BasicVersity.com: Test your basic knowledge of anything
I had been working on
BasicVersity.com for a year. Now, it is live and running. BasicVersity is an online education site where you can practice and test your basic knowledge of all topics -
basic maths,
it-skills,
business skills,
soft skills,
certifications,
health sciences,
engineering, as well as standardized tests including, but not limited to,
SAT,
CLEP,
AP,
DSST,
GRE,
GMAT and many more.
Currently there are around 180,000 questions in 1500 tests across 700 topics.
I shall not forget to mention that it is all free. If you think you are up to date on online marketing, I suggest you go test your knowledge on
BasicVersity right now!
Labels: basicversity, education, online learning
100 Acronyms that teach us: Now available as a free Android app
Labels: app, education, mobile, thesuccessmanual
Introducing three new collections of useful advice: The Gist, Rules for Startups, and Rules for Writers
I just finished updating
The Success Manual. Simultaneously, I also compiled 3 new collections of useful advice from the best sources.
1.
The Gist: 1000+ Big Ideas From 200+ Greatest Business & Self-Improvement Books of all time.
2.
Rules for Startups: Compilation of big ideas about startups from 50+ Best Books on Entrepreneurship.
3.
Rules for Writers: 200+ Big Ideas about Writing from Great Writers.
I hope you will find them useful.
Labels: ebooks, education
Elizabeth Warren: There is nobody who got rich on his own. Nobody
Elizabeth Warren is the law professor who earned everyone's praise for her performance as
the chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel created to oversee the U.S. banking bailout (formally known as the Troubled Assets Relief Program). Now she is a United States Senate candidate.
Here's her
socio-economic lesson for those who called Pres. Barack Obama’s proposed new tax increases for the rich (up from 35% to 39%) as “
class warfare”.
I hear all this, you know, ‘Well, this is class warfare, this is whatever.' No. There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody.
You built a factory out there? Good for you. But I want to be clear: you moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for; you hired workers the rest of us paid to educate; you were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn't have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory, and hire someone to protect against this, because of the work the rest of us did.
Now look, you built a factory and it turned into something terrific, or a great idea? God bless. Keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.
A good education for the 'cult of self-made' so popular nowadays.
Labels: education, entrepreneurs, politics
Seth Godin's High School Curriculum
A list of things Seth Godin wants
high schoolers to learn (my favorite is at the bottom of the list):
1. How to focus intently on a problem until it's solved.
2. The benefit of postponing short-term satisfaction in exchange for long-term success.
3. How to read critically.
4. The power of being able to lead groups of peers without receiving clear delegated authority.
5. An understanding of the extraordinary power of the scientific method, in just about any situation or endeavor.
6. How to persuasively present ideas in multiple forms, especially in writing and before a group.
7. Project management. Self-management and the management of ideas, projects and people.
8. Personal finance. Understanding the truth about money and debt and leverage.
9. An insatiable desire (and the ability) to learn more. Forever.
10. Most of all, the self-reliance that comes from understanding that relentless hard work can be applied to solve problems worth solving.
Labels: education
How young people can achieve true happiness: Every course you take should be about who you are going to marry
New York Times columnist and author David Brooks has just written '
The Social Animal: A Story of How Success Happens', where he says that '
the path our lives take is for the most part decided by inner workings over which we have little control. Or little control until now.'
His
advice for young people seeking happiness in life:
I tell university students that every course they take should be about who they are going to marry,...They should read novels about marriage. They should study the neuroscience and psychology of marriage. Universities should offer one course after another in marriage. But our institutions are structured based on this false view of human nature, so they emphasise the professional skills, which are important, but they underemphasise the things that seem soft and squishy and frankly unmanly.
Labels: books, education, happiness
Is Meritocracy a sham?: What happens after you get into an IIT/IIM or beyond
So, you got "
coached". Passed the entrance exams. Got yourself on the path to a secure life ahead. But, what do you actually contribute to society? Do you live up to the reputation of how "
brainy" you are?
I often hear stories about arrogant IITians in companies who treat students from lesser institutes (as well as people with experience) with disdain, doing little work, bossing over others, and obsessing over EMIs and latest consumer aspirations. Same goes for IIM type people. I wonder how many of these stories are true.
Is this all what the IIT/IIM dream was about? Becoming rabid consumers? Is Meritocracy a sham? Nothing but fancy-word, poster art for the aspirational middle class?
Relevant Read:
What becomes of Asian-American overachievers after the test-taking ends?Labels: education, india, trends
Book literacy in India
We have plenty of colleges and universities in India. But, not enough, considering our population. A look at
some numbers:
20 central universities.
215 state universities.
100 deemed universities.
5 institutions established and functioning under the State Act.
13 institutes of national importance.
16000 colleges (including 1800 exclusive women's colleges), affiliated to these universities and institutions.
1522+ degree-granting engineering colleges in India, who take in 582,000 new students each year.
1,244 polytechnics who take in 265,000 each year.
These educational institutions are churning graduates by the millions. But,
how many of these people actually read books? Let's see what's happening in the U.S. Below are some facts about
literacy in the U.S.:
42 percent of college graduates never read another book after college.
80 percent of U.S. families did not buy or read a book last year.
70 percent of U.S. adults have not been in a bookstore in the last five years.
I think the corresponding Indian numbers would be more disheartening.
Labels: education, india
How Corrupt India's Higher Education System Really Is
Notes from an excellent article on the state of India's
corrupt Higher Education system, and from an
overview at Nanopolitan:
1. 30% of all Indian students pay bribes to get into colleges after having failed entrance exams. (Figure may be higher at colleges with the so-called '
management quota'.
2. Fees at a typical tech institute are 3 times that of those at an IIT.
3. At many colleges, you can get test papers for a price.
4. At many colleges, you can bribe to get better marks in the internal exams.
5. At many colleges, you can bribe the lab people to meet your quota of lab attendance.
6. Most Indian institutes and universities have to pay bribes to get the desired accredition from AICTE, MCI, and others.
7. In 2010, some IIT Kharagpur Professors were found to be running their own private college on the side, called the Institution of Electrical Engineers (India).
Also read: Does India really need more colleges and universities?
Do we need more MBAs?
How to improve education in India: A proposalLabels: education, india
Does India Really Need More Colleges and Universities?
While the rest of the world is considering the
death/irrelevancy of colleges/universities,
questioning their monopolies as
Givers of Degrees, and while the rest of the world is benefiting from brilliant educational innovations such as the
Khan Academy, MIT
Open Courseware,
http://schools-wikipedia.org/Wikipedia content in schools, among other great initiatives, India is stuck in web of greedy for-profit educational institutions and pliable governments, who are only too eager to please corporate education efforts (read this Business Standard story about
government largesse towards corporate universities).
There is some innovation happening in the field of education in India: For example, IITs and IISc courses being converted into
freely available videos. NGOs such as
Pratham are doing some good work. But India is a country of 400+ million students, and Government plans such as Right to Education (RTE) and Sarvasiksha Abhiyan are simply not effective.
All the government wants to do in the name of promoting education in India is to privatize higher education,
authorizing moneyed players to loot students, by claiming that they have teachers from abroad.
Yes, the same teachers that the West is discarding for being ineffective and irrelevant. India has always been a haven for discarded and outdated professionals.
At least, Kapil Sibal should put in an independent Education Regulatory Authority of India, which sees to it that our students aren't being
defrauded in name of good education.
As far as Colleges and universities are concerned, why must we blindly copy concepts from the West? Things that they themselves are questioning?
Education cannot be a business: Think
Campusless teaching. Think Apprenticeships. Think Continuous Learning.
Labels: education, india
Why much of what investment bankers do is socially worthless
"
Banking is important, banks are not". Translated for the field of education, this prescient dictum would say "
Education is important. Schools are not." It doesn't surprise me that both banks and schools are ripe for revolution. This must-read New Yorker article correctly describes
banking as a utility:
Most people on Wall Street, not surprisingly, believe that they earn their keep, but at least one influential financier vehemently disagrees: Paul Woolley, a seventy-one-year-old Englishman who has set up an institute at the London School of Economics called the Woolley Centre for the Study of Capital Market Dysfunctionality. "Why on earth should finance be the biggest and most highly paid industry when it's just a utility, like sewage or gas?" Woolley said to me when I met with him in London. "It is like a cancer that is growing to infinite size, until it takes over the entire body."
Labels: education, finance, trends
The Simple MBA Manifesto: Do We Really Need MBAs?
I just uploaded a presentation titled "Do we really need MBAs?" Many will disagree but I firmly believe the MBA concept is way, way over-hyped. You will also find some solutions in the later part of this presentation. By the way this was also the idea behind me creating
The Success Manual. You will find more Success Manual articles
here.
Labels: business, education, presentation
Media Meltdown and the Value of Media Literacy for All
In my old school, they are teaching computers and programming languages from Class 6 - onwards. It is an elite school. That is expected of an elite school. Sadly, not elite enough to teach
Media Literacy to a generation weaned on a media diet of aspirational, exploitative, and silly notions.
The kids need to catch the message behind the message. The kids need to identify the pervasive web of vested interests of big media companies. The kids need a book such as "
Media Meltdown", a graphic novel about media literacy for kids, written by Liam O'Donnell and illustrated by Mike Deas.
BoingBoing
explains the plot of the comic book,
(the book wants to) teach kids how to question the media they get, and to make their own. It follows the adventures of a group of kids who have discovered that the local monster-home developer is up to no good, and is getting away with it because he's a heavy advertiser with the town's only media company, which owns the newspaper, stadium, and TV station. Working together, they break the story on their own, using the Web, and along the way they learn to analyze the media they receive, to use that analysis in making their own media, and to work with others to get their message across.
Labels: book publishing, education, graphic novel, media ethics, media literacy
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
The only course in Online Writing that you must take (sort of)
There are no clear cut solutions for people to money in a Google-ruled world but check this (non)course in online writing titled '
Writing for Nonreaders in the Postprint Era' on Mcsweeney's, the list-making site for the smart set. Check out the prerequisites for the course:
Students must have completed at least two of the following.
ENG: 232WR—Advanced Tweeting: The Elements of Droll
LIT: 223—Early-21st-Century Literature: 140 Characters or Less
ENG: 102—Staring Blankly at Handheld Devices While Others Are Talking
ENG: 301—Advanced Blog and Book Skimming
ENG: 231WR—Facebook Wall Alliteration and Assonance
LIT: 202—The Literary Merits of Lolcats
LIT: 209—Internet-Age Surrealistic Narcissism and Self-Absorption
Labels: education, funny, online journalism
Would you like a degree in Facebook, Orkut and Twitter?
And while we are at it, a degree in blogging, podcasting and using Flickr? And be willing to pay $5676 for the course? The Birmingham City University in UK is offering
a course in Social media. Commenting on this course, columnist on Politico website says this on
Twitter,
Is about as brilliant as a degree in email would have been ten years ago.
What do I think? For $5776, I could pay for a couple of online journalists at my startup for local journalism,
Bighow. For $5776, I could have gone ahead with my planned series of free Online Journalism Courses across India, being able to hold at least 6 of such events. The basic course material is already up
here.
Bottomline: nothing like learning by doing. Start learning about social media by registering for a couple of social networking sites and blog daily.
Labels: education, social media
Curriculum 2.0: How to raid a bank
According to the
Information Times, students at Guangdong University of Foreign Studies in China have an assignment with a difference: they must plan to rob a bank with a team of six under seven minutes.
Through this radical assignment, the teacher wants to teach students
how to "allocate resources economically and efficiently."The above image is a sample layout of a target bank from the assignment.
Link
viaRelated: Idea of the year: Bachelor of inventionLabels: curriculum, education, innovation, students
Idea of the year: why not have bachelors of invention?
Trevor Baylis has proposed a breakthrough idea about ideas, laying out that students of the 21st century have a first hand knowledge of all topics related to the art (or science, depends on who is talking) of invention.
Advocating that the Generation Y (or Z…what ever happened to Generation A-W?) gets a head start in their life, Trevor proposes a new course the study, leading to a
Bachelor Degree in Inventing, where students get to know things like
intellectual property, disclosure, trademarks, patents, business plans, creating prototypes, raising venture capital, the history of invention…and so on.
If the curriculum makers of the world respond to it in an enthusiastic fashion, it will indeed be cool.
Read more
here.
Labels: education, innovation, invention
Top 5 things I would do if I were in charge of Wikipedia
Hypothesizing about a probable Wikipedia Educational Foundation, during a break from his busy schedule (yeah, right), my good friend
Jayanta Bhattacharya listed out five things that he would do if God (Or, some rich person with tonnes of hard cash lying around - Jonty mentions that Anil Ambani might be a good fit) intervened, buying out Wikiepdia, and conveniently putting my fantasy-prone albeit highly- learned friend in charge.
A small Todo list that emerged from our talks:1. Allow every single person to make their personal pages in Wikipedia along with their achievements (or non- achievements) in life.
2. They will be charged a 5-dollar entry fee. That money would go towards the funding of schools in poor countries.
3. Bring out hard copies of Wikipedia to distribute amongst poor populations.
4. Allow sponsorships by the way of banners etc for a premium from companies. (no Google Adsense) and then use the money for purely benevolent purposes, primarily on education - education is empowerment.
5. If there is a lot of money in the coffers, Jonty would like to start the
Wikipedia Educational Foundation, opening schools and knowledge centers around the world, running educational satellite channels etc. The education would be free and the schools will not be affiliated to any boards but a central
WEF board.
This way, general education around the world would be of the same standard, but different countries would have different history, civic and law syllabus.
Bonus: And make Wikipedia the primary search engine on the Internet.
What would you do if you were in charge of Wikipedia?Labels: education, google, User generated Content, wiki, wikipedia
