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Category Archives: education

Thought’s on MITx’s pilot course — 6.002x Circuits and Electronics

I took this course to refresh some of my EE basics which, having moved from EE to CS, I had long forgotten. I’d also been dabbling with various online courses being offered by Stanford (Machine Learning and Databases) but although the content and teaching were excellent, I realized that unless I was really serious about […]

On teaching as learning

He wore a cowboy hat and he said, “write software that could cook me bacon.” That was one of the responses I got this morning, when I asked a class of 30-odd students what they’d like to do after learning programming. It was an introductory Python programming class, and we mostly covered the basics, like […]

Protests in Armenia over Indian student’s death

An Indian student in an Armenian university recently fell from his dorm window and died, allegedly due to to negligence by emergency services and university administration – who prevented his friends from giving him first aid, asking them to wait until an ambulance arrived… which was 45 minutes later. This has led to huge protests […]

The meritocracy argument – lost in repetition?

The reservation and the quota system have long been a subject of debate in India. With the recent announcement of imminent increases in reservations for IITs and IIMs, the topic is very much in circulation again. Yet somehow, there’s a difference. Unlike the passionate and vociferous response to the Mandal Commission, the voices this time […]