Sexual Harassment

Sit at your own risk: Make office your mini-gym

Be it the Metro, car, bike or workplace, most office-goers tend to sit at one spot at a stretch every day at the cost of their health. So how about taking a little time out to exercise at your workplace every now and then?

A survey done by Qi Spine Clinic in 2014 shows that 57 percent of professionals in office jobs are affected by visible symptoms of sedentary workplace behaviour. Experts agree and suggest that by taking breaks to stretch or to run on the spot, people can work towards a healthier lifestyle.

"Desk work puts a huge mental and physical stress on our bodies, especially on our lower back, leading to low back pain," Garima Anandani, chief spine specialist at Qi Spine Clinic, told IANS.

"The combination of high stress at jobs (which puts people at greater risk for habits such as smoking), sitting for long periods (sitting for over two hours at a stretch is considered a long period) at the desk in poor posture, and lack of physical activity, puts us at greater risk for low back pain," she added.

Stressing the importance of an active lifestyle, Ibrahim Khan, master trainer at Talwalkars gym, said: "A sitting job would lead to lower back pain and spondylosis. A side effect of not working out would be slowing down of Basal Metabolic Rate (the rate at which we burn our calories), and weight gain."

Leading holistic health guru Mickey Mehta has some easy-to-follow solutions.

"Use the staircase at least three times a day. Walk from your house or office to the bus stand. After every two hours, get up from the chair and take a deep breath and stretch backwards. Then breathe out and come and touch your toes," he said.

"Twisting will also help. Hip rotation clockwise and anticlockwise is good too," he added.

Another simple way to workout in office is to run on the spot, suggests Neeraj Mehta, director of Growth For Fitness Instructors Fitness Academy.

"You can do that for 30 seconds or a minute. Then do a little bit of stretching," he said.

Anandani is also in favour of stretching.

"For the benefit of the back and neck, stretch from head to toe, beginning with the neck. Slowly tilt your head towards your shoulder. Hold for 10 seconds. Do alternate sides. Next loosen up your shoulders. Roll both shoulders forward in a circular motion then backward. Repeat 10 times," she said.

Tightening stomach muscles at work is also possible!

"To work your abdominal muscles, hold your stomach for a few seconds when breathing in, then release when breathing out.
"If possible, get some fresh air in your lungs by taking a walk outside," master trainer Aminder Singh at Anytime Fitness, told IANS.
For your hips, try kicking...in the air!

"Leg kick front is good for hips. Kick front in a controlled way, do 10 counts for each leg. Another one is side kick. Kick sideways in a controlled way, do 10 counts for each leg," said Khan.

While taking the staircase is a must to keep the legs strong, Singh also suggests to sit upright on your chair and straighten one leg out in front of you.

Your hands should rest on the chair. Hold the position for three to five seconds. Repeat it between 12 and 20 times, then switch to the other leg, he said.

And just in case you don't want bingo wings, don't forget to keep your arms fit.

"Stand up and place your hands (each about a shoulder width away from your body) on the desk, and twist them in so they point towards your body then lean forward.

"Then push your shoulders and elbows closer to the desk. Repeat it five times," said Singh.

Thanks to computers, office work also strains the eyes, so you need to exercise to strengthen them too.

"Gaze at a distant object for 15 to 30 seconds, then relax eyes," said Neeraj Mehta.

Now stop sitting and reading, get set going towards a fitter and more active you.

Source | Free Press | 6 February 2015

Paper Books Will Never Die

After eight years of writing about past visions of the future, I've learned to never make predictions of my own. Nobody knows what the future holds, so unless you want punk ass kids featuring your dumb ass predictions on some smarmy ass blog called PaleoFutureFuture or some shit in the year 2065, it's best to keep those things to yourself. But I'm about to break my own rule because I'm just so damn confident in my prediction: Paper books will never completely disappear.

Okay, I'm going to almost immediately hedge and say that I can't get behind the concept of "never." Never is a long time. So for lack of a better way to measure, how about we call it within your grandkids' lifetime? Because after your grandkids are dead nobody you know or care about will still be alive. That puts us at about a century out. And since I've got maybe 30 or 40 good years left on this planet if I'm lucky, a century is basically forever for me.

So how can I be confident that paper books are going to be with us for a long time to come? First of all, because they're lovely and I refuse to believe they'll ever disappear. But also because paper books are still a fantastic and irreplaceable piece of technology. 

College students overwhelmingly prefer deadtrees to e-textbooks. In a recent survey, a whopping 92 percent said that paper books allowed them to concentrate better. And it's easy to see why! Your deadtree Chemistry book doesn't have the siren song of Twitter or Facebook calling you from the digital rocks.

Believe it or not, paper book sales have made a modest comeback in the past year. Ebooks are mainstream. But paper books have too many benefits to simply die out anytime soon. 

Paper books aren't hindered by DRM or evolving media storage standards* or a need for electricity that'll turn your Kindle into a nice paperweight when that nuclear EMP blast finally hits and we're all bringing our kids to the burned out husk of a library to show them what the Before Times were like. Paper books sit on the shelf and mind their own fucking business like they should.

Even short of the more apocalyptic scenarios one can dream up, paper books still serve a purpose and will for the foreseeable future. And anyone who disagrees is almost certainly buying into myths about tech adoption that have poisoned the national discourse about progress for far too long.

It's so easy to think of technological media progress in linear terms. As I mentioned in my post earlier this week about the long forgotten experiments of radio faxpapers, the popular narrative goes something like this: First there were newspapers, then radio made them obsolete, then TV made radio obsolete, and then the web made TV obsolete. This is generally how we prefer to understand the evolution of mass media. But, of course, it's dead wrong.

We still have newspapers, radio, and TV. But with the emergence of each new technology, those older modes were forced to adapt-to refocus on the features that new technologies couldn't offer. It happened for newspapers, radio, and TV, and it's happening for books printed on paper and bound together. That's not to say that ebooks aren't superior in some ways. Rather, that one mode of technology has sharpened the utility of another.

"In the future no book will ever be out of circulation," Nathaniel Lande, a New York publishing consultant, told the New York Times in 1991. Which is a fantastic dream, and a great reason to embrace ebooks. The cost of distribution for electronic media borders on nothing. And digitization will certainly help preserve culture, save nuclear annihilation.

But the battle between paper books and ebooks isn't a zero sum game, even though we tend to imagine technological progress as an endless war between mediums that can only have one victor. In reality, it's more like a stew in which each ingredient is being constantly, subtly redefined by the others. 

Paper books and ebooks are each distinct modes of technology, with distinct strengths and weaknesses. They can co-exist in harmony and almost certainly will forever. And rest assured that if they don't, some punk ass blogger will take great pleasure in telling me how wrong I am. Stupid punk ass bloggers.

*Remember all those firewire hard drives you bought that are now sitting in a drawer somewhere like a time capsule from 2002?

Source | http://www.gizmodo.in/

Never trust a corporation to do a library’s job

As Google abandons its past, Internet archivists step in to save our collective memory

 

Google wrote its mission statement in 1999, a year after launch, setting the course for the company’s next decade:

“Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”

For years, Google’s mission included the preservation of the past.

In 2001, Google made their first acquisition, the Deja archives. The largest collection of Usenet archives, Google relaunched it as Google Groups, supplemented with archived messages going back to 1981.

In 2004, Google Books signaled the company’s intention to scan every known book, partnering with libraries and developing its own book scanner capable of digitizing 1,000 pages per hour.

In 2006, Google News Archive launched, with historical news articles dating back 200 years. In 2008, they expanded it to include their own digitization efforts, scanning newspapers that were never online.

In the last five years, starting around 2010, the shifting priorities of Google’s management left these archival projects in limbo, or abandoned entirely.

After a series of redesigns, Google Groups is effectively dead for research purposes. The archives, while still online, have no means of searching by date.

Google News Archives are dead, killed off in 2011, now directing searchers to just use Google.

Google Books is still online, but curtailed their scanning efforts in recent years, likely discouraged by a decade of legal wrangling still in appeal. The official blogstopped updating in 2012 and the Twitter account’s been dormant since February 2013.

Even Google Search, their flagship product, stopped focusing on the history of the web. In 2011, Google removed the Timeline view letting users filter search results by date, while a series of major changes to their search ranking algorithm increasingly favored freshness over older pages from established sources. (To thedetriment of some.)

Two months ago, Larry Page said the company’s outgrown its 14-year-old mission statement. Its ambitions have grown, and its priorities have shifted.

Google in 2015 is focused on the present and future. Its social and mobile efforts, experiments with robotics and artificial intelligence, self-driving vehicles and fiberoptics.

As it turns out, organizing the world’s information isn’t always profitable. Projects that preserve the past for the public good aren’t really a big profit center. Old Google knew that, but didn’t seem to care.

The desire to preserve the past died along with 20% time, Google Labs, and the spirit of haphazard experimentation.

Google may have dropped the ball on the past, but fortunately, someone was there to pick it up.

The Internet Archive is mostly known for archiving the web, a task the San Francisco-based nonprofit has tirelessly done since 1996, two years before Google was founded.

The Wayback Machine now indexes over 435 billion webpages going back nearly 20 years, the largest archive of the web.

For most people, it ends there. But that’s barely scratching the surface.

Most don’t know that the Internet Archive also hosts:

• Books. One of the world’s largest open collections of digitized books, over 6 million public domain books, and an open library catalog.
• Videos. 1.9 million videos, including classic TV, 1,300 vintage home movies, and 4,000 public-domain feature films.
• The Prelinger Archives. Over 6,000 ephemeral films, including vintage advertising, educational and industrial footage.
• Audio. 2.3 million audio recordings, including over 74,000 radio broadcasts, 13,000 78rpm records, and 1.7 million Creative Commons-licensed audio recordings.
• Live music. Over 137,000 concert recordings, nearly 10,000 from the Grateful Dead alone.
• Audiobooks. Over 10,000 audiobooks from LibriVox and more.
• TV News. 668,000 news broadcasts with full-text search.
• Scanning services. Free and open access to scan complete print collections in 33 scanning centers, with 1,500 books scanned daily.
• Software. The largest collection of historical software in the world.

That last item, the software collection, may start to change public perception and awareness of the Internet Archive.

Spearheaded by archivist/filmmaker Jason Scott, the software preservation effort began on his own site in 2004 with a massive collection of shareware CD-ROMs from the BBS age.

After he joined the Internet Archive as an employee, he started shoveling all that vintage software onto their servers, along with software gathered from historicFTP sites, shareware websites, tape archives, and anything else he could find.

But actually using old software can be rough even for experienced geeks, often requiring a maze of outdated archival utilities, obscure file formats, and emulators to run.

In October 2011, Jason Scott wrote a call-to-arms aimed at making computer history accessible and ubiquitous — by porting classic systems to the browser.

“Without sounding too superlative, I think this will change computer history forever. The ability to bring software up and running into any browser window will enable instant, clear recall and reference of the computing experience to millions.”

The project started attempting a Javascript port of MESS, the incredible open-source project to emulate over 900 different computers, consoles, and hardware platforms, everything from the Atari 2600 and Commodore 64 to your old Speak & Spell and Texas Instruments graphic calculator.

Two years later, it was all real.

In October 2013, the Internet Archive tested the waters with the Historical Software Collection, 64 historic games and applications from computing history playable in the browser. No installation required — just one click, and you were trying out Spacewar! for the PDP-1, VisiCalc for the Apple II, or Pitfall for the Atari 2600.

By Christmas, they launched The Console Living Room, nearly 3,000 games from a dozen different consoles. Popular systems like the ColecoVision and Sega Genesiswere represented, but also obscure and hard-to-find consoles like the FairchildChannel F and Watara SuperVision.

A year later, they launched the Internet Arcade — hundreds of classic arcade games emulated with JSMAME, part of the JSMESS package.

Earlier this month, the Archive made headlines with the latest addition to its collection: nearly 2,300 vintage MS-DOS games, playable in the browser.

A technical breakthrough, the games are played on the popular DOSBoxemulator, ported to Javascript by one brilliant, talented engineer.

The experience of clicking a link and playing a game you haven’t seen in 25 years is magical, and many other people felt the same way.

News of the MS-DOS Game Collection got widespread media coverage, includingThe Washington Post, The Verge, and The Guardian, with thousands of people hitting the site every minute.

Millions of people are discovering software they’ve never seen before, or revisiting games from their past. People are making Let’s Play videos of 30-year-old games, played in a Chrome tab.

When this launched, there were dozens of confused comments from people wondering what old videogames has to do with Internet history.

In my mind, this stems from mistaken perception issues of the Internet Archive as solely an institution saving webpages.

But their mission and motto is much broader:

Universal access to all knowledge.

The Internet Archive is not Google.

The Internet Archive is a chaotic, beautiful mess. It’s not well-organized, and its tools for browsing and searching the wealth of material on there are still rudimentary, but getting better.

But this software emulation project feels, to me, like the kind of thing Google would have tried in 2003. Big, bold, technically challenging, and for the greater good.

This effort is the perfect articulation of what makes the Internet Archive great — with repercussions for the future we won’t fully appreciate for years.

But here’s a glimpse: last week, one of the JSMESS developers managed to getNetscape running on Windows 3.1 with functional networking. All of computing history is within our grasp, accessible from a single click, and this is the first step.

It’s not just about games — that’s just the hook.

It’s about preserving our digital history, which as we know now, is as easy to delete as 15 years of GeoCities.

We can’t expect for-profit corporations to care about the past, but we can support the independent, nonprofit organizations that do.

Source | https://medium.com

The changing face of classroom tech - and what's coming next

Classroom technology has evolved out of all recognition, yet the biggest changes are yet to come

The last two decades have seen a revolution in the way technology is used in the classroom. We’ve moved from a world where a handful of computers might have been found in a school’s computer lab to one where ICT suites and interactive whiteboards became a fixture of every school - and now to a world where fleets of laptops and tablets are used by many students throughout the school day.

The pace of change has been extraordinary, but there are no signs that it’s slowing up. A new generation of devices allied with new software and services and shifts in pedagogy will only see further transformations on the shape of classroom tech.

While ICT suites promoted the teaching of basic ICT skills in school, interactive whiteboards and laptops had an even bigger impact, transforming technology from a subject area to a tool that could help primary age students with literacy and numeracy, support history, geography and science lessons, or help young people get to grips with a world of digital media.

Combined with the internet, online resources and Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs), technology revolutionised education as a whole.

Things have changed again since 2010, not just because of a change in government that has seen major changes to the ICT curriculum and the promotion of computing skills in schools, but because classroom technology is changing to reflect the devices and services being used in business and the home.

The debut of Apple’s iPad was as much a watershed for schools as for the business and the home, as schools rushed to explore the clear potential of a simpler, more personal, highly versatile computer and a library of education-friendly apps.

Behind the iPad has come a wave of Android and Windows tablets and convertibles, while Google’s Chromebooks have given schools a low-cost alternative to Windows laptops, hooked in to a world of cloud-based services, learning resources and free web-based apps.

Mobile technology has entered the classroom in style – and it’s shaking up the way we teach and learn.

Rise of mobility

“I think that for certain, mobility is taking over” says Gus Schmedlen, HP Vice President of Worldwide Education, “especially in the mature or developed markets, where broadband availability and streaming availability are pretty pervasive.”

For Schmedlen and HP, mobile devices play a critical role in preparing students for a world where every industry is being disrupted by technology, and where the most important skill a school can teach is learning itself.

Backed up by cloud services and effective, easy-to-use management tools, they can make transform the way technology is used in the classroom, and help teachers improve outcomes in a tangible way.

HP’s latest mobile devices, including its Education Edition tablets and ProBook laptops, provide them with total access to learning, and can be better tailored to the way that individual students learn.

For primary school students, this might mean working with a stylus to practice handwriting or basic maths skills. For secondary school students, HP’s partnership with Pasco turns its tablets into effective scientific instruments, where you can attach over 70 sensors to a tablet and see the incoming data live on the screen.

The potential to engage students in exciting, practical science lessons should be clear.

Economies of scale and cost reductions are also enabling more schools to look at 1:1 access schemes, where every student in specific years, or even across the whole school, is provisioned with their own tablet, Chromebook or laptop.

This doesn’t just impact what and how students learn, but where. “1:1 is a reality now, when you look at the cost of these devices” says Steve Beswick, Director of Education, Microsoft UK. “You’ll get to a point where anytime, anywhere learning really can happen.”

For Beswick, though, it’s not just about having the devices, but about the way devices integrate with services and applications through the cloud.

“It’s no point having 1:1 if it’s all disparate. You’ve got to handle it all in a seamless way. It has to be so that what Johnny does at home he can access from school, and what Johnny does at school he can access from home.”

Beswick describes how, at Bett 2015, teachers using Windows mobile devices on the showfloor were able to use OneNote and Office 365 to set tasks for students back at school, then receive work and feedback from the classroom in real-time while still at the show.

Both with Microsoft’s cloud services and Google’s flexible, integrated platforms are making for a dynamic and engaging environment for teaching.

Liz Sproat, Head of Education, EMEA for Google, cites the take-up of Google Apps for Education and Google Classroom in UK schools, and how the new Google Play for Education initiative should drive more teachers to take advantage of mobile tech.

“We see more schools using this technology to improve learning” she says, “and really benefitting from the advantages it can bring. This is my second Bett at Google, and already the level of the conversation is getting much more involved.”

Mobile technology also supports new blended approaches to learning. At Bett 2015, HP talked of Blended Reality, where students might use text books imprinted with a watermark that could trigger supporting video or audio materials on a tablet or smartphone.

“If a student is trying to learn Pythagorean theorem and they’re confused about what it means, they can take their mobile device, put it over the Pythagorean theorem and see a video about it and why it works” Gus Schmedlen told us. “What we’re trying to do is increase the number of modalities that a student uses to learn one learning objective.”

HP isn’t alone in this endeavour. Across the Bett 2015 showfloor we witnessed innovative approaches that combine digital content with real-world materials to engage students and improve learning.

Whether using 2D or 3D scanners with large-screen interactive displays, using 3D printers to bring digital objects into real-world forms, or combining computer science with chemistry or robotics, developers and teachers are finding new ways to mix the best of ICT with the best of more traditional pedagogy.

Large-format interactive displays and holographic screens, like HP’s ingenious zVR series displays, give educators powerful new tools to teach with, yet still give them scope to put their own knowledge, experience and enthusiasm to good use.

Cloudy thinking

Meanwhile, new cloud-based communications and telepresence platforms are enabling more collaborative approaches to learning, not just within the class or between classrooms in the same school, but across schools in the same area – or even different countries.

What’s more, the way we interact with technology is changing. Voice recognition, natural user interfaces and innovative PC systems like the HP Sprout all have obvious classroom applications.

All this new technology will pose challenges for teachers. “I think it introduces a new digital divide” says Microsoft’s Steve Beswick, “between the teachers who get it, in terms of how to teach using technology, and want to drive that forward, and those who don’t. There will still be some who don’t get it, and that’s not good, but we will help those who want to cross the chasm and join the teachers who do.”

For all the applications of this new mobile technology, we can’t forget more basic skills. HP’s Gus Schmedlen believes that laptops such as the new £179 HP Stream 11 Pro (above) still have a major role to play in education, because as long as students need to create a lot of content, a keyboard will still be an essential.

Gemma Harris, from St Cuthbert and Matthias School, London, agrees. “If the children are just using iPads, then they lose the skill of being able to use a PC. Employers are telling us as teachers that they need people who can use a PC and Windows, and while tablets are fine, we still need to make sure that children learn all the basic skills of computing and using a mouse.”

We live in an era of unprecedented, accelerated change, where the technology being used by young people outside the classroom evolves at a rate that leaves those of us who aren’t digital natives struggling to maintain the pace.

Yet if we can take advantage of the latest classroom technology, we can do a better job of preparing students for the world outside. The financial barriers are breaking down and there’s help on offer for training and development. 

Source | http://www.pcpro.co.uk/

 

IIT Bombay launches mass open online courses

The programme, offered free, will give access to high quality, IIT-style education to Indian students in Indian languages.

In a step that could significantly push the bar for quality online education in the country, IIT Bombay has embarked on a commendable mass online education programme that will provide free online courses and give access to high quality, IIT-style education to Indian students in Indian languages. 

On the Republic Day, Prof Devang Khakhar, Director of IIT Bombay, launched three Mass Open Online Courses (MOOC) in computer programming, thermodynamics, and signals and systems from the institute’s IITBombayX platform developed in collaboration with edX, a not-for-profit initiative by MIT and Harvard. 

Describing the initiative as “pathbreaking”, Prof. Khakhar credited Prof. Deepak Phatak of the Computer Science and Engineering Department for bringing it to IIT Bombay. “The rapid evolution of technology makes it imperative for students and teachers to incorporate the various offerings of technology in their learning process,” he said, launching the first three courses. 

The Introduction to Computer Programming will be 16-week course in two parts aimed at computer programming students. The course on Thermodynamics, designed for mechanical engineering students, will last 12 weeks. Signals and Systems will be a 16-week course in two parts designed for electrical engineering students. The students will get an honour certificate of achievement certifying successful completion of the course after they have qualified in the tests. 

Simultaneously, IIT Bombay will also offer training workshops for invited teachers on effective teaching and mentoring students in online courses for each of these three subjects under the Train 10,000 Teachers or T10KT programme of the institute. 

Mass Open Online Courses or MOOCs have emerged as the most inexpensive mechanism for offering quality education online to a very large number of learners and in addition to traditional course materials like videos, readings and problem sets, it incorporates aspects of active learning, collaborative discussions on forum, online quizzes etc. 

Global educational institutions are increasingly adopting MOOCs and given India’s need for reaching out to largest possible number of learners, MOOCs are seen as the best way forward to ensure quality in education and vocational training. 

“We have about 3500 colleges, but the academic infrastructure is not up to the expected levels and quality of education suffers. In other institutes, computer programming students may be given 10, 20, or 30 line programmes to write, but in IIT Bombay, students write 200 to 250 line programmes. So, simply put IITBombayX stands for extended online educational services from IIT Bombay and IIT-style learning,” Prof Phatak told The Hindu on Thursday. 

He said the IITBombayX courses will be initially offered in English and Hindi, but eventually in all Indian languages as the project expands nationally. “The courses will also be important for collecting data on student behaviour and their approach in online education which we could share with other educational institutions,” Prof Phatak said, adding that anyone from 15 year-old to 75-year-olds can register for the courses, and there is no limit on how many can enrol at a time. 

Prof Phatak said the IITBombayX platform will soon offer other courses like a course in agriculture designed by Hyderabad-based International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (Icrisat), and a course by Tata Institute of Social Science on open source animation tools. “A chemistry course by Dr. Mangala Sunder of IIT Madras is also being planned,” he said. 

Source | http://www.thehindu.com/

CORPORATE TIPS - SOCIAL MEDIA ETIQUETTE

 

The power of social media is indisputable; what you say on line creates a lasting impact.

In today's time, social media has become an integral aspect of various businesses too. However, this networking tool, if misused, has major pitfalls which can range from tarnishing company reputations to harassment and breach of privacy. Hence, while it is vital for company leaders to embrace this technology, laying down rules that dissuade employees from using the tool against an organisation or in a way that breaches the organisation's interest is a must.

“Social media has overrun workstations. Employer concerns about employees spending too much official time on their personal social media accounts have underscored the need for rules about social networking. It definitely calls for policy formation that will encourage employees to follow a code of conduct when using social media,“ says Piyush Khemka, director, Times Minerals.

Here are some social networking related policies that organisations can adopt to help employees better manage their online social lives. 

TEXT AND PICTURES 

Establish guidelines for online etiquette and establish rules on where to draw the line when sharing text and photos online. “Although social media interactions rely on photos, text posts, comments and tweets, they reflect your thought and opinion and have the potential to create or destroy your career,“ warns Manuel D'Souza, Director HR, Serco Global Services. 

OPINION MATTERS 

If you are in a profession where you have a lot to lose if your on line reputation takes a beating, it makes sense to stay away from controversial posts on social media. With the advent of online networking platforms, it has become very easy for individuals to share their opinions and thoughts on a matter of public importance.However, do remember that your opinion can be at odds with the organisation's ethos or may offend the sentiments of your co-workers, which can lead to inter-personal conflict. When posting online, ensure to water down your radical views, so that your words do not offend your colleagues.

Opines Sanjay Verma, group chief people officer and global HR head, Uniparts India Limited, “HR departments need to sensitise employees on basic social media etiquette and educate them on respecting religious values so that they can uphold the cultural fabric of the workplace.“ 

MAINTAIN A BALANCE 

The exposure social media can give is not restricted to employees alone.Organisations too can leverage an employee's online presence and indirectly engage with a bigger audience be it by posting pictures of an office celebration, or the announcement of a promotion. However, as advantageous as their social media involvement may be, employees must refrain from giving away information vital to the organisation.Do not promote or popularise strategies or information that can be deemed important to the organisation. According to Verma, organisations should discourage employees from conducting official communication on such public platforms. He adds, “HR departments should encourage the use of an intra-organisational networking platforms to allow employees to discuss official work. This can help in enhancing an employee's knowledge about the company and create a culture that encourages learning. It will also improve camaraderie between employees.“ 

BE OPEN TO FEEDBACK 

The impact of social media for an organisation often works best when used as a means of gaining feedback. “Internally, we use the social channel for the betterment of the institution. We have an open blog where employees can offer their suggestions on improving our processes and business. An employee's opinion is vital in overcoming various organisational roadblocks,“ says Thampy Kurian, head, human resource, Federal Bank.

Although organisations lay down rules regarding inter-personnel communication, an agreement on virtual conduct is not yet a given. Solidifying what is acceptable and what is not in our virtual lives has yet a long way to go. 

Source | Mumbai Mirror | 2 February 2015

Technology in schools: Future changes in classrooms

Is it time for radical change of our school systems?

Technology has the power to transform how people learn - but walk into some classrooms and you could be forgiven for thinking you were entering a time warp.

There will probably be a whiteboard instead of the traditional blackboard, and the children may be using laptops or tablets, but plenty of textbooks, pens and photocopied sheets are still likely.

And perhaps most strikingly, all desks will face forwards, with the teacher at the front.

The curriculum and theory have changed little since Victorian times, according to the educationalist and author Marc Prensky.

"The world needs a new curriculum," he said at the recent Bett show, a conference dedicated to technology in education. "We have to rethink the 19th Century curriculum."

Most of the education products on the market are just aids to teach the existing curriculum, he says, based on the false assumption "we need to teach better what we teach today".

He feels a whole new core of subjects is needed, focusing on the skills that will equip today's learners for tomorrow's world of work. These include problem-solving, creative thinking and collaboration.

'Flipped' classrooms

One of the biggest problems with radically changing centuries-old pedagogical methods is that no generation of parents wants their children to be the guinea pigs.

Mr Prensky he thinks we have little choice, however: "We are living in an age of accelerating change. We have to experiment and figure out what works."

"We are at the ground floor of a new world full of imagination, creativity, innovation and digital wisdom. We are going to have to create the education of the future because it doesn't exist anywhere today."

He might be wrong there. Change is already afoot to disrupt the traditional classroom.

In a "flipped" classroom, children get on with work and teachers act as guides 

The "flipped" classroom - the idea of inverting traditional teaching methods by delivering instructions online outside of the classroom and using the time in school as the place to do homework - has gained in popularity in US schools.

The teacher's role becomes one of a guide, while students watch lectures at home at their own pace, communicating with classmates and teachers online.

Salman Khan is one of the leading advocates of "flipped" classrooms, having first posted tutorials in maths for his young cousins on YouTube in 2004. 

Their huge popularity led to the creation of the not-for-profit Khan Academy, offering educational videos with complete curricula in maths and other subjects.

The project has caught the eye of the US Department of Education, which is currently running a $3m (£1.9m) trial to gauge the effectiveness of the method. Now the idea has reached the UK.

Teachers 'surprised'

Mohammed Telbany heads the IT department at Sudbury Primary School in Suffolk. He has been experimenting with the "flipped" classroom and recently expanded it to other lessons.

"The teachers facilitate, rather than standing in front of the children telling them what to do, and the children just come in and get on with what they are doing," he says.

"It has surprised the teachers that the kids can excel on their own, with minimal teaching intervention."

In the developing world where, according to some estimates, up to 57 million children are unable to attend primary school, the idea of children learning without much adult intervention is a necessity not a luxury.

Prof Sugata Mitra, from Newcastle University, has been experimenting with self-learning since his famous hole-in-the-wall computer experiments in the slums of Delhi in 1999.

The School in the Cloud project opened this month in India 

He was amazed at how quickly the children learned how to use the machines with no adult supervision or advice.

From that was born the idea of "cloud grannies" - retired professionals from the UK, mentoring groups of children in India via Skype.

He won the $1m Ted prize in 2013 to build a series of self-organising learning environments in both the UK and India.

In January he completed the last of seven such units - a striking solar-powered glass building amid the lush vegetation of the village of Gocharan in West Bengal.

There will be no teachers and up to 40 children can participate when it suits them. They will have the internet at their disposal and will work in small groups. E-mediators will mentor the children via Skype.

Dr Suneeta Kulkarni, research director of the School in the Cloud project, said children would "engage in a variety of activities that are driven by their interest and curiosity", with games typically tried first.

The children will also be asked "big questions" that they can answer online.

"At yet other times these questions emerge from what the children 'wonder' about. It is also where the grannies or e-mediators are expected to play a significant role," she said.

Classroom games

When Canadian teacher and computer programmer Shawn Young wanted to spruce up his lessons, his first thought was gaming.

It was a platform many of his students were familiar with and something that was proven to engage children.

But it also had a bad reputation in teaching circles - thought to be too violent, addictive and without educational merit.

Some early attempts to integrate educational content within games failed. But what makes Craftclass different is that it is not about content - it is more a behaviour-management and motivation tool.

Linking behaviour and attitude to a game could be a way of engaging children 

"The teacher teaches as normal. Teachers can offer pupils points for good behaviour, asking questions, or working well in their teams and it gives them access to real life powers," Mr Young says.

Those powers are decided by the teachers and may include handing in homework a day late.

There are also penalties for those not concentrating in class, turning up late or being disruptive.

Children play the game in teams, which means a lost point affects the entire group, and encourages them to work together.

"It is being used in a school in Texas which has a mix of white, Mexican and Afro-Americans. They would never normally speak to each other," said Mr Young.

Teachers using the system - some 100,000 have signed up since it launched in August - have noted not just better interaction between pupils, but better classroom engagement and motivation.

"As in other games there are sometimes random events, which could be something like everyone having to speak like a pirate for the day or the teacher having to sing a song in class. The kids love it."

Source | http://www.bbc.com/