A case for open academic spaces As students are penalised for independent thinking, universities and colleges are losing their spirit

A case for open academic spaces

As students are penalised for independent thinking, universities and colleges are losing their spirit

The task of a modern educator is not to cut down jungles, but to irrigate deserts.

– C.S. Lewis 

Chronicles of Narnia

Let this prescription resonate loud and clear in all the educational institutions of the country. Colleges and universities must regain the spirit they lost ever since they turned into degree-production units.

With the proliferation of professional educational institutions, the concept of colleges underwent a radical change from a sarvakalashala to an extended school system with closed academic spaces, where students are often penalised for independent thinking: forget about thinking aloud. 

The severest exposition of this syndrome was the banning of student politics from some colleges and universities based on the naive argument that universities and colleges are spaces for learning. Of course, they are. But learning is much more than what lies within the lines of textbooks and what is learnt in enclosed classrooms. Higher educational institutions today have become more important in shaping one’s career and much less in shaping one’s character.

Mandatory attendance to the tune of 25 per cent to 50 per cent or more is a norm in most of the universities today. The attendance norm is tied to eligibility to write examinations. Attendance is also a major criterion that determines a student’s internal evaluation marks or grades. 

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Google’s search finds a future where devices don’t matter: It’s all AI

In the foreseeable future, we likely won’t even notice our devices. That’s the vision Google CEO Sundar Pichai cast in the search giant’s annual shareholder letter. In a section subtitled “The power of machine learning and artificial intelligence,” Pichai sets the stage for the future as Google sees it. “We’ve been building the best AI team and tools for years, and recent breakthroughs will allow us to do even more,” he writes.

This year’s shareholder letter was the first since the announcement of Alphabet last August as the Google parent company. It’s also the first time anyone other than original Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin wrote the letter. Search is what got Google started and search is Google’s future. It’s our future too, but search is already different today than it was in 1998 when Google launched, and someday it will be vastly different than it is today. Artificial intelligence and machine learning will assist and work for us in ways we can only begin to imagine. The way Nvidia’s GPU-based system trains driverless carsby watching humans drive, gathering massive amounts of data, and then 

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Digital Solutions in India 2016: A Multitude of Outstanding Projects

What went into the initial stages of planning and executing a digital publishing project? Which area posed the biggest challenge? What happened after the project was near completion? Here, 18 digital-solutions providers talk about their unique projects and give a broad idea on the type of services that they offer to book and journal publishers.

A major backlist digitization project involving books for a multinational book and journal publisher was the highlight at Aaltech Group. "The entire backlist of 700 titles was converted into three different formats—ePub, Mobi, and print PDF. In view of the project scale, our technology team first developed a cost-effective transformation workflow that was tailored to the publisher's specific needs and type of titles. Then, the output files were QA-tested before they were delivered to the publisher," says director P. Shivaalkar, adding that all 700 titles were digitized within four weeks.

For another project involving highly interactive online courses that are to be made accessible on mobile, tablet and PC platforms, the Aaltech team decided to use Adobe Edge Animate CC to create a wide variety of interactivities that were customizable and applicable to content from different subject areas. "Games, drag-and-drop, quizzes, and interactive diagrams were some of the activities used in these online courses. For us, the goals of this project were obvious: reducing the development and production costs, and shortening the production time even as we looked for ways to enrich the courses," adds v-p for business development Thiru Baskaran.

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