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P.P. Sneha - Mapping Digital Humanities in India
https://cis-india.org/papers/mapping-digital-humanities-in-india
<b>It gives us great pleasure to publish the second title of the CIS Papers series. This report by P.P. Sneha comes out of an extended research project supported by the Kusuma Trust. The study undertook a detailed mapping of digital practices in arts and humanities scholarship, both emerging and established, in India. Beginning with an understanding of Digital Humanities as a 'found term' in the Indian context, the study explores the discussion and debate about the changes in humanities practice, scholarship and pedagogy that have come about with the digital turn. Further it inquires about the spaces and roles of digital technologies in the humanities, and by extension in the arts, media, and creative practice today; transformations in the objects and methods of study and practice in these spaces; and the shifts in the imagination of the ‘digital’ itself, and its linkages with humanities practices. </b>
<p> </p>
<h4>Download: <a href="https://github.com/cis-india/website/raw/master/docs/CIS_Papers_2016.02_PP-Sneha.pdf">Mapping Digital Humanities in India</a> (PDF)</h4>
<hr />
<h2>Foreword</h2>
<p>What different forms do digital humanities (DH) research and expertise take around the world? My colleagues and I investigated this question for our report on <a href="https://www.clir.org/pubs/reports/pub168" target="_blank"><em>Building Expertise to Support Digital Scholarship: A Global Perspective</em></a>. In some places, we struggled to find resources on local practices in DH, but fortunately in India we could draw upon the excellent work of P.P. Sneha and the Centre for Internet and Society. In a series of insightful blog posts, Sneha explored the implications of technology for humanities scholarship and surveyed digital humanities practices in India.</p>
<p>Now Sneha has brought this work together in “Mapping Digital Humanities in India.” Rather than falling into naive boosterism or superficial critique, this report plumbs deep questions about humanistic knowledge in a digital age: What do we make of textuality in a digital environment? How might digital tools and platforms contribute to conflicts about authority? How does digital infrastructure affect how humanities research can be practiced? Sneha probes the complexities of these questions, drawing from theorists such as Benjamin, Derrida and Foucault as well as digital humanities scholars such as Franco Moretti and Patrik Svensson.</p>
<p>From this strong theoretical foundation, “Mapping Digital Humanities in India” explores specific challenges and possibilities for DH in India, synthesizing rich interviews with a range of Indian scholars. Sneha notes that digital humanities is in an “incipient stage” in India, given the persistence of the digital divide in much of the country, the association of the term with a specific history in the Anglo-American context, and concerns about the uncritical embrace of technology. The report highlights several Indian projects that demonstrate how technology can be used to create and disseminate humanistic knowledge. Creating online resources in Indic languages poses challenges, especially inputting languages and translating between them. To create an online variorum of Nobel prize-winning author Rabindranath Tagore’s works, Bichitra had to develop a Bangla character set. Bichitra enables readers to collate texts at the level of the chapter/canto, paragraph/stanza or word. In the realm of film and video, Indiancine.ma (which archives Indian films from the pre-copyright period) and Pad.ma (which houses found and deposited audio, video, and allied materials) offer powerful annotation tools and open up the archive into a space
for interpretation and collaboration.</p>
<p>As digital humanities scholars attempt to move past a limited, Anglo-American perspective, “Mapping Digital Humanities in India” provides a model for how we can understand local practices in DH and connect them to ongoing discussions about humanistic knowledge. Through this report, readers can navigate central issues in digital humanities, explore the Indian context, and critically examine culturally based assumptions about DH practices.</p>
<p><em>- <strong>Lisa Spiro</strong>, Executive Director, Digital Scholarship Services, Rice University, Texas, USA</em></p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Executive Summary</h2>
<p>In the short time span that the term ‘digital humanities’ (henceforth DH) has been around in the Indian academic landscape, it had generated much discussion and debate about the changes in humanities practice, scholarship
and pedagogy that have come about with the digital turn. What are the spaces and roles of digital technologies in the humanities, and by extension in the arts, media, and creative practice today? How has it transformed objects and
methods of study and practice in these spaces? What does it tell us about the relationship between the humanities and technology? Perhaps most importantly, what is our imagination of the ‘digital’ itself, and how does it shape
our humanities practices?</p>
<p>These are but a few of the questions that this study on mapping key conversations and actors around the term DH tries to explore in some detail. While the study began as an attempt to understand the growing interest
around the term itself in India, its scope has extended to explore what specific contexts and conditions are in place in India that give it critical purchase. Five universities now offer various programmes in DH in India - ranging from a Master’s degree to certificate courses, and there have been several workshops, winter schools, seminars and one national level consultation over the last five years. Academic and applied practices focus on building of digital archives, film studies, game studies, textual studies, cultural heritage and critical making
to name just a few. While these efforts have managed to create a growing interest in DH, there is still a lack of consensus on what exactly constitutes the field in India. Thus, questions around definition, ontology, and method
remain pertinent, as does the need for recognition by the national academic bureaucracy.</p>
<p>Context is another important factor here - most global narratives of DH reiterate a predominantly Anglo-American narrative that draws from a history in the field of humanities computing, as well as a crisis in higher education,
particularly in the humanities and liberal arts. The efforts to map different histories of DH in the last couple of years, seen in the emergence of fields such as postcolonial DH and feminist DH, then point to diverse locations, and more intersectional perspectives from which the discourse around the field is being shaped. This is an important opportunity to better contextualise the debates around the digital as well – where conditions and hierarchies of access and usage, transition from analogue to the digital, and the notion of ‘digitality’ itself
need to be defined and understood better. In India, with initiatives such as the Digital India programme, and the increasing push for the adoption of digital technologies in every sphere from education to governance, and now a steady push towards a digital economy, there is already a tremendous amount of investment in the idea of the digital by a diverse group of stakeholders. These advancements, and the enthusiasm, must be read within the context of a rather chequered and uneven history of the growth of science and technology in India, the advent of the internet and adoption of ICT4D, and existence of digital divides at different levels. The changing higher education system in India, and criticism around a profit-driven model of education, along with the entry of a large number of private actors in the field in the form of MOOCs and other online platforms in the last few years also contribute to this growing interest in DH, as also much of its criticism. In fact, the global discourse on DH and its
linkages with shifts in government funding has seen increasingly polarized positions, with many humanities scholars being uncertain about the political or critical stake of the field, and a concern about the its focus on certain kinds of methods and skill sets at the expense of more traditional ones.</p>
<p>In India, the discourse around DH has largely remained within an academic context so far, although emerging creative practices in art, design and media may have been asking questions of a similar nature for some time now. These include efforts to understand changes in objects of enquiry from analogue to digitised and born digital artifacts, and the need for new methods of work and study that are necessitated by these new digital objects. The process of ‘digitisation’ itself is one fraught with several challenges, and demands a closer look – what are tools, resources and skills available for digitisation or creation of new digital cultural artifacts, and the context that facilitates their creation and active use in humanities research and practice. The ‘text’ as the
primary cultural artifact or object of enquiry in the humanities, has undergone several changes with digitisation. Working with digital texts that are fluid and networked, and most often in languages other than English bring forth
several new questions that are not only technological but also conceptual. The emergence of new digital cultural archives and online repositories, owing to the (marginally) increased access to internet and digital technologies and the growth of a culture that facilitates collecting and sharing, has greatly expanded the scope of engagement with these questions. The archive in fact forms a significant part of the discourse around DH in India - the challenges and prospects offered by digital cultural artifacts are quite diverse, ranging from modes of documentation, preservation and curation to dissemination over online spaces, and there is a need to understand these in greater detail. Infrastructure emerges as an important political and conceptual question here – while an interest in technological advancement and innovation, and the growth of a culture of free and open access to knowledge to some extent has helped facilitate work in the humanities at large, the lack of access to funding, expertise, and of course adequate, and advanced physical and technological infrastructure , such as computational methods often limits the kind of work that can be done with digital artifacts.</p>
<p>The implications of these changes for the study and practice of humanities are several, particularly with respect to traditional methods of pedagogy and scholarship. The access to resources like Wikipedia and devices like the mobile phone have facilitated a move towards more distributed, non-hierarchical, and individualised models and practices of learning, which simultaneously are premised upon new kinds of centralisation, hierarchies, and aggregation of information. The need to develop new forms of digital pedagogy as well as creating more spaces for such conversations within and outside the academic context would be crucial here. This growth of digitally-engaged
humanities practice raises pertinent questions about how exactly the “digital turn” is transforming the humanities, its practice and politics. DH being an interdisciplinary field also offers the possibilities to engage with creative, often alternative practices that exist at the margins of mainstream academia, thus trying to encourage collaborative work across different domains of expertise. The inherited separation of disciplines, or even humanities and technology as suggested by the term DH, may then be contentious here, as it creates the
opportunity to explore a twinned history of humanities and technology.</p>
<p>While the field of DH in India continues to develop slowly but surely, and hopefully widely, as more institutions and individuals become engaged with DH and related works, these key questions around its history, methods, and scope will continue to remain pertinent over the next years. For us at the Centre for Internet and Society, studying DH at this historical juncture when the Indian state is rushing towards embracing the “digital” provides a critical lens to understand and engage with the reconfigurations in modes and practices of arts and humanities scholarship and pedagogy in particular, and digital economies of knowledge in general.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>CIS Papers</h2>
<p>The CIS Papers series publishes open access monographs and discussion pieces that critically contribute to the debates on digital technologies and society. It includes publication of new findings and observations, of work-in-progress, and of critical review of existing materials. These may be authored by researchers at or affiliated to CIS, by external researchers and practitioners, or by a group of discussants. CIS offers editorial support to the selected monographs and discussion pieces. The views expressed, however, are of the authors' alone.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/papers/mapping-digital-humanities-in-india'>https://cis-india.org/papers/mapping-digital-humanities-in-india</a>
</p>
No publishersneha-ppHigher EducationDigital KnowledgeCIS PapersDigital HumanitiesEducation TechnologyMapping Digital Humanities in IndiaDigitisationDigital ScholarshipRAW ResearchResearchers at Work2016-12-31T05:56:49ZBlog EntryWorkshop on Digital Annotation and Content Generation with research scholars in Pune
https://cis-india.org/openness/workshop-on-digital-annotation-and-content-generation-with-research-scholars-in-pune
<b>The Centre for Indian Languages in Higher Education (CILHE) is conducting a two-day workshop on Digital Annotation and Content Generation with research scholars at KSP Women’s Studies Centre, Pune on October 30-31, 2015.</b>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>Day 1:</strong></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">As part of this workshop, we will be working
with <a class="external-link" href="http://www.annotationstudio.org/">Annotation Studio</a><span class="_Tgc">, </span>a set of collaborative web-based and open source
annotation tools that allows users to share texts and annotate them
simultaneously. For the educator, it enables tracing points of
engagement with the text, identifying which paragraphs generate most
interest and why, and learn how readers understand the argument of the
text based on marking of tags. For the student, digital annotation is an
interesting exercise in close analytical reading, responding to
feedback, and building an argument.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>Day 2:</strong></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">The second day will be spent in understanding about generating
encyclopedic content on Wikipedia. We will engage the participants in annotating key
Women’s Studies texts and create well-referenced entries on various Indian language Wikipedia projects.</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/openness/workshop-on-digital-annotation-and-content-generation-with-research-scholars-in-pune'>https://cis-india.org/openness/workshop-on-digital-annotation-and-content-generation-with-research-scholars-in-pune</a>
</p>
No publishergaruleHigher EducationAccess to KnowledgeMarathi WikipediaCIS-A2KHindi Wikipedia2015-12-31T07:17:02ZEventWikipedia Editing as Assessment Tool in the Indian Higher Education Classroom
https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/wikipedia-as-assessment-tool-in-indian-higher-education-classroom
<b>Getting students to create and edit Wikipedia entries in English and Indian languages can be a comprehensive assessment tool at the Bachelor’s and Master’s levels. Both levels of higher education require the demonstration of the ability to present knowledge in encyclopaedic form, which can be done by a good review of relevant literature and the showcasing of key arguments in the field.</b>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Using the <a href="https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/dublin-descriptors.pdf" class="internal-link">Dublin competency level descriptors</a>,<a href="#fn*" name="fr*">[*]</a> we can put down what sorts of <a class="external-link" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higher_education">higher education</a> skills Wikipedia editing can help evaluate. The most commonly accepted descriptors internationally are:</p>
<ol>
<li>Demonstration of Knowledge and understanding </li>
<li>Applying knowledge and understanding </li>
<li>Making judgements </li>
<li>Communication abilities</li>
<li>Learning skills relevant to higher education</li>
</ol>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><a class="external-link" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page">Wikipedia</a> allows for assessing the ‘depth’ of an article which is the measure of the quality of an entry. The depth is a function of several parameters like the number of edits an article has seen, the length of discussion in the talk pages, the number of footnotes, references, hyperlinks and editors active on that page. In addition to this, providing Wiki-interlinks to key concepts within an article and categorization of articles exposes the students to a "semantic web" of interconnections between various fields of knowledge. Although, it may not be a complete substitute for the more formal modes of assessment, it provides a more rounded form of evaluation for student assessment. The ‘depth’ indicator also shows the relative significance of an article for the larger community of users, thereby providing a better model for student assessment in the long run.</p>
<h3 style="text-align: justify; ">Bachelor's Level</h3>
<p>By getting students to edit on Wikipedia at the Bachelor’s Level, you can test the following, and appropriate weightage can be given to each aspect of the work:</p>
<ul>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">Comprehension of the theory, concepts and processes pertaining to a field or fields of learning </li>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">Demonstration of knowledge, supported by the use of advanced textbooks and other reading materials, of one or more specialised areas </li>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">Ability to apply this knowledge and comprehension in a manner that indicates a thorough and informed approach to the work, and have competences typically demonstrated through devising and sustaining arguments</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">Ability to gather and interpret relevant data to inform independent judgements which include reflection on relevant social, scientific or ethical issues </li>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">Ability to communicate information, ideas, problems and solutions to both specialist and non-specialist audiences [in the case of Wikipedia, the audience would usually be a non-specialist one]</li>
</ul>
<h3>Master's Level</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">By getting students to edit on Wikipedia at the Master’s Level, you can test the following, and appropriate weightage can be given to each aspect of the work:</p>
<ul>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">Demonstration of knowledge and comprehension that is founded upon, extends and enhances that associated with the Bachelor’s level and is at the forefront of a field of learning </li>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">Critical awareness of current problems and new insights, new tools and new processes within their field of learning (ability to do a good literature review, which can be seen through the citations provided for a Wikipedia entry)</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">Ability to apply their knowledge, comprehension, and critical awareness in broader or multidisciplinary areas related to their fields of study </li>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">Ability to integrate knowledge and handle complexity, to formulate judgements with incomplete or limited information, with an awareness of the social and ethical responsibilities linked to the application of their knowledge and judgements </li>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">Ability to communicate their conclusions, and knowledge, rationale and processes underpinning these, to specialist and non-specialist audiences clearly and unambiguously</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">Ability to reflect on one’s own writing by engaging with feedback received from a collaborative network.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">Ability to form peer knowledge networks through collaboration and interaction with other contributors</li>
</ul>
<h3>Risks and Mitigation</h3>
<p>It is helpful to be aware of the typical risks a faculty may face in using Wikipedia entries as an assessment tool.</p>
<ul>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">New article creation: Wikipedias, especially the <a class="external-link" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_Wikipedia">English Wikipedia</a>, are closely monitored by thousands of volunteers from across the world. Often, articles created by new users come under a lot of scrutiny. It is advisable to first encourage the students to edit and improve the existing articles before creating a new article all by themselves. Also taking the help of an experienced Wikipedian will go a long way in mentoring the students on the nuances of the Wikipedia platform and the volunteer community that strives in good faith to preserve the quality of entries. </li>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">Copyright violation: <a class="external-link" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control-C">Ctrl+c</a> and <a class="external-link" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cut,_copy,_and_paste">Ctrl+v</a> (i.e., <a class="external-link" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plagiarism">plagiarism</a>) is a major challenge for the higher education sector across the world. Often the students find that copy-pasting the content from various sources is an easy way of doing an assignment. On Wikipedia, plagiarism is taken very seriously and a student editor can get banned from further contribution to Wikipedia, which may de-motivate the entire class. It’s useful for the faculty to give a detailed orientation on this aspect before encouraging the students to take up writing a Wikipedia entry as an assignment. There are numerous resources (text and videos) made available by Wikimedians across the world explaining the problem of plagiarism. These could be used by the faculty. </li>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">If you are encouraging students to write an entry in an Indian language Wikipedia, special attention and support needs to be planned to train the students in typing in that particular Indian language script. Wikipedias have a useful tool called <a class="external-link" href="http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Universal_Language_Selector">Universal Language Selector</a> (ULS) which makes it very easy for the student to start typing in any script using the transliteration method. There is increasing support for Indian language scripts, however. You could check whether your University computer lab has Unicode compliant computers/systems. This will help the students to work offline on their assignment, if required.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">One of the biggest challenges for a teacher is to get the student to see the value of taking up a Wikipedia entry as an assignment. Some of the students may see this as an additional task or extra-curricular activity and may not put in a committed effort, which could affect the goals you have set for your course. Faculties are encouraged to find various means of integrating/dovetailing the Wikipedia assignment into the curriculum or course. </li>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">Faculty may also feel this as an additional burden on them, especially in terms of evaluation of the assignment. There are various tools available to measure most of the assessment parameters set out above, which will not take much time. It is in fact possible to save faculty time if the evaluation is planned meticulously. </li>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">A pragmatic challenge for the faculty would be to deal with a scenario where the entire class submits the assignments on Wikipedia on the last day. This will not only increase burden on the faculty but can also result in a lot of plagiarism. An effective way to address this challenge is to make the Wikipedia entry assignment part of a formative assessment, whereby the student develops the entry over a period of time (e.g. one month or during the course). There are various tools through which you can track the students’ contribution continuously and share feedback with them periodically.</li>
</ul>
<hr />
<p style="text-align: justify; ">[<a href="#fr*" name="fn*">*</a>].Available at <a class="external-link" href="http://www.tcd.ie/teaching-learning/academic-development/assets/pdf/dublin_descriptors.pdf">http://www.tcd.ie/teaching-learning/academic-development/assets/pdf/dublin_descriptors.pdf</a></p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/wikipedia-as-assessment-tool-in-indian-higher-education-classroom'>https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/wikipedia-as-assessment-tool-in-indian-higher-education-classroom</a>
</p>
No publisherDr. Tejaswini Niranjana, Ashwin Kumar A.P. and T. Vishnu VardhanSocial MediaHigher EducationAccess to KnowledgeWikimediaWikipediaOpenness2014-01-30T10:06:40ZBlog EntrySouth Asia Conference on Higher Education
https://cis-india.org/news/south-asia-conference-on-higher-education
<b>The Higher Education Innovation and Research Applications (HEIRA), Centre for Study of Culture and Society is hosting the South Asia Conference on Higher Education at the Ford Foundation office in New Delhi from August 5 to 7, 2013. Sunil Abraham will participate in this conference.</b>
<p><b>The Pathways to Higher Education Programme (2009 -13)<br /></b></p>
<p><b>Day 1</b></p>
<table class="plain">
<tbody>
<tr>
<th>Title</th><th>Moderators & Resource Persons</th><th>Timings</th>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Introduction</td>
<td>
<ul>
</ul>
Tejaswini Niranjana, HEIRA- CSCS, Ravina Aggarwal, Ford Foundation and Ashish Rajadhyaksha, CSCS
<ul>
</ul>
</td>
<td>10.30 <br />11.15</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Tea Break</td>
<td></td>
<td>11.15 <br />11.30</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td colspan="3"><b>Presentation by Ford Grantees</b></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><ol> </ol>Martin Chautari<ol> </ol></td>
<td>
<p>Pramod Bhatta<br />Respondent: Milind Wakankar</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>11.30 <br />12.15</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Bhasha Research and Publication Centre</td>
<td>Vipul Kapadia<br />Respondent: Uma Bhrugubanda<br /></td>
<td>12.15 <br />13.00</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Lunch Break</td>
<td></td>
<td>13.00 <br />14.00</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Pukar</td>
<td>Anita Patil-Deshmukh<br />Respondent: Janaki Nair<br /></td>
<td>14.00 <br />14.45</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Insight Foundation</td>
<td>Anoop Kumar<br />Respondent: Sitharamam Kakarala<br /></td>
<td>14.45 <br />15.30</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>HEIRA, CSCS</td>
<td>Tejaswini Niranjana<br />Respondent: Pawan Agarwal<br /></td>
<td>15.30 <br />16.15</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Roundtable Discussion</td>
<td>Initial Responses:<br />Ravina Aggarwal, Dilip Chavan, Shivali Tukdeo<br /></td>
<td>
<p>16.15<br />17.00</p>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<p><b>Day 2</b></p>
<table class="plain">
<tbody>
<tr>
<th colspan="3">Presentation by Sub-grantees of HEIRA, CSCS</th>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Maharashtra Cluster<br />Chair: Dilip Chavan<br /></td>
<td>Faculty Coordinators, <br />Pathways to Higher Education Programme, HEIRA-CSCS</td>
<td>10.00 10.45</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Karnataka Cluster<br />Chair: Tharakeshwar V.B<br /></td>
<td>Faculty Coordinators, <br />Pathways to Higher Education Programme, HEIRA-CSCS</td>
<td>10.45<br />11.30</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Kerala Cluster<br />Chair: Rajan Gurukkal<br /></td>
<td>Faculty Coordinators, <br />Pathways to Higher Education Programme, HEIRA-CSCS</td>
<td>11.45<br />12.30</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Tea Break</td>
<td></td>
<td>11.30<br />11.45</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Lunch Break</td>
<td></td>
<td>12.30<br />13.30</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Panel Discussion on Social Justice and Indian Languages<br />Chair: Satish Deshpande<br /></td>
<td>Panelists: Gopal Guru, Apoorvanand, <br />K. Sathyanarayana, M.G. Hegde<br /><br /></td>
<td>13.30<br />15.30</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Tea Break</td>
<td></td>
<td>15.30<br />15.45</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Roundtable Discussion<br />Chair: Krishna Kumar (TBC)<br /></td>
<td>Initial Responses: Rajeev Bhargava, Sasheej Hegde, Ashish Rajadhyaksha, Aarti Srivastava</td>
<td>15.45<br />16.30</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Conference Dinner</td>
<td></td>
<td>18.30</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<p><b>Day 3</b></p>
<table class="plain">
<tbody>
<tr>
<th colspan="3">Higher Education in the Age of Globalisation: Rethinking Social Justice</th>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Session 1: Technology<br />Chair: Nivedita Menon<br /><br /></td>
<td>Anita Patil Deshmukh</td>
<td>10.00<br />10.45</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Session 2: Critical Humanities<br />Chair: Aditya Nigam<br /><br /></td>
<td>Anup Dhar<br /> Ashwin Kumar <br /><br /></td>
<td>10.45<br />11.30</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Tea Break</td>
<td></td>
<td>11.30<br />11.45</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Session 3: Science Education<br />Chair: Mary John<br /></td>
<td>Geeta Venkataraman<br /> Gita Chadha<br /></td>
<td>11.45<br />12.30</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Roundtable Discussion</td>
<td>Initial Responses: Satish Deshpande, Anoop Kumar, Uma Bhrugubanda, Pramod Bhatta</td>
<td>12.30<br />13.00</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Closing Remarks</td>
<td>Tejaswini Niranjana and Ravina Aggarwal<br /></td>
<td>13.00<br />13.15</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>TBC – To be confirmed<br /><i>Please note that the schedule is tentative as speakers are yet to confirm; the final programme schedule shall be sent out by e-mail a week before the conference</i>. </b></p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/news/south-asia-conference-on-higher-education'>https://cis-india.org/news/south-asia-conference-on-higher-education</a>
</p>
No publisherpraskrishnaHigher Education2013-07-30T08:13:02ZNews ItemFirst Odia Wikipedia Education Program to be Rolled Out
https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/first-odia-wikipedia-education-program-to-be-rolled-out-at-iimc-dhenkanal
<b>Odia Wikipedians gathered at the Indian Institute of Mass Communication (IIMC), Dhenkanal on November 8, 2012 to start the first Odia Wikipedia Education Program. This program aims to bring students edit articles on Odia Wikipedia through a series of assessments by professors. The local community members from Nalconagar would be supporting the four month program.</b>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Since March 2011, Odia Wikipedia has started growing in terms of readers, editors and content. Last few months have seen many new faces added to the community who are willing to take part in both offline and online outreach. Though many of the community members are staying out of state, there are community clusters in three different places: Cuttack, Nalconagar and Bhubaneswar. We approached many institutions from these three places and some of them showed interest for an Odia Wikipedia workshop to assess and evaluate students for the education program. We conducted workshops in some of those institutions in the initial level. After successive workshops and meeting with the faculty members, some of the potential institutions were chosen for the education program. One of those colleges was the IIMC in Dhenkanal. We had a meeting with the professor of this organization along with teaching associates and a visiting professor and a full day workshop on editing wikipedia. Odia wikipedians, Mrutyunjaya Kar, Manoranjan Mallick, Srikant Kedia and Kamalakanta Nayak supported for organizing the event.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">IIMC, Dhenkanal is one of the six IIMCs of India and a pioneer in the field of Mass Communication. We met Professor Mrinal Chaterjee along with teaching associates, Sucharita and Bhagaban Sahu, retired professor of Revenshaw University and visiting professor of IIMC. The college is home to 83 students across India. Students enroll for a one year diploma program for Journalism and Mass communication in Odia and English.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The full day session was made to two separate sessions: an introductory session and one hands-on training on editing. Prof. Chaterjee introduced the agenda of the session and why it is needed for the students from a student's point of view. I continued the discussion and presented the key points of wikipedia editing and details of the education program, why and how we are going to start it focussing on the key roles of students and the institution and how it will help them. We announced about the hands on training session post lunch for the interested students. Twenty one students gathered for the second session. Interestingly all of the Odia department students were present and there was one student from English department. Students were briefed about editing. During the workshop we found that majority of them knew a typing layout called "Modular layout" which is used by non-unicode ISCII/ASCII typing softwares like Leap office, I-Lipi, Shreelipi, etc. As this layout is yet to be enabled for Odia we continued explaining about typing using the default typing scheme.</p>
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<p style="text-align: center; "><img alt="The Reporter, a bilingual newspaper published by students on college noticeboard" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/3f/Odia_WEP_IIMC-10.jpg/223px-Odia_WEP_IIMC-10.jpg" /></p>
<p style="text-align: center; "><span>"The Reporter", a bilingual daily published by students on college notice board</span></p>
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<p><iframe frameborder="0" height="356" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0" scrolling="no" src="http://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/embed_code/15366884" width="427"> </iframe></p>
<div><b><a href="http://www.slideshare.net/psubhashish/odia-education-program-proposal-iimc" target="_blank" title="Odia education program proposal IIMC">Odia education program proposal IIMC</a> on Slideshare</b></div>
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<p style="text-align: justify; ">After the end of the workshop we had another meeting with the professor and other faculty members to assess and discuss about the further steps. IIMC has a very close student-teacher relation which we observed from the beginning of the workshop. Students were really keen and patient to learn and all of the students who attended the hands-on training session stayed back till the end of the session. Apart from their regular assignments and projects, students also publish a daily bilingual newspaper, "The Reporter".</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">"Writing is a part of their their study and we emphasize much on getting the most of their short program. If Wikipedia could give them a global platform to and larger audience for their work to be read, reviewed and enhanced then why not adding it to their task list?", expresses Prof. Chatterjee. The only hurdle which students are going to face in the initial phase is typing in Odia. So, modular layout needs to be added in "Narayam", the typing tool integrated in Odia Wikipedia. To begin with this program an Odia Wikipedia club was formed at Nalconagar which would primarily support this program at the ground level.</p>
<h3><span>Video</span></h3>
<p><iframe frameborder="0" height="250" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/nm7dRQ7LmVI" width="300"></iframe></p>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">Read a detailed four month work plan for this program on Odia Wikipedia: <a class="external-link" href="http://or.wikipedia.org/s/cgk">Read in English</a> | <a class="external-link" href="http://or.wikipedia.org/s/cgj">Read in Odia</a></li>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">Presentation for Odia Education Program: <a class="external-link" href="http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Odia_Education_Program_proposal_IIMC.pdf">On Commons</a> | <a class="external-link" href="http://bitly.com/iepiimc">Source file</a></li>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">Commons picture gallery: <a class="external-link" href="http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Odia_Wikipedia_Education_Program">See here</a></li>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/first-odia-wikipedia-education-program-to-be-rolled-out-at-iimc-dhenkanal'>https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/first-odia-wikipedia-education-program-to-be-rolled-out-at-iimc-dhenkanal</a>
</p>
No publishersubhaHigher EducationAccess to KnowledgeWikimediaWikipediaWorkshopVideoOpenness2012-12-14T12:17:04ZBlog EntryAn Odia Wikipedia Workshop at KMBB College, Bhubaneswar
https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/odia-wikipedia-workshop-organized-in-kmbb-college-bhubaneswar
<b>The Centre for Internet and Society along with Odia Wikipedians in Bhubaneswar organized an Odia Wikipedia workshop on November 18, 2012. It was held in KMBB College of Engineering. Odia Wikipedia is a free encyclopedia in Odia language which everyone can edit. </b>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Odia Wikipedians gathered in the temple city of Bhubaneswar on November 18, 2012 to organize the third <a href="http://or.wikipedia.org/s/c8x">Odia Wikipedia workshop</a> in <a href="http://www.kmbb.in/">KMBB College of Engineering</a>. KMBB College of Engineering is a BPUT affiliated engineering college supported by Ama Odisha, an organization working for media, communication and development of Odia language. <a href="http://kmbb.academia.edu/DhanadaMishra">Dr. Dhanada Mishra</a>, Director-Academics, KMBB and a veteran educationalist and open source source enthusiast supported this event. Forty-five students from KMBB attended this workshop. The agenda for the two-and-a-half hour session was to educate students about open source movement, journey of Wikipedia and how to contribute to Odia Wikipedia and how it would help them. Nine active Odia Wikipedians joined to support this event.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Dr. Mishra began the session by introducing Odia Wikipedians to the students. He spoke about Open source movement, how the community supports various open source projects, how Wikipedia was started and how it is essential for students to take part in such activities. Subhashish Panigrahi briefly spoke about the history of Odia wikipedia, how it grew up in the recent years to its present state. Odia Wikipedian <a href="http://or.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:ManXiii">Manoranjan Behera</a> discussed about how everyone can contribute to the Wikipedia.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">To explain the easiness of typing in Odia, some of the students were invited to write text on a board and test the typing tool on Odia Wikipedia. A new article about the college was created and one of the students wrote few sentences. Wikipedians explained the importance of creating user accounts and demonstrated how to search an article, how to create an article and the basics of editing an article. A Question and Answer session was held for students to put their queries. At the end of the session, contact details were shared with the students and the Facebook group (<a class="external-link" href="https://www.facebook.com/groups/OdiaWiki">https://www.facebook.com/groups/OdiaWiki</a>) of Odia Wikipedia was shown so that students could continue editing and remain in touch with fellow wikipedians.</p>
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<p style="text-align: justify; ">Odia daily “The Sambad” <a href="https://cis-india.org/news/report-of-odia-wikipedia-workshop-in-sambad" class="external-link">covered this event</a>.</p>
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<p><a href="http://prezi.com/ljk3w0m44w6x/copy-of-introduction-to-wikipedia/" title="Copy of Introduction to Wikipedia!">Copy of Introduction to Wikipedia!</a> on <a href="http://prezi.com">Prezi</a></p>
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<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/odia-wikipedia-workshop-organized-in-kmbb-college-bhubaneswar'>https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/odia-wikipedia-workshop-organized-in-kmbb-college-bhubaneswar</a>
</p>
No publishersubhaHigher EducationAccess to KnowledgeWikimediaWikipediaWorkshopVideoOpenness2012-12-07T22:40:32ZBlog EntryPinning the Badge
https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/pathways/pinning-the-badge
<b>In a world of competition, badging provides a holistic way of grading and learning, where individual talents are realised and the knowledge of the group is used.</b>
<p><a class="external-link" href="http://www.indianexpress.com/news/pinning-the-badge/925167/0">The article by Nishant Shah was published in the Indian Express on March 18, 2012</a>.</p>
<p>I write this column fresh out of being a judge at the Digital Media and Learning contest on “Badging for Life-long Learning” in San Francisco. While the contest focused largely on the American education system and its future, the idea of badging that each person brings a set of skills to a study or workplace is useful to think about, in connection with India. We have now spent some time, in India, hearing about how education in the country has been ruined. There is a constant narrative of the university in shambles, where we seem to lack competent teachers, engaged students, and the resources to build efficient infrastructure for learning. This argument also positions employment as the only aim of education, reducing our humanist and social sciences legacies to skill-based information transmission.</p>
<p>Digital technologies emerge as a cure for the problems that contemporary education seems to be facing. The availability of resources at affordable costs for anybody online, has been one of the biggest promises of the internet, and it hopes to build a better learning environment and better learners. The condition of being connected to a much larger network of educators and learners, also offers us the possibilities of producing better and innovative knowledge structures. There is also an inherent ambition that the introduction of new digital competencies and skills will encourage both students and teachers to integrate their learning and pedagogy with their lived reality, producing responsible people and citizens. However, in all these expectations around the role of the digital technology in transforming learning, the idea of grading and evaluation remains unquestioned.</p>
<p>Even in the most radical restructuring of education systems, grades remain an absolute form of quantifying and measuring skills that the student is supposed to demonstrate. Grading might take up different forms — numbers, letters, percentile, etc — or it might take up different methods — continuous grading, take-home exams — but it eventually becomes the only badge that the student takes into the “real world”.</p>
<p>The idea of a badge as an alternative to this particular kind of quantification oriented learning that sees the grade as a final evaluation and in some ways, a termination of the learning process, opens up huge possibilities for how we understand learning. The badge is not imagined as yet another kind of grading, but instead it is recognition of certain skills and competences that we bring to and build in classrooms with our peers. A badge allows the students to recognise their own investment in the learning process, enabling them to realise their particular skills on the way to learning. In any learning environment, students play many roles. Some are good as connectors, some serve as conduits of information, some are good in specific areas and need help with others, some are mentors, some are translators of knowledge, some help in creating new forms of knowledge. Unfortunately, most of our grading patterns refuse to acknowledge and credit these skills which are crucial for surviving the academic world. The ability of the students to badge themselves, and others in their peer groups, acknowledging their contributions to their collective learning, might be the motivation and encouragement that we are looking for.</p>
<p>A peer-2-peer system of badging, which enables learners to be critically aware not only of their own interaction with knowledge, but also recognises the ways in which larger communities of knowledge — including the peers and teachers — opens up an extraordinary way of thinking about education. It disrupts the competitive modes of cut-throat modes of education systems we are building and allows us to re-think the function of education and the role of learners in educational environments. The digital systems of social networking and reputation management, already perform some of these tasks, which is why, a student who might not do well in class might be a YouTube sensation, finding thousands of followers worldwide. Or a student who might not show research aptitude in class might be editing complex Wikipedia entries on subjects that high-level researchers are engaging with. All these digital systems acknowledge the roles that people play in learning and knowledge production, and in that reward of recognition, provide incentives for learners to re-examine their role within knowledge systems.</p>
<p>Such a system of badging, that exceeds the static classroom, allows for students to become stakeholders in their own education, building connected communities of learning. It hints at what the future of education is going to look like. More importantly, it offers a new way of thinking about technology and its role in redesigning education, which is not merely about introducing technologies into classrooms and continuing with the traditional modes of learning through new technology skills. Instead, we have a model for what learning means, how we interact with conditions of knowledge consumption and production, and how, we can form global communities of learning which might find an anchor in the classrooms but also transcend the brick-and-mortar institutions of learning as we understand them.</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/pathways/pinning-the-badge'>https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/pathways/pinning-the-badge</a>
</p>
No publishernishantHigher EducationResearchers at Workdigital pluralismDigital Natives2015-05-08T12:34:23ZBlog EntryThe Digital Classroom: Social Justice and Pedagogy
https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/pathways/facultyworkshop
<b>What happens when we look at the classroom as a space of social justice? What are the ways in which students can be engaged in learning beyond rote memorisation? What innovative methods can be evolved to make students stakeholders in their learning process? These were some of the questions that were thrown up and discussed at the 2 day Faculty Training workshop for participant from colleges included in the Pathways to Higher Education programme, supported by Ford Foundation and collaboratively executed by the Higher Education Innovation and Research Application and the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore.</b>
<p></p>
<p>The workshop focused on 3 chief challenges in contemporary
pedagogy and teaching in higher education in India as identified by <a class="external-link" href="http://heira.in/">HEIRA</a>: The need for innovative
curricula, challenges to social justice in education, and possibilities offered
by the intersection of digital and internet technologies with classroom
teaching and evaluation. In the open discussions, the participating faculty
members used their multidisciplinary skills and teaching experience to look at possibilities that we might implement in our classrooms to create a more
inclusive and participatory environment. The conversations were varied, and
through 3 blog entries I want to capture the focus points of the workshop. In
this first post, I focus specifically on the changing nature of student
engagement with education and innovative ways by which we can learn from the
digital platforms of learning and knowledge production and implement certain
innovations in pedagogy that might better help create inclusive and just learning
environments in the undergraduate classroom in India.</p>
<p><strong>Peer 2 Peer:</strong> One of the observations that was made
unanimously by all the faculty members was that students respond better, learn
faster, engage more deeply with their syllabus when the instructor has a
personal rapport with them. Traditionally, the teachers who have established
human contact which goes beyond the call of duty are also the teachers that
have become catalysts and inspirations for the students. Especially with the
digital aesthetics of non-hierarchical information interaction, this has become
the call of the day.</p>
<p>Establishing the teacher as a peer within the classroom,
rather than the fountainhead of information flow, is an experiment worth
conducting. Like on other digital platforms, can we think of the classroom as a
space where the interlocutors each bring their life experience and learning to
start an information exchange and dialogue that would make them stakeholders in
the process of learning? This would mean that the teacher would be a <em>facilitator</em> who builds conditions of
knowledge production and dissemination, thus also changing his/her relationship
with the idea of curriculum and teaching.</p>
<p><strong>Reciprocal evaluation</strong>: It was pointed out that the grade
oriented academic system often leads to students disengaging with innovative
and meaningful learning practices. With the pressure of completing the
curriculum, the students’ instrumental relationship with their classroom
learning and the highly conservative structures of higher education that do not
offer enough space to experiment with the teaching methods, it often becomes
difficult to initiate innovative pedagogic practices. Learning from the
differently hierarchised digital spaces, it was suggested that one of the ways
by which this could be countered is by introducing reciprocal evaluation
patterns which might not directly be associated with the grades but would
recognise and appreciate the skills that students bring to their learning.</p>
<p>Inspired by the Badges contest at <a class="external-link" href="http://hastac.org/tag/badges">HASTAC</a>,
it was suggested that evaluation has to take into account, more than grades.
Different students bring different skills, experiences, personalities and
behaviours to bear upon the syllabus. They work individually and in clusters to
understand and analyse the curriculum. Recognising these skills and the roles
that they play in their learning environments is essential. Getting students to
offer different badges to each other as well as to the teachers involved, helps
them understand their own learning process and engages them in new ways of
learning.</p>
<p><strong>Role based learning: </strong>Within the Web 2.0 there is a peculiar
condition where individuals are recognised simultaneously as experts and
novices. They bring certain knowledges and experiences to the table which make
them credible sources of information and analysis in those areas. At the same
time, they are often beginner learners in certain other areas and they harness
the power of the web to learn. Such a distributed imagination of a student as
not equally proficient in all areas, but diversely equipped to deal with
different disciplines is missing from our understanding of the higher education
classroom.</p>
<p>We discussed the possibility of making the student responsible not
only for his/her own learning but also the learning of the peers in the
classroom. Making the student aware of what s/he is good at and where s/he is
lacking allows them to gain confidence and also realise that everybody has
differential strengths and aptitudes. Such a classroom might look different
because the students don’t have to be pitched in stressful competition with
each other but instead work collaboratively to learn, research and produce
knowledge in a nurturing and supportive learning environment.</p>
<p>These initial discussions look at the possibility of
innovative classroom teaching that can accommodate for the skills and
differences of the students in higher education in India. The conversations
opened up the idea that the classroom can be reshaped so that it becomes a more
inclusive space where the quality of students’ access to education can be
improved. It also ties in with the larger imagination of classrooms as spaces
where principles of social justice can be invoked so that students who are
disadvantaged in language, learning skills, socio-economic backgrounds, are not
just looked at as either ‘beyond help’ or ‘victims of a system’. Instead, it
encourages to look at the students as differential learners who need to be made
stakeholders in their own processes of learning and education.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/pathways/facultyworkshop'>https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/pathways/facultyworkshop</a>
</p>
No publishernishantHigher EducationAccess to KnowledgeDigital NativesFeaturedNew PedagogiesResearchers at WorkDigital Pluralism2015-05-08T12:36:29ZBlog EntryTechnology, Social Justice and Higher Education
https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/pathways/blog/higher-education
<b>Since the last two years, we at the Centre for Internet and Society, have been working with the Higher Education Innovation and Research Applications at the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society, on a project called Pathways to Higher Education, supported by the Ford Foundation. </b>
<p>The main aim of the project is to research the state of social diversity and justice in undergraduate colleges in India and encourage students to articulate the axes of discrimination and exclusion which might keep them from interacting and engaging with educational resources and systems in their college environments.</p>
<h3>Peer-to-Peer Technologies<br /></h3>
<p>The entry point into these debates was digital technologies, where
through an introduction to peer-to-peer technologies, digital story
telling through various web based platforms, and a collaborative thought
environment mediated by internet and digital technologies, we
facilitated the students to identify, articulate and address questions
of discrimination, change and the possibility of engaging with these
critically in order to build a better learning environment for
themselves (and their peers) in their own colleges.</p>
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<div align="left">Each workshop was designed not only to be sensitive to
the specificities of the locations of the colleges, but also to
accommodate for the needs, desires and aspirations of the students
involved. The participants looked at their own personal, family and
community histories, their everyday experiences, their affective modes
of aspiration and desire, and their own circumstances which often
circumscribe them, in order to come up with certain themes that they
thought were relevant and crucial in their own contexts.</div>
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<p>As a follow-up on the workshops, the students developed specific
projects and activities that will help them strengthen their hypotheses
by looking beyond the personal and finding ways by which they can engage
with the larger communities, spreading awareness, building histories
and acquiring skills to successfully bolster their classroom interaction
and learning.</p>
<p><em>The following is a bird’s eye view of the key themes that have emerged in the workshops:</em></p>
<h3>The Costs of Belonging</h3>
<p>Almost unanimously, though articulating it in different ways, the
students looked at different costs of belonging to a space. Sometimes it
was the space of the web, sometimes of the larger educational
institution, sometimes to distinct language groups which do not treat
English as the lingua franca, and sometimes to communities and friend
circles within the college environment.</p>
<p> </p>
<p align="center"><img src="https://cis-india.org/home-images/problem.jpg/image_preview" title="problems" height="365" width="548" alt="problems" class="image-inline image-inline" /></p>
<div align="left">It was particularly insightful for us to understand
that granting access, providing infrastructure or equipping
‘underprivileged’ students with skills is not enough. In fact, it became
apparent that there is a certain policy driven, post-Mandal affirmative
action that has already bridged the infrastructural and access gap in
the educational institutions. The easy availability of computers,
internet access, the ubiquitous cell phone, were all indicators that for
most of the students, it wasn’t a question of affording access. Even
when we were dealing with economically disadvantaged students, there
were a plethora of technology devices they had access to and familiarity
with. Shared resources, public access to digital technologies, and
institutional support towards promoting digital familiarity all played a
significant role in demystifying the digital for them. In many ways,
these students were digital natives if defined through access, because
they had Facebook accounts and browsed Google to find everything they
wanted. Their phone was an extension of their selves and they used it in
creative ways to communicate and connect with their peers.<br /><br />Based
on this, the students are now prepared to work on documenting,
exploring and raising awareness about these questions, to see what the
gating factors are that disallow people with access to still feel
excluded from the power of the digital.<br /><br /></div>
<h3>The Need for Diversity<br /></h3>
<div align="left"><br />
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<td>It is a telling sign about the state of the Internet in India that every
student presumed that the only way to be really fluent with the digital
web is to be fluent in English. The equation of English being
synonymous with being online was both fascinating and troubling to us.
Of course, a lot of it has to do with India’s own preoccupations, marked
by a postcolonial subjectivity, with English as the language of
modernity and privilege. But it also has to do with the fact that almost
all things digital in India, lack localisation. The digital
technologies and platforms remain almost exclusively in English,
fostered by the fact that input devices (keyboards, for example) and
display interfaces favour English as the language of computing.<br /><br /><br /></td>
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<p>Such an idea might also help in
reducing the distance between those who can fluently navigate the web
through its own language, and those who, through various reasons, find
themselves tentative and intimidated online.</p>
<p>The breakthrough that the
participants had, when they realised that they don’t have to be ‘proper
in English’ while being online – the ability to find local language
resources, fonts, translation machines, and the possibility of
transliterating their local language in the Roman script was a learning
lesson for us.</p>
<h3>Peer-to-Peer (P2P) Learning</h3>
<div align="left">As a part of their orientation to the world of the
digital, especially with the methodologies of the workshops, the
students literally had an overnight epiphany where they could see the
possibilities and potentials of P2P learning. The recognition that they
are not merely recipients of knowledge but also bearers of experience
and contexts which are rich and replete with knowledge, gave them new
insights on how to approach learning and education. Through digital
storytelling, the workshops demonstrated how, in our own stories and
accounts of life, there are many indicators and factors which can help
us engage with the realities of exclusion and injustice.<br /><br />Working
together in groups, not only to excavate knowledge from the outside, as
it were, but also to unearth the knowledge, experience, stories,
emotions that we all carry with ourselves and can serve as valuable
tools to bring to the classroom, is a lesson that all the groups
learned. The idea of a peer also led them to question the established
hierarchies within formal education. What was particularly interesting
was that they did not – as is often the case – translate P2P into DIY
education. They recognised that there are certain knowledge and skill
gaps that they would like experts to address and have incorporated
special trainings with different experts in areas of language,
communication, ethnography, interviews, film making, etc. However, the
methods for these trainings are going to emphasise a more P2P structure
that is different from the regular classroom learning.<br /><br />What would
happen if a teacher is looked at as a peer rather than a superior? How
would they navigate curricula if the scope of their learning was greater
than the curricula? How could they work together to learn from each
other, different ways of learning and understanding? These are some of
the questions that get reflected in their proposed campus activities,
where they are trying to now produce knowledge about their communities,
cities, families, groups and experiences, by conducting surveys,
ethnographies, historical archive work, etc. The digital helps them in
not only disseminating the information they are collecting but also in
re-establishing their relationship with learning and knowledge.<br /><br /><img src="https://cis-india.org/home-images/workshop.jpg/image_preview" title="classroom" height="337" width="509" alt="classroom" class="image-inline image-inline" /><br />
<div align="center"><br />
<div align="left">Ideas like open space dialogues, collaborative
story-telling, mobilising resources for knowledge production, creating
awareness campaigns and interacting with a larger audience through the
digital platforms are now a part of their proposals and promise to show
some creative, innovative and interesting uses of these technologies.
How the teachers would react to such an imagination of the students as
peers within the formal education system, remains to be seen as we
organise a faculty training workshop later in December. <br /><br />These
three large themes find different articulations, interpretations and
executions in different locations. However, they seem to be emerging as
the new forms of social exclusion that we need to take into account. It
is apparent that the role of technologies – both at the level of usage
and of imagination – is crucial in shaping these forms of social
inequities. But the technologies can also facilitate negotiations and
engagements with these concerns by providing new forms of knowledge
production and pedagogy, which can help the students in developing
better learning environments and processes. The Pathways to Higher
Education remains committed to not only documenting these learnings but
also to see how they might be upscaled and integrated into mainstream
learning within higher education in India.</div>
</div>
</div>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/pathways/blog/higher-education'>https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/pathways/blog/higher-education</a>
</p>
No publisherpraskrishnaFeaturedHigher EducationResearchers at WorkDigital Knowledge2015-03-30T14:54:21ZBlog EntryLearn it Yourself
https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/pathways/blog/learn-it
<b>The peer-to-peer world of online learning encourages conversations and reciprocal learning, writes Nishant Shah in an article published in the Indian Express on 30 October 2011. </b>
<p>Technologies and learning have always had a close link. In the past,
distance learning programmes of higher education through the postal
service, remote education programmes using satellite TV and interactive
learning projects using information and communication infrastructure,
have all been deployed with varied results in promoting literacy and
higher education. In the last two decades, the internet has also joined
this technology ecology in trying to provide quality and affordable
education to remotely located areas through “citizen service centres”
envisioned to reach 6,40,000 Indian villages in the future.</p>
<p>These technology-based information outreach programmes expand the
ability of traditional formal learning centres like universities, to
cater to the needs of those who might not have access to learning
resources. This vision of networked education relies on existing systems
of centralised syllabus making, teacher-to-student information
transfer, grade-based evaluation and accreditation systems, and a
degree-centred approach to learning.</p>
<p>I was in New York last week, at an international summit on the future
of learning, Mobility Shifts, organised by the New School, where more
than 260 speakers from 21 countries discussed the possibility of
learning beyond the bounds of the school and university system. Many
discussions were around the declining public education system (with huge
disinvestment moves from the government), privatisation of education,
increasing tuition and fees, and the non-relevance of current education.
However, along with this digital expansion of the traditional education
system is an emerging trend that challenges the ways in which we
understand education and learning – DIY Learning or Do It Yourself
Learning.</p>
<p>DIY Learning is a product of the networked condition. It recognises
that as more people get onto digital information networks, there is a
possibility of producing peer-to-peer learning conditions, which do not
have to follow our accepted models of learning and education.</p>
<p>We have seen the rise of various decentralised and democratised
knowledge repositories like Wikipedia. The search based algorithms of
search engines also take into consideration the idea that knowledge is
personal. User generated content sites like eHow.com show that the
individual learner is not merely a recipient of information and
knowledge. Information seeking spaces like Quora have shown that
knowledge-sharing communities can incite new conditions of learning. Our
contexts, experiences, everyday practices, aspirations etc. equip us
with valuable information, which not only shape how we learn but also
what we find relevant to learn for ourselves. DIY Learning picks up on
the idea that the infrastructure of education is not necessarily
designed towards learning. Learning often happens outside the
classrooms, in informal conversations.</p>
<p>Thus DIY Learning offers a new model of learning. It destabilises the
established hierarchy of knowledge production and pedagogy and creates
an each-one-teach-one model with a twist. Instead of a centralised board
of curriculum designer who shape syllabi for the “average” student, you
have the possibility of customised, highly individual, interest-based
learning curricula where the student is a part of deciding what s/he
wants to learn. DIY Learning doesn’t recognise the distinctions between
teachers and students, but recognises them as “peers” within a network,
encouraging conversations and reciprocal learning rather than
information transfer based classroom models. Instead of mass-produced
education that caters only to an imagined average, the DIY Learning
model recognises that within the same student group, there are different
rates and scales of learning, thus offering environments suited to the
aptitude of the students.</p>
<p>Within the DIY Learning model, aspects of education, from the design
of curriculum and learning methods, to grading and evaluation are geared
towards individual preferences and aspirations.</p>
<p>Many people think of DIY Learning as an alternative to mainstream
learning processes and structures. However, it is perhaps more fruitful
to think of DIY Learning as a way of figuring out the problems that
beset our traditional educational system. It allows us to rethink the
relationships between learning, education, teaching and technologies. It
recalibrates the space of the classroom and reconfigures the role of
the teacher and the student.</p>
<p>DIY Learning emphasises that merely building schools and universities
is not enough to assure that learning happens. Learning happens through
experiences, practice, conversations, internalisations and through
making mistakes. DIY Learning offers these possibilities in an education
universe that is constantly refusing to take risks, innovate and adapt
to the needs of the present. By itself it might not be able to take on
the roles and functions of the existing education systems. But it does
warn us that we are preparing our students for our pasts rather than
their futures. And the time to change is now.</p>
<p>The original story was published in the Indian Express, it can be read <a class="external-link" href="http://www.indianexpress.com/news/learn-it-yourself/867069/">here</a></p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/pathways/blog/learn-it'>https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/pathways/blog/learn-it</a>
</p>
No publishernishantHigher EducationResearchers at WorkDigital Knowledge2015-05-14T12:08:32ZBlog Entry