How to improve education in India: a proposal
1. Making Internet Access a Legal Right in IndiaThis week, Finland passed a law that made
1Mb Broadband Access a legal right. In the United Kingdom, Martha Lane Fox, a successful Internet entrepreneur of Lastminute.com fame has been chosen to head a
'Digital Inclusion' project of the U.K. government. Her mandate is to make
sure that the 4 million
"socially excluded" UK citizens falling behind in areas such as health, education, income and housing get help to use the Internet to improve their lives.
They want to enable the socially excluded people make informed decisions using the Internet - help them use comparison shopping online for
"energy [purchases], insurance, clothing and package holidays".
Miss Fox estimates that through comparison shopping on the internet, each household might save £560, the lowest-income household saving £300 annually.
Now you might ask whether internet access is only about internet shopping and saving money, and you are right.
In a developing country, Internet access is about access to two extremely important things,
A. Quality Education: (more on that below.)
B. Quality news: access to more news means access to more sides of every story and figuring out the spin put out by government, big business and vested interests.
By some estimates, the government spends Rs. 4500 per children per year on education. Out of that we can allot Rs. 1200 (@100/month) for Internet access.
We can't match the Scandinavian countries for the quality of mobile and internet reach. A 1 mb/month connection costs Rs. 1200 in Delhi. A commercial 256 kbps connection costs Rs. 500 in the cities [with download caps] Considering the number of students in this country of 1 billion +, we can do some workaround the maths, add some government help, and make sure we are able to connect every school and library in this country. You can also cut down on internet costs by capping downloads, synchronizing off line content with cloud etc.
2. Solve the education quality problem
I think that in India Universal internet access is more important that universal primary education. By law, we might have made Universal education up till 14 years a right but we have not made the conditions for quality education services.
Until we have made
service quality a right, this law is good on paper and for providing lifelong employment to the untrained, undisciplined people in name of education.
Once we have internet access for everyone, we can get educators of repute, along with subject matter experts to set up
a curated portal of quality educational content, across all disciplines and grades, sourcing content and links from, and not limited to Wikipedia, MIT OCW, and the Educational Channel on Youtube. Just Google and Curate, dammit.
On the
device front, we can make sure the educational content is available, for example, battery of quizzes on mobile devices and low cost computing devices, such as the OLPC.
While we are discussing law making the issue of 'service quality',
why don't we make it a legal requirement that all government-funded educational institutions video record all their lectures and post them online, on the above mentioned curated website, or to any of the big web 2.o services such as Youtube.com, along with lectures notes and study material - this includes the IIM, IIT too.
I want the caste system in India's education system to end.
If a privately funded MIT can put all its content online, free for all, why can't our IITs and IIMs?By making some useful tinkering with the law, through some generous and creative use of public moneys, and by combining low cost technologies with quality (and free) information, we might be able to improve the educational level of India.
Labels: digital divide, education, india
Why Digg needs editors - Part 2
I still think Digg would be a better resource for all of us who are looking for
'news with the context'/the big picture.
I found the above image
'If Digg were a newspaper' on the Shortformblog blog.
Yes, Digg needs editors. Editors to curate what goes on to topic-specific front pages. The traffic is huge, the comments are getting better and at times they inform me on issues I previously knew little about.
In case of some topics, Digg is approaching Slashdot like quality, but then we have to remember that Slashdot has moderation, while Digg has stupid bury brigades. If you want to deal with spammers, trolls, duplicate content, do it properly and openly, not firing from free-ranging cabals.
BTW, did you know the New York Times has a whole department moderating the comments?
Related stories about Digg on this blogDigg in print?Creating a Digg about DiggsLoving Digg, why?Getting on top of Digg is out, becoming a top digger is inLabels: Digg, social news
UGC 1 Politicians 0: The unstoppable rise of the citizen's voice
Everyone a reporter now. The rise of user-generated content on the internet and mobiles is forcing politicians to the proverbial wall, making them do more stupid things, as in the case of African countries of Namibia and Botswana where politicians are hitting back at citizen reporters with
Medieval/Soviet tactics.
Rattled by the loss of control over information (actually, the flow of it), politicians have reduced to leveling charges of racism in case of an editor in Namibia, and in Botswana they have passed laws making it mandatory for journalists and bloggers to register themselves with the government.
In this mighty age of user-generated content, will they require the whole country to register themselves?
Labels: citizen journalism, legal, mobile, User generated Content
Khabar Lahariya: How a local print newspaper still makes a difference
The Columbia Journalism Review has this beautiful, inspiring story about a local print, biweekly newspaper called '
Khabar Lahariya' ('
The Wave of News' in English) in the local bundeli language, staffed by 20 local women, who are either high school or college grads and freshers.
Started some seven years ago, Khabar Lehariya has a circulation of 35,000 and sells for two rupees (four cents, roughly the cost of a cup of tea in Bundelkhand, a hot and dry region in central India, famous for its bandits, harsh landscapes (think of Robert Rodriguez's Mexico movies), the place where Lord Rama lived and most importantly, for rains that almost always disappoint.
Focus of coverage: To cover all "local issues", all that the main press ignores -
untouchability, dominance of upper castes, banditry, women's rights education, governance (rather, the lack of it)...it is an endless list of problems in India's heartlands, mercifully untouched by the malls.
A paper like this might do great with help of cheap technology like mobiles, for example, for filing voice and SMS-based reports.
How much will take for similar local village journalism initiatives to bloom in 600-odd districts throughout India?At 20 reporters per district, Rs. 5000 ($100) per month, that comes to $24,000/year per district and $14,4000,00/year ($14.4 million) for whole of India. That is what I have in mind. At the current budget for the completely unnecessary Commonwealth Games, we could have funded this
'non-profit local news across India' initiative for 50 years, at least, give or take another 50 years.
Labels: bighow, citizen journalism, local news
The best SEO/SMM tip ever
"Make something great. Tell people about it. Do it again."Nothing can be more simple (and demanding).
So, why pay for SEO when you can get it for free? In an article titled '
Spammers, Evildoers, and Opportunists', Derek Powazek zips through the SEO industry and offers the aforementioned piece of priceless online marketing wisdom.
Why pay for common and obvious pieces of SEO advice?Derek says,
Look under the hood of any SEO plan and you'll find advice like this: make sure to use keywords in the headline, use proper formatting, provide summaries of the content, include links to relevant information. All of this is a good idea, and none of it is a secret. It's so obvious, anyone who pays for it is a fool.
Google is actually waiting for you to find loopholes in the search algorithmDerek:
Occasionally a darkside SEO master may find some loophole in the Google algorithm to exploit, which might actually lead to an increase in traffic. But that ill-gotten traffic gain won't last long. Google changes the way it ranks its index monthly (if not more), so even if some SEO technique worked, and usually they don't, it'll last for a couple weeks, tops.
Folks, isn't that also the best SMM tip ever?
Labels: SEO, SMM, tip
Where do Indian bloggers go from here?
So, we are in the 10th year of the blog. The Mint business newspaper has done a couple of nice stories on blogging in India and concludes
"A decade on, Indian blogs remain mostly urban, niche". That is to say
9 out of 10 Indian users are not interested in blogging. The Mint story quotes the India Online 2008 report and I am using data from the comments:
Interactive blogging is the least popular social interactivity activity online with only 10% internet users commenting on blogs and only 8% internet users owning a blog site.
Where is my revolution that I was promised?Yes, some people are blogging, but as the Mint article says and my experiences suggest the same,
most of the top bloggers have writing/reporting backgrounds or they have paying gigs that doesn't involve writing.What do these people write on? -
Cricket, movies, humor, if it is not their latest culinary or travel adventure. Barring a few, a pretty mundane and bland offering.
I like to compare Indian blogging to the wave of
'Me, My family, My Ancestors and my Hometown' kind of books that Indian authors have grown famous for in the past 10 years.
Sure, there have been some fine momonts as well
- the IIPM scandal, the Tsunami reportage... sadly, nothing like a disaster to wake the Indian blogging lion.
Blogging has given voice to the marginalized but by and large, the masses have yet to use its power to raise voices, channelize their collective force and bring much-needed change in their lives.
In the 5 years that I have been blogging, almost all of the people I knew who blogged have sort of given up on it and taken to other jobs.
Some Indian bloggers have had success in
using blogging as a tool for getting better jobs. But, one can count these successes on one's fingers.
Not surprisingly, most Indian bloggers want to make money from blogging. So far,
Amit Agarwal, who studied at the IIT and blogs about tips and tools, towers over everyone in minting money from digital words, but I am not sure how much IIT has got to do with it.
However, I am most disappointed by the approach of influential and powerful Indians. Barring your average bollywood type, who mostly writes for self-promotion purposes, most Indian teacher & professors, top lawyers, doctors, bureaucrats, cops and people in other responsible positions do not blog.
Which is a pity. One of the most popular blogs in the United States,
Marginal Revolution is written by an Economist, Tyler Cowen.
I wish if we had blogs by good doctors. That would help demystify the Swine flu pandemic. Besides, blogging might help bring trasparency in the Indian government system, at the Center as well as at the local level.
Indian that I am, I could go on and on about where do Indian bloggers go from here - suffice to say I wish
'roti (food), kapdaa (clothing), makaan (house) and blogging' becomes a universal necessity.
Related Must Reads on the State of Indian BloggingThe top Indian bloggers across various categories - a subjective but useful list
A simple guide to the best moments in Indian Blogging History - the best and the worst moments in these 10 years
A simple guide to the satte of Indian blogosphere - about vested interests among bloggers
The State of Citizen Journalism in India - a story in three parts
The Indian Elections and the reality of India Online - On lack of quality inputs by digital citizens
Ending it with the legal fineprint
A simple guide to legal issues for Indian JournalistA simple guide to the Internet and cyber laws in IndiaLabels: blogging, india, report
An age of hobbyists journalists?
Explorations into the changing landscape of 21st century journalism continue to bring in new themes -
citizen journalism; everyone is a journalist, two-way conversation, web filters, web curators, the people formerly known as the audience, twitter reporting, and of course bloggers. Add 'hobbyist journalist' to the mix.
In an interview, Wired editor Chris Anderson, of the Long Tail fame says :
"Maybe the media is going to be a part-time job..."Maybe media won't be a job at all, but will instead be a hobby,"
A let down or a leg up?
Labels: new media, trends
Blogger 1 Twitter 0
Touted as the '
first draft of history', Twitter is also a tower of babel built on 140 characters at a time. Twitter might be a useful tool to break stories, it is useless to make sense as the story develops, because the activity on Twitter deteriorates into tweets, retweets, rants and it becomes a virtual dust-storm of sorts.
It takes human intervention to guide users through that storm of data, through careful curation. In context of the election controversy in Iran, The Economist magazine
praises the work of select bloggers who monitored the internet and helped readers make sense of what is happening in Iran.
The Economist writes,
Much more impressive were the desk-bound bloggers. Nico Pitney of the Huffington Post, Andrew Sullivan of the Atlantic and Robert Mackey of the New York Times waded into a morass of information and pulled out the most useful bits. Their websites turned into a mish-mash of tweets, psephological studies, videos and links to newspaper and television reports. It was not pretty, and some of it turned out to be inaccurate. But it was by far the most comprehensive coverage available in English.
So much so for the demise of blogging, we were being forced to believe.
Labels: blogging, social media, twitter
How to improve quality of online comments
At best, comments are distractions or ego-boosts , depending on the bloggers personality. Once you read the first 5-10 comments below a highly commented-upon post, you know you have read all the comments - it is rambling echo chamber, if not a free-for-all self-promotion pulpit.
Writing about the disappointing quality of online comments,
Virginia Heffernan writes in The New York Times,
Commenters, in short, rarely really sock it to a columnist. They also too often go automatic, churning out 100-word synopses of one stock ideological position after another.
But most disappointing of all, for readers, is that commenters don’t, as literary critics say, read an article against itself to show how, for example, an argument framed as incendiary is in fact banal, or one that’s meant to be feminist is retrogressive, or one that touts its originality is a knockoff.
How do we fix online commenting? Virginia offers her solution, citing the example of Slate.com:
Creating registration standards, inventive means of moderating and displaying comments, membership benefits for regular posters and ratings systems for useful comments are just some of the ways that other news outlets like Slate have improved the quality of reader responses.
Labels: howto, online journalism
The coming age of booklogs
In short, booklogs are excerpts from books posted as blog articles and readers rate them, add comments a nd so on, sort of Youtube for books. Again, copyright issues will be sent for a toss but I think writers of controversial and racy paragraphs will find it easy to develop a following.
Booklogs will be fueled by Amazon's e-book reader Kindle, which is still in its early days. Steven Johnson writes about
booklogs in the Wall Street Journal:
As the writer and futurist Kevin Kelly says, "In the new world of books, every bit informs another; every page reads all the other pages."
Labels: blogging, blooks, booklogs, trends
