Musing gently about improvisation, permission and forgiveness
Have you heard of Sugata Mitra? If you haven’t, then please watch this video. And if you have, please watch this video. And if you’ve already seen it, please watch this video. He’s an amazing guy; his ideas on “minimally invasive education” and “child-driven education” are fabulous; what’s more important is that he’s put his...
Thinking about the Social Enterprise and Flow
My grandfather appears to have grown up in a village in southern India, attended university in what was then Madras, worked as “private secretary” to one of India’s richest men and biggest landowners, the Maharaja of Darbhanga, all on his way to founding a weekly magazine, called Indian Finance, in Calcutta in 1928. He died...
Thinking about learning and invention and the Maker Generation
As an adolescent I loved number theory, particularly prime numbers; but that did not stop me looking into some other, apparently mundane aspects of numbers. And finding them fascinating. Take decimal fractions as an example. I must have been around 14 when I first came across the concept of “circulating” decimals. I understood that some...
Numbers of Mass Distraction: Part 2
Some years ago, incensed by the jiggery-pokery of the “copyright industries”, I wrote a post seeking to expose the way they went about making the most outrageous claims when it came to the volume of illegal downloads prevalent. I described them as Numbers of Mass Distraction. It is clear that recent events surrounding SOPA do...
The joy of writing about things that don’t matter
….because sometimes they do matter. I’ve been fascinated by what people share, when they share it and how they share it for some time now. And for even longer, I’ve been thinking about why we share what we share. [Those of you who’re interested may want to read some of my earlier posts. Why We...
Thinking about learning. And SOPA and PIPA and stuff like that
I love being human. And I love human beings. I’m constantly amazed by human ingenuity. How our brains appear to work. How we construct mental models of things. How we observe, imitate, learn. How we repeat that cycle to augment learning. How, once we learn something, we show the capability to extend that learning in...
More on know-how and know-why versus know-what
Thanks for all your comments and tweets re my earlier post. Some of you solved the “unGoogleAble” question. Others commented on what they’d been doing with the Prime Numbers in Arithmetical Progression question. And a number of you engaged in conversation with me across a variety of platforms. It helps me think. And learn. For which...
Musing gently about filter bubbles and trends
Here’s what’s trending on Twitter right now: And here are the top stories on Google News: Here’s what the BBC News site has at top billing: I tried to even the field. So the twitter trends were set to “Global”, I finally overrode Google’s very irritating attempts to point me towards google.co.uk rather than google.com,...
Know-how and know-why versus know-what
A few days ago, I set a cricket question for my twitter followers. To be precise, I set a question for those among my followers who were interested in cricket, interested enough to try and answer the question. The question was simple: Herschelle Gibbs holds the record. Vinod Kambli was the previous holder. What is...
More on why I’m excited about 2012
[This is a follow-up to the post I wrote late last night; thank you very much for your comments, Likes, RTs, +1s and Shares. Active and visible feedback is a great motivator, and helps me learn to write about the right things and in the right ways]. Where was I? Oh yes. Why am I...
Why I’m excited about 2012
I don’t think I can remember a New Year’s Day when I’ve been more excited about the year to come. Let’s start with the political landscape. You all know about the year we’ve had, the long-standing governments that have tumbled, the despots and terrorists who are no more, the growth in measured nonviolent protest. It’s...
Into late 60s – early ’70s music? then try this:
I made this collage up for the previous post. Some of my favourite albums from that time. See how many you can guess without enlarging the photo.
