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Showing posts from January, 2010

Towards Lean Teaching

Teaching can be seen as a process. It consists of a sequence of steps or functions : such as discovering information to delivering of lecture. Lean thinking aims to eliminate waste from any process. Therefore teaching is good candidate for the application of principles of lean thinking. Teaching is moving teaching what to teaching where. In the past, when schools were less in number and teacher were difficult get, teacher's job consisted of teaching a student "what and how". With the spread of education and advent of web, number of resources that teach you " what or how" are increasing in number and accessible from anywhere. In this context, teaching becomes more of "teaching where" to look for learning resources and how to harness them. Lean teaching is all about linking students to minimum number of learning resources. This must eliminate waste in terms of unsuccessful searches.

Network Proverbs

With networks sweeping our life, it is time to observe them and crystallise their behaviour into proverbs. Here are two I have formed You can't crawl the same web twice On the web every search is a surprise

Informating Learners

Experts recommend that learner's life at educational institution must be linked to their life outside of it. The learner's life outside of educational institution includes life at home and in community. Linking of learner's life to outside also implies that it must also include institutions where he/she is expected take positions and where his/her participation is required. One such future institution for a technical graduate is obviously industry. At higher education life this also means readying learner for professional life. Experts also recognise that given space, time and freedom,learners generate new knowledge by engaging with information passed on to them by adults: teachers and parents. We have been often told that we live in information age and information is a productive factor. The web has become a growing source of information and one of the necessary skills to be cultivated in learners is to "know where" i.e. ability to locate and procure information