Prof. Yash Pal spoke on ” Wondering, Exploring and Meandering in Education ” on account of the eight VGK memorial lecture on September 5, 2009 @ HBCSE.

At first he began with what does one mean by “understanding”. There were a few responses from the audience. What I liked most was that understanding is what makes us feel happy about something. His talk was mostly around the children’s wanderings for the quest of understanding. He cited lots of children’s questions, and opened the forum for discussion from the audience.  One could see the way he was amazed with simple yet important questions that children ask. On this note, he commented that our curriculum should be based on children’s questions. Acknowledging the old gurukul tradition, he even emphasized that each child should have an individual curriculum which can be decided based on each child’s mental faculties.

All along his talk, he was emphasizing on the interdisciplinary nature of  learning that should happen during education.  He criticized the compartmentalization of subjects in departments in universities.

Upon asking what answers does he given to children’s questions, he in a lighter note said, “I am not into realization of truth, I can only try to think and reason”.

From his talk, I could relate to two points that we practice. One was making connections with our prior knowledge. The other was cross-fertilization for new ideas.

it is a pleasant sunday evening. i am back from home. the weather was perfect for an evening walk. we are lucky to be so close to a beautiful place in anushakti nagar. it was still bright and i got tempted to walk, stroll inside the barc campus. i followed the ususal route from anushaktinagar gate -ellora-everest-shantiniketan-akashdeep-north gate-training hostel-anushaktinagar gate. i took a halt near akashdeep after a 20 minutes brisk walk. the view from here is fabulous, imagine how greener it gets after the first few rains, the mountain,  children playing cricket, teenagers playing football, middle aged people walking. it gives me joy to see kids playing and enjoying their childhood. after 10-15 mins of break, i began my brisk walk from the northgate and it took another 15 mins. it was quite relaxing and refreshing.

As final year project of B.Tech in Bioinformatics, Ruchi student from D.Y . Patil from D. Y . Patil Institute of Biotechnology and Bioinformatics, Navi Mumbai, worked on a project on representing processes modelling of mitosis in gnowsys. The project involved to create dictionaries, store into gnowsys and then represent using graphviz. The project report can be viewed from the trac site.

The mitotic process has been represented in the form of prior-state and post-state. For e.g. in prophase, the chromatin’s prior state is thin, fibre-like and its post state is thick, condensed form. In this case, the chromatin’s properties are getting changed. In this way, we have modelled each change in the structural objects by representing the changes in the states of the object.

The website of my homepage is:

http://www.hbcse.tifr.res.in/~meena

The following is a list of my publications:

A Proposal to Refine Concept Mapping for Effective Science Learning CMC2006, Costa Rica

Understanding Science Through Knowledge Organizers: An Introduction Episteme-1, India

An Alternative Proposal for Eliciting and Assessing Students’ Knowledge Structure Episteme-2, India

Information and Knowledge Management Using GNOWSYS READIT2005, India

Hi ! I am Meena Kharatmal.

I am blogging mostly on the issues that I am interested in — science education, concept maps, knowledge representation, which are also the research areas of my PhD work.

I am a scientific officer and a Ph.D. student at the Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research. Mumbai, India.

My research interest is broadly in the area of knowledge representation in biology education. I am using concept maps to characterize scientific knowledge, understand students’ representation (understanding) of a domain, to compare novice’s knowledge structure with that of an expert’s knowledge structure.

I am also interested in issues related to ICT in education.

Apart from my interests in academic things, I am also very interested in watching movies, and travelling.

My Email ID: meena@hbcse.tifr.res.in

My Homepage: http://www.hbcse.tifr.res.in/~meena.