we, the power of people

Today April 30, 2009 was the voting day for Mumbai, Maharashtra, India for the 15th Loksabha Elections.

Yes, as a responsible citizen I did Vote !!

It was really a very easy affair. It took just 10-15 min. of time to vote. But before voting day, it was worth to know about the registration procedures, voters list, about the constituenciences, to know the candidates with their detail profiles, and other related information. I think this election mostly used the internet technology to spread the awareness and share the information. The websites and organizations such as jaagore.com, myobv.com, ceomaharashtra.gov.in have been very useful to have the information.

The results of the Loksabha elections will be up on the 16th May 2009. Let us see..

Khoj 2008 – Gurgaon

Like last year, I was invited to be a judge for the International School Competition on Science Projects in DAV Public School at Gurgaon. The projects dealt on issues of Global warming, Future Energy Sources, IT, Clean and Green City, etc. Overall the students were very enthusiastic about their models but when it came to conceptual understanding the students were found to be not so competent.

Later on the second day, I was one of the panel members for the discussion on the topic of Science Education – A Challenge. This was held for the teachers. The other members of the panel were from IITD, NCL, BARC. The panel discussed on how the teachers can help the students to generate an interest towards science, about classroom learning, conceptual understanding, relating their learning with their daily experiences, etc.

my blog level

My blog level:

Feels good

School Science Education – Universalisation with Quality

This is one of the sessions organized in a National Conference on Science Education-Challenges of Quality being organised in HBCSE on account of Prof. B. M. Udgaonkar’s 80th birthday.

The speakers of this session: Prof. Anil Sadgopal (Chair), Prof. Ram Takwale, Dr. Anita Ramphal, Dr. Jayashree Ramadas, Dr. Gambhir and Dr. Subramaniam.

Prof. Ram Takawale talked about the issues of Open Educational Resources, distance and open universities, school science education, universalization and quality school science education for all, how to achieve universalization of education. As we know, information and knowledge society is emerging, and therefore ICT can play an important role in solving the problems of making quality of science education universal. In today’s world, we are connected with mobile phone, TV,internet, but not all the schools are connected, in this situation how can we create a connected world. ICT is using different processes such as digitization, personalization, customization and can we use these new processes to universalize science education.

According to Prof. Takwale, we cannot use the conventional processes to solve the problems of universalization, and we need to use ICT to solve such problems. The keypoint is that ICT enables for mass collaboration wherein few people come together for a common cause and create resources for everyone for example wikipedia. He showed interest in creating learning groups or learning communities for the open educational program.

Well, I would like to add here that the SELF Project is also an example of such open educational resources. The SELF Platform is being used to create courses and learning materials. It aims to be a community-driven platform for producing and distributing educational materials.

The next speaker, Dr. Anita Ramphal dealt with the formulation of NCERT syllabus. She showed concerns to bridge the inequality in school education. Some other issues that were touched upon were the language of science used in the textbooks, sometimes due to this the people are distancing from science. The language of science has to be explicit, visual representations are important.

Jayashree Ramadas talked about the Homi Bhaba Curriculum, Dr.  Subramaniam talked about research in mathematics education, Dr. Gambhir talked about science experiments in schools.

SELF Launch News in Media

SELF Launch got a good coverage in Media. There were reporters from Loksatta, DNA, and TV News Channel from DD News. The images are the clippings from the articles.

 Article from DNA

 Article from Indian Express

Article from Loksatta

SELF Platform Launch @ HBCSE

Today HBCSE launched the SELF Platform for the community. Prof. Arvind Kumar, Centre Director, HBCSE, began the event by welcoming the participants and informing about the research and development work at HBCSE. Dr. Nagarjuna gave an introductory talk about the SELF Project. Prof. Shobo Bhattacharya, Director TIFR, launched the SELF Platform by joining as a user at www.selfplatform.eu

We had organized two special lectures on the occassion. A keynote address on FOSS & Collaborative Culture was delivered by Prof. D. B. Phatak,Subharao M. Nilekani Chair Professor, Kanwal Rekhi Institute of Information Technology, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay. A special lecture on Semantic Web and Collaborative E-learning was delivered by Prof. G. Sivakumar,Professor and Head, Computer Science and Engineering Department Indian Institute of Technology Bombay.

Later the SELF Team conducted a live demo of the SELF Platform explaining its features. The developers team are Nagarjuna, Bipin, Prasanta, Divya, Rajiv, Rakesh, Debarshi, Alpesh, Saurabh, Meena.

The event concluded by vote of thanks and high tea.

We had a good number of audience (about 100) comprsing of teachers, educaitonists, students, scientists, people from free software community, etc. alongwith media.

Times of India article on Free Software Movement

One fine day, I received a call from the Times of India (one of India’s leading newspapers) correspondent Ketan Tanna who was interested to write an article on the Free Software Movement in India and the Linux Users Group in Mumbai. The article was to feature in a series called Tribal Instincts wherein they reflect upon the community based involvement. Since I am aware of such a group, and also closely involved, I thought of coordinating with the people who are actively involved in Mumbai and also whom I know closely. The venue chosen was HBCSE. The correspondent interviewed Vihan, Anurag, Bipin, Alpesh and myself. The article focussed primarily on creating an awareness of the Free Software Movement in the city. It was good to share our views on FSF and moreover it was real fun posing for the group photograph which were taken by Abhijit Batlekar.

Here is the link for the article. For further information on the Linux Users Group in Mumbai one can visit: http://www.ilug-bom.org.in

The Open Library Project

From the public domain blog, I came to know about The Open Library Project.

What if there was a library which held every book? Not every book on sale, or every important book, or even every book in English, but simply every book—a key part of our planet’s cultural legacy.

… The site would be like Wikipedia—a public resource that anyone in any country could access and that others could rework into different formats.

…It would take catalog entries from every library and publisher and random Internet user who is willing to donate them. It would link to places where each book could be bought, borrowed, or downloaded. It would collect reviews and references and discussions and every other piece of data about the book it could get its hands on.

… But most importantly, such a library must be fully open. … a product of the people: letting them create and curate its catalog, contribute to its content, participate in its governance, and have full, free access to its data.

—Aaron Swartz and the Open Library team, 16 July 2007

It is a very ambitious project. The kind of licence that is being considered is The Talis Community Licence, an example of an Open Data Licence.

Looking forward to it…

Wellcome images in public domain

Good news ! The Wellcome trust has released its Wellcome images in public domain. The wealth of collection portrays the 2000 years of human culture. The images are released under the Creative Commons Licence. From their press release:

Wellcome Images is the world’s leading source of images on the history of medicine, modern biomedical science and clinical medicine. All content has been made available under a Creative Commons Licence, which allows users to copy, distribute and display the image, provided the source is fully attributed and it is used for non-commercial purposes.

This news is quite exciting for me. In its collection, I searched for the images that I have been looking for, such as—Galileo’s drawings of moon’s phases, Vinci’s illustration of human anatomy, etc. This collection will be of greate value to our History of Science Exhibition.

six questions for MS-OOXML

There have been on-going arguments against voting MS-OOXML as ISO/IEC. FSFEurope (in consultation with FSF India) has compiled six questions to national standardisation bodies to be asked against MS-OOXML. In a nutshell, these six questions are:

1. Application Independence ?
2. Supporting Pre-exisiting Open Standards ?
3. Backward Compatibility for all Vendors ?
4. Proprietary extensions ?
5. Dual Standards ?
6. Legally Safe ?

It is required that MS-OOXML provides conclusive answers to the above questions to be voted for ISO/IEC.

I have also posted the on-going discussions in India with regard to the above arguments.