning Research Group (TEL) at Durham University are designing an interactive classroom solution called ‘SynergyNet’ which aims at achieving active student engagement and learning by sharing, problem-solving and creating.

The team has collaborated with manufacturers and are now designing software, and desks that recognize multiple touches on the desktop, using vision systems that can see infrared light.

The team observed how students and teachers interact in classes and how Information Communications technology could improve collaboration and are developing SynergyNet which will integrate ICT into the classroom.

The ‘multi-touch’ desks will be the central component and the desks will be networked to a main smartboard that will provide new opportunities for teaching and collaboration. At a time, many students will be able to work together at a desk as the desks allow simultaneous screen contact by multiple users using fingers or pens.

A single work-desk can operate as a set of individual work spaces and/or a large screen allowing students to cooperate on a task. The software will be used to link everything together in a fully interactive classroom system of desks and smartboards.

Teachers will be able to instantly display examples of good work by students on the main smart-board; tasks could also be set for each desk. Numeracy tasks could include exercises where pupils have to split a restaurant bill by sliding visual representations of money into a group space.

The scientists wanted to create a ‘natural way’ for students to use computers in class. “Our vision is that every desk in school in 10 years time will be interactive. IT in schools is an exciting prospect — our system is very similar to the type of interface shown as a vision of the future in the TV series Star Trek”, said Liz Burd, director of active learning in computing at Durham University. ANI

BLACKBOARD’S OUT: Students will be able to learn in environments using interactive multi-touch desks

Next Live Earth concert in city

TIMES NEWS NETWORK

Mumbai: The world’s coming to rock India. Former US vice president Al Gore and the organisers of the Live Earth series of music concerts have announced that the next edition of the mega event will be held in Mumbai on December 7 at the Andheri Sports Complex.

Nobel laureate Rajendra Pachauri, director Shekhar Kapur and actor Amitabh Bachchan announced their support for the initiative which uses the power of the world’s celebrity musicians to draw attention to the climate crisis caused by global warming. A record two billion people around the world watched the first series on July 7, 2007. American rocker Jon Bon Jovi will perform at the Mumbai show.

Addressing the international press at a suburban club on Thursday, Live Earth founder Kevin Wall said the proceeds would go to fund R K Pachauri’s Light A Billion Lives project which aims to put a solar lantern in a billion homes.

While Bachchan said he was sufficiently alarmed by Pachauri’s doomsday prediction to speak up for climate conservation, Kapur noted that his favourite rivers and forests in Mussourie had become brown and barren over time. The star moment came when Al Gore hooked up via a video link from the US. Admitting that his own country was perhaps the largest polluter in the world, he cautioned Indians against falling prey to similar trends in consumerism.

“It is undesirable for a country to promote and subsidise dirty fuels like kerosene, paraffin and coal when it could use cheaper and better alternatives like electricity,’’ he said. “India is clearly emerging as a world leader in many ways, and it could show the path to other countries by converting to healthier energy resources.’’

‘Concert aimed at educating Indians’
Mumbai: TERI (The Environment Research Institute) ch i e f and Nobel laureate Raj e n d r a Pachauri will be the Indian face of the Live Earth concert slated to be held in the city on December 7. The Bachchan family will provide the star wattage.

Addressing a press meet in the city on Thursday via a video link from the US, former vice-president and Nobel winner Al Gore said the music concert had a serious motive—educating every Indian consumer about the right to a clean environment and the duty that comes with it.

At this point, some mediapersons asked if the concert itself would not become a source of environmental pollution, as was alleged last year. The organisers sheepishly said they would try their best to avoid such a situation.

Meanwhile, expressing his support for the Indo-US nuclear deal, Pachauri said, “While we are on the subject of modern, non-polluting resources of energy, I must say I consider nuclear energy to be one of the cleanest and best alternatives. There are no side-effects to its use.’’
toireporter@timesgroup.com

ROCK THE WORLD: Madonna at the Live Earth concert in London last year


Al Gore

IITians do a bloody good deed at Mood Indigo

Mumbai: Students queued up in large numbers outside Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay (IIT-B) on Thursday for a blood donation camp as part of the institute’s cultural festival Mood Indigo, which will be held from December 20 to 23.

The festival’s stamp this year is “RETRO: Reborn to Rock’’. Ishank Gupta, core group member of the festival, said, “Through the blood donation campaign, called Khoon Chala, we want to tell the world that the youth is capable of rocking and reaching out to the country. On day one, we had over 450 IITians donating blood.’’

IIT-B has partnered with the state blood transfusion council, Doctors for You and Rotaract District 3140, which will conduct the camp. Donation will be open for IIT students and staff for a week beginning Thursday.

From begging to soccer team...

Ananthakrishnan G | TNN

Thiruvananthapuram: When football selectors announced Kerala’s sub-junior team after a camp in Kottayam on Monday, Raja was jubilant. The 14-year-old knew he had made it to the list, leaving behind days of despair when he had fallen into a begging racket.

Hailing from Salem in Tamil Nadu, Raju first hit the headlines in 2002 as an eightyear-old rescued from the begging mafia in Thrissur. The boy lost his mother very early and his father, a leprosy patient, asked for alms to survive. A young man who came into contact with his father took away Raju and brought him to Kerala where he was thrown into a begging racket. The gang leader was a man called Chinnaswamy who always travelled by car.

“They forced him into begging. His daily target was Rs 50 and if he failed to make the amount, they would beat him up and burn him with cigarette butts,’’ says Jos Maveli, who runs the NGO that rescued him in 2002. Maveli remembers it was a bookseller from Delhi visiting Thrissur who alerted him about Raja.

The boy had run away from the gang and was sitting at the bus station crying when the man saw and rescued him.

The NGO admitted him in a school. He is now a Class VIII student of the NSS higher secondary school. It was at the school that he started to kick the football. Soon, he was invited by the school coach to join the football team. On Tuesday, Raja boarded a train to Punjab where the team will participate in the all-India sub-junior football championship beginning on September 22.

Wednesday, September 17, 2008

Quota Seats Have Been Filled In All IIMs, Announces Union HRD Ministry

Akshaya Mukul I TNN


New Delhi: The Union HRD ministry on Tuesday said SC/ST/OBC quota had been filled in all IIMs and around 35 OBC vacancies existed in IITs, all in the old ones, while some of the new IITs had even given 27% reservation to OBCs.

The ministry is planning a detailed response to the petition filed in the Supreme Court on Monday stating that as 432 SC/ST/OBC seats were lying vacant in IITs, the apex court should ask the government to fill these seats with general candidates. Officials said there were still 66 SC/ST vacancies in the new IITs.

Sources said one way in which the OBC quota could be fully filled was through change in the creamy layer criterion. The National Commission for Backward Classes has already recommended changing the criterion from an annual income of Rs 2.5 lakh to Rs 5 lakh. The HRD ministry expects the social justice ministry to notify the change at the earliest.

According to information collected from IITs, about 35 seats for OBC students remain vacant. While the seven old IITs implemented 9% OBC reservation this year, the six new institutes implemented the entire 27% OBC reservation. This year, the IITs did not have to relax their entry norms to take in OBC students.

All OBC students who were admitted to the IITs figured on the general category list. However, students benefited from the reservation at the seat allotment level. Some of the vacant OBC seats were in the architecture stream.

IIT officials said these seats could not be filled as many students did not qualify in the aptitude test they needed to take in addition to the JEE to get into architecture.

On the other hand, the IIMs, which implemented differing OBC quota—ranging from as low as 3% in IIMKolkata to as high as 21% in IIM-Kozhikode—were forced to lower their entry norms for OBC candidates.

For instance, if the cut-off for general category students after the CAT stood at 38% at IIM-Kolkata, it was 35% for OBC students.
(With inputs by Hemali Chhapia)

Tuesday, September 16, 2008

READING ONLINE

Don’t buy the costly textbook, download it for free

Noam Cohen

Squint hard, and textbook publishers can look a lot like drug makers. They both make money from doing obvious good — healing, educating — and they both have customers who may be willing to sacrifice their last pennies to buy what these companies are selling.

It is that fact that can suddenly turn the good guys into bad guys, especially when the prices they charge are compared with generic drugs or ordinary books. A final similarity, in the words of R Preston McAfee, an economics professor at Cal Tech, is that both textbook publishers and drug makers benefit from the problem of “moral hazards” — that is, the doctor who prescribes medication and the professor who requires a textbook don’t have to bear the cost. “The person who pays for the book, the parent or the student, doesn’t choose it,” he said. “There is this sort of creep. It’s always OK to add $5.”

In protest of what he says are textbooks’ intolerably high prices — and the dumbing down of their content to appeal to the widest possible market — McAfee has put his introductory economics textbook online free. He says he most likely could have earned a $100,000 advance on the book had he gone the traditional publishing route, and it would have had a list price approaching $200.

“This market is not working very well — except for the shareholders in the textbook publishers,” he said. “We have lots of knowledge, but we are not getting it out.”

His volume, ‘Introduction to Economic Analysis’, is being used at some colleges, including Harvard and Claremont-McKenna, a private college in Claremont, California. And that is a big difference between textbook publishers and the drug makers. Sure, there have been scientists with McAfee’s attitude — Jonas Salk was asked who owned the patent to the polio vaccine and scoffed: “Could you patent the sun?”

For the textbook makers, however, it is a different story. McAfee allows anyone to download a Word file or PDF of his book, while also taking advantage of the growing marketplace for print on demand.

A broader effort to publish free textbooks is called Connexions, the brainchild of Richard Baraniuk, an engineering professor at Rice University. Connexions uses broader Creative Commons license allowing students and teachers to rewrite and edit material as long as the originator is credited. Teachers put up material, called “modules,” and then mix and match their work with others’ to create material for students. NYT NEWS SERVICE

Researchers now train young brains to behave

Mental Exercises Can Reduce Kids’ Potential For Trouble

Benedict Carey

After inflicting months of sleep deprivation on their parents, young children often switch course and begin what could be called a thought-deprivation campaign.

This is the stage, around age 2 or 3, when their brains seem to send multiple messages to the body at once — eat, scream, spill juice, throw crayons — and good luck to anyone trying to form a complete sentence or thought in their presence. Toddlers are interruption machines, all impulse and little control.

One reason is that an area of the brain that is critical to inhibiting urges, the prefrontal cortex, is still a work in progress. The density of neural connections in the 2-year-old prefrontal cortex, for instance, is far higher than in adults, and levels of neurotransmitters, the mind’s chemical messengers, are lower. Some children’s brains adapt quickly, while others’ take time — and, as a result, classmates, friends and adults are interrupted for years along the way.

But just as biology shapes behaviour, so behaviour can accelerate biology. And a small group of educational and cognitive scientists now say that mental exercises of a certain kind can teach children to become more self-possessed at earlier ages, reducing stress levels at home and improving their experience in school. Researchers can test this ability, which they call executive function, and they say it is more strongly associated with school success than IQ.

“We know that the prefrontal cortex is not fully developed until the 20s, and some people will ask, ‘Why are you trying to improve prefrontal abilities when the biological substrate is not there yet?’” said Adele Diamond, a professor of developmental cognitive science at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. “I tell them that 2-year-olds have legs, too, which will not reach full length for 10 years or more — but they can still walk and run and benefit from exercise.” Executive function involves three important skills. The first is the ability to resist distractions or delay gratification to finish a job: to finish the book report before turning on the television. The second is working memory, the capacity to hold multiple numbers or ideas in the mind, — for example, to do simple addition or subtraction without pencil and paper. The third is cognitive flexibility, the presence of mind to adapt when demands change — when recess is cancelled, say, and there’s a pop quiz in math. Experts can rate these abilities by giving young children several straightforward mental tests.

Experts say that parents can use a variety of activities to help children sharpen executive skills. Some of these are obvious: reading to a child while continually establishing eye contact. By tilting the book so pictures are obscured, parents force youngsters to follow the words carefully, holding more of them in mind at one time — a function of working memory. NYT NEWS SERVICE

SELF-CONTROL: Young boys take turns listening and speaking without interrupting each other. Such exercises can help children become more self-possessed at an early age