Pathways Blog
http://editors.cis-india.org
daily12013-05-13T05:05:43ZTechnology, Social Justice and Higher Education
http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/pathways/blog/higher-education
<b>Since the last two years, we at the Centre for Internet and Society, have been working with the Higher Education Innovation and Research Applications at the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society, on a project called Pathways to Higher Education, supported by the Ford Foundation. </b>
<p>The main aim of the project is to research the state of social diversity and justice in undergraduate colleges in India and encourage students to articulate the axes of discrimination and exclusion which might keep them from interacting and engaging with educational resources and systems in their college environments.</p>
<h3>Peer-to-Peer Technologies<br /></h3>
<p>The entry point into these debates was digital technologies, where
through an introduction to peer-to-peer technologies, digital story
telling through various web based platforms, and a collaborative thought
environment mediated by internet and digital technologies, we
facilitated the students to identify, articulate and address questions
of discrimination, change and the possibility of engaging with these
critically in order to build a better learning environment for
themselves (and their peers) in their own colleges.</p>
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<div align="left">Each workshop was designed not only to be sensitive to
the specificities of the locations of the colleges, but also to
accommodate for the needs, desires and aspirations of the students
involved. The participants looked at their own personal, family and
community histories, their everyday experiences, their affective modes
of aspiration and desire, and their own circumstances which often
circumscribe them, in order to come up with certain themes that they
thought were relevant and crucial in their own contexts.</div>
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<p>As a follow-up on the workshops, the students developed specific
projects and activities that will help them strengthen their hypotheses
by looking beyond the personal and finding ways by which they can engage
with the larger communities, spreading awareness, building histories
and acquiring skills to successfully bolster their classroom interaction
and learning.</p>
<p><em>The following is a bird’s eye view of the key themes that have emerged in the workshops:</em></p>
<h3>The Costs of Belonging</h3>
<p>Almost unanimously, though articulating it in different ways, the
students looked at different costs of belonging to a space. Sometimes it
was the space of the web, sometimes of the larger educational
institution, sometimes to distinct language groups which do not treat
English as the lingua franca, and sometimes to communities and friend
circles within the college environment.</p>
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<p align="center"><img src="http://editors.cis-india.org/home-images/problem.jpg/image_preview" title="problems" height="365" width="548" alt="problems" class="image-inline image-inline" /></p>
<div align="left">It was particularly insightful for us to understand
that granting access, providing infrastructure or equipping
‘underprivileged’ students with skills is not enough. In fact, it became
apparent that there is a certain policy driven, post-Mandal affirmative
action that has already bridged the infrastructural and access gap in
the educational institutions. The easy availability of computers,
internet access, the ubiquitous cell phone, were all indicators that for
most of the students, it wasn’t a question of affording access. Even
when we were dealing with economically disadvantaged students, there
were a plethora of technology devices they had access to and familiarity
with. Shared resources, public access to digital technologies, and
institutional support towards promoting digital familiarity all played a
significant role in demystifying the digital for them. In many ways,
these students were digital natives if defined through access, because
they had Facebook accounts and browsed Google to find everything they
wanted. Their phone was an extension of their selves and they used it in
creative ways to communicate and connect with their peers.<br /><br />Based
on this, the students are now prepared to work on documenting,
exploring and raising awareness about these questions, to see what the
gating factors are that disallow people with access to still feel
excluded from the power of the digital.<br /><br /></div>
<h3>The Need for Diversity<br /></h3>
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<td>It is a telling sign about the state of the Internet in India that every
student presumed that the only way to be really fluent with the digital
web is to be fluent in English. The equation of English being
synonymous with being online was both fascinating and troubling to us.
Of course, a lot of it has to do with India’s own preoccupations, marked
by a postcolonial subjectivity, with English as the language of
modernity and privilege. But it also has to do with the fact that almost
all things digital in India, lack localisation. The digital
technologies and platforms remain almost exclusively in English,
fostered by the fact that input devices (keyboards, for example) and
display interfaces favour English as the language of computing.<br /><br /><br /></td>
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<p>Such an idea might also help in
reducing the distance between those who can fluently navigate the web
through its own language, and those who, through various reasons, find
themselves tentative and intimidated online.</p>
<p>The breakthrough that the
participants had, when they realised that they don’t have to be ‘proper
in English’ while being online – the ability to find local language
resources, fonts, translation machines, and the possibility of
transliterating their local language in the Roman script was a learning
lesson for us.</p>
<h3>Peer-to-Peer (P2P) Learning</h3>
<div align="left">As a part of their orientation to the world of the
digital, especially with the methodologies of the workshops, the
students literally had an overnight epiphany where they could see the
possibilities and potentials of P2P learning. The recognition that they
are not merely recipients of knowledge but also bearers of experience
and contexts which are rich and replete with knowledge, gave them new
insights on how to approach learning and education. Through digital
storytelling, the workshops demonstrated how, in our own stories and
accounts of life, there are many indicators and factors which can help
us engage with the realities of exclusion and injustice.<br /><br />Working
together in groups, not only to excavate knowledge from the outside, as
it were, but also to unearth the knowledge, experience, stories,
emotions that we all carry with ourselves and can serve as valuable
tools to bring to the classroom, is a lesson that all the groups
learned. The idea of a peer also led them to question the established
hierarchies within formal education. What was particularly interesting
was that they did not – as is often the case – translate P2P into DIY
education. They recognised that there are certain knowledge and skill
gaps that they would like experts to address and have incorporated
special trainings with different experts in areas of language,
communication, ethnography, interviews, film making, etc. However, the
methods for these trainings are going to emphasise a more P2P structure
that is different from the regular classroom learning.<br /><br />What would
happen if a teacher is looked at as a peer rather than a superior? How
would they navigate curricula if the scope of their learning was greater
than the curricula? How could they work together to learn from each
other, different ways of learning and understanding? These are some of
the questions that get reflected in their proposed campus activities,
where they are trying to now produce knowledge about their communities,
cities, families, groups and experiences, by conducting surveys,
ethnographies, historical archive work, etc. The digital helps them in
not only disseminating the information they are collecting but also in
re-establishing their relationship with learning and knowledge.<br /><br /><img src="http://editors.cis-india.org/home-images/workshop.jpg/image_preview" title="classroom" height="337" width="509" alt="classroom" class="image-inline image-inline" /><br />
<div align="center"><br />
<div align="left">Ideas like open space dialogues, collaborative
story-telling, mobilising resources for knowledge production, creating
awareness campaigns and interacting with a larger audience through the
digital platforms are now a part of their proposals and promise to show
some creative, innovative and interesting uses of these technologies.
How the teachers would react to such an imagination of the students as
peers within the formal education system, remains to be seen as we
organise a faculty training workshop later in December. <br /><br />These
three large themes find different articulations, interpretations and
executions in different locations. However, they seem to be emerging as
the new forms of social exclusion that we need to take into account. It
is apparent that the role of technologies – both at the level of usage
and of imagination – is crucial in shaping these forms of social
inequities. But the technologies can also facilitate negotiations and
engagements with these concerns by providing new forms of knowledge
production and pedagogy, which can help the students in developing
better learning environments and processes. The Pathways to Higher
Education remains committed to not only documenting these learnings but
also to see how they might be upscaled and integrated into mainstream
learning within higher education in India.</div>
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<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/pathways/blog/higher-education'>http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/pathways/blog/higher-education</a>
</p>
No publisherpraskrishnaFeaturedHigher EducationResearchers at WorkDigital Knowledge2015-03-30T14:54:21ZBlog EntryMobility Shifts 2011 — An International Future of Learning Summit
http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/pathways/blog/mobility-shifts-2011
<b>The summit was organised by the New School and sponsored by MacArthur Foundation and Mozilla. It was held from October 10 to October 16, 2011 at the New School, New York City.
</b>
<p>Nishant Shah participated in the summit and spoke on Digital
Outcasts: Social Justice, Technology and Learning in India. The video of
the event is online.</p>
<p><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/pathways/blog/mobility-shifts.pdf" class="external-link"><img alt="" />Agenda and Program details</a> PDF document, 1611 kb</p>
<p><strong>VIDEO</strong></p>
<iframe src="http://player.vimeo.com/video/32528893?title=0&byline=0&portrait=0" frameborder="0"></iframe>
<p><a href="http://vimeo.com/32528893">Mobility Shifts 2011, Nishant Shah</a> from <a href="http://vimeo.com/mobilityshifts">The Politics of Digital Culture</a> on <a href="http://vimeo.com">Vimeo</a>.</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/pathways/blog/mobility-shifts-2011'>http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/pathways/blog/mobility-shifts-2011</a>
</p>
No publisherpraskrishnaResearchers at WorkDigital Knowledge2015-03-30T14:55:16ZBlog EntryLearn it Yourself
http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/pathways/blog/learn-it
<b>The peer-to-peer world of online learning encourages conversations and reciprocal learning, writes Nishant Shah in an article published in the Indian Express on 30 October 2011. </b>
<p>Technologies and learning have always had a close link. In the past,
distance learning programmes of higher education through the postal
service, remote education programmes using satellite TV and interactive
learning projects using information and communication infrastructure,
have all been deployed with varied results in promoting literacy and
higher education. In the last two decades, the internet has also joined
this technology ecology in trying to provide quality and affordable
education to remotely located areas through “citizen service centres”
envisioned to reach 6,40,000 Indian villages in the future.</p>
<p>These technology-based information outreach programmes expand the
ability of traditional formal learning centres like universities, to
cater to the needs of those who might not have access to learning
resources. This vision of networked education relies on existing systems
of centralised syllabus making, teacher-to-student information
transfer, grade-based evaluation and accreditation systems, and a
degree-centred approach to learning.</p>
<p>I was in New York last week, at an international summit on the future
of learning, Mobility Shifts, organised by the New School, where more
than 260 speakers from 21 countries discussed the possibility of
learning beyond the bounds of the school and university system. Many
discussions were around the declining public education system (with huge
disinvestment moves from the government), privatisation of education,
increasing tuition and fees, and the non-relevance of current education.
However, along with this digital expansion of the traditional education
system is an emerging trend that challenges the ways in which we
understand education and learning – DIY Learning or Do It Yourself
Learning.</p>
<p>DIY Learning is a product of the networked condition. It recognises
that as more people get onto digital information networks, there is a
possibility of producing peer-to-peer learning conditions, which do not
have to follow our accepted models of learning and education.</p>
<p>We have seen the rise of various decentralised and democratised
knowledge repositories like Wikipedia. The search based algorithms of
search engines also take into consideration the idea that knowledge is
personal. User generated content sites like eHow.com show that the
individual learner is not merely a recipient of information and
knowledge. Information seeking spaces like Quora have shown that
knowledge-sharing communities can incite new conditions of learning. Our
contexts, experiences, everyday practices, aspirations etc. equip us
with valuable information, which not only shape how we learn but also
what we find relevant to learn for ourselves. DIY Learning picks up on
the idea that the infrastructure of education is not necessarily
designed towards learning. Learning often happens outside the
classrooms, in informal conversations.</p>
<p>Thus DIY Learning offers a new model of learning. It destabilises the
established hierarchy of knowledge production and pedagogy and creates
an each-one-teach-one model with a twist. Instead of a centralised board
of curriculum designer who shape syllabi for the “average” student, you
have the possibility of customised, highly individual, interest-based
learning curricula where the student is a part of deciding what s/he
wants to learn. DIY Learning doesn’t recognise the distinctions between
teachers and students, but recognises them as “peers” within a network,
encouraging conversations and reciprocal learning rather than
information transfer based classroom models. Instead of mass-produced
education that caters only to an imagined average, the DIY Learning
model recognises that within the same student group, there are different
rates and scales of learning, thus offering environments suited to the
aptitude of the students.</p>
<p>Within the DIY Learning model, aspects of education, from the design
of curriculum and learning methods, to grading and evaluation are geared
towards individual preferences and aspirations.</p>
<p>Many people think of DIY Learning as an alternative to mainstream
learning processes and structures. However, it is perhaps more fruitful
to think of DIY Learning as a way of figuring out the problems that
beset our traditional educational system. It allows us to rethink the
relationships between learning, education, teaching and technologies. It
recalibrates the space of the classroom and reconfigures the role of
the teacher and the student.</p>
<p>DIY Learning emphasises that merely building schools and universities
is not enough to assure that learning happens. Learning happens through
experiences, practice, conversations, internalisations and through
making mistakes. DIY Learning offers these possibilities in an education
universe that is constantly refusing to take risks, innovate and adapt
to the needs of the present. By itself it might not be able to take on
the roles and functions of the existing education systems. But it does
warn us that we are preparing our students for our pasts rather than
their futures. And the time to change is now.</p>
<p>The original story was published in the Indian Express, it can be read <a class="external-link" href="http://www.indianexpress.com/news/learn-it-yourself/867069/">here</a></p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/pathways/blog/learn-it'>http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/pathways/blog/learn-it</a>
</p>
No publishernishantHigher EducationResearchers at WorkDigital Knowledge2015-05-14T12:08:32ZBlog Entry