Skip to main content

Moving from 2006 to 2007

In 2006 I did a lot research on elearning, instructional technology, and psychology of learning. After much deliberation I came to the conclusion that learning is all about taking in new information, reflecting upon it, practicing it, conversing with others and then sharing. This entire process not only strengthens the learners own understanding of a topic, but also helps the community by knowledge sharing.

Learning can be very effective when done as a conversation, rather than a monologue (with either a teacher or a book). Which is why some experts suggest that you should talk to your book while learning, by making notes. Having a conversation helps the learners derive knowledge rather than just having it spoonfed to them.

New media technology gives us an entire new way to have these conversations, by blogging and podcasting. I have written here, and here about the benefits of blogging. In the spirit of enabling learning through conversations, I created a website - Adaptive Learning Solutions, in Jne 2006. For most of 2006, I posted articles on learning and how the internet can be leveraged for information and to create a personal learning environment. This was to create a base for the readers to understand how to effectively use the net. Now the time has come to focus on posts for the people I set out to help - senior students of computer science and fresh employees working in software development. In 2007 you will mainly see articles that explain best practices in software design and development in Java. This will be the primary focus, however I will from time to time also write about Agile methodologies, and extreme programming. I hope to publish at least 2 posts every week and even start a screencast, which will be a video of a program being written in Eclipse, while I explain principles and best practices of software development.

All of you who would like to improve your software development skills are welcome to visit the website, and post your questions, comments, and suggestions.

Wishing everyone a very a happy and prosperous new year.

Comments

Neeraj Verma said…
Your initiative of e-learning is unique and encouraging. It will definitely give developers and naïve programmers a better way to deal with programming practices .Still Software Engineering need a better approach to deal with the software life cycle. Reluctance and Dissatisfaction are prevalent among customers due to rise in expectation from their side. India has strategic advantage as far as the skilled labor is concerned but we are still lagging behind due to non availability of sufficient educational resources. Media technology can be the most effective way to deal with this problem. Blogs, podcasts, Utube are the new buzzwords in the media and they are taking the concept of e-learning to a new height but in country like India poor Infrastructure (Bandwidth , Availability of Computer etc.) is a big force to deal with. Country of one billion doesn’t require One more IIT but it requires one thousand ITIs. As we all know that alone Government can’t deal with this painstaking task so concepts of self learning and e-learning are the most optimized way to handle it. It will undeniably revolutionize the whole concept of education in India also.

Neeraj Verma
SCIT
10:57 PM
Dhaval Shah said…
Parag sir your insight on the new avenues of learning which rises from new technologies is quiet interesting. I have always been of the opnion that if u can't share/write about what you are doing, there is no point in doing that job.
And i am going to be in the technical field, though towards .Net, but best practices don't differ so looking forward to reading your blog in the coming year.
Happy New Year to you too...

Dhaval Shah
SCIT
2:47 PM
Parag said…
Neeraj,
The collaborative possibilities of the Internet have created a flat open classroom. The IITs, Harvards, and IIMs, will continue to impart world class education, but world class education will no longer be limited to those who are admitted to these institutes.

The Internet makes information as well as interaction available to every netizen. Every person will have access to a world class education, if they have enough discipline and drive.

Offcourse infrastructure issues like power and bandwidth may create some roadblocks, but these are the far simpler to overcome now.

--
Regards
Parag
6:34 PM
Parag said…
Dhaval, I look forward to reading your blog as well as your feedback on mine. Good luck with your work and blogging.

--
Regards
Parag
6:40 PM
Unknown said…
Hah, now it's in history.

Best regards
Toby, data room virtual
5:36 PM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Fuctional Programming Principles in Scala - Getting Started

Sometime back I registered for the Functional Programming Principles in Scala , on Coursera. I have been meaning to learn Scala from a while, but have been putting it on the back burner because of other commitments. But  when I saw this course being offered by Martin Odersky, on Coursera , I just had to enroll in it. This course is a 7 week course. I will blog my learning experience and notes here for the next seven weeks (well actually six, since the course started on Sept 18th). The first step was to install the required tools: JDK - Since this is my work machine, I already have a couple of JDK's installed SBT - SBT is the Scala Build Tool. Even though I have not looked into it in detail, it seems like a replacement for Maven. I am sure we will use it for several things, however upto now I only know about two uses for it - to submit assignments (which must be a feature added by the course team), and to start the Scala console. Installed sbt from here , and added the path
1 comment
Read more

Five Reasons Why Your Product Needs an Awesome User Guide

Photo Credit: Peter Merholz ( Creative Commons 2.0 SA License ) A user guide is essentially a book-length document containing instructions for installing, using or troubleshooting a hardware or software product. A user guide can be very brief - for example, only 10 or 20 pages or it can be a full-length book of 200 pages or more. -- prismnet.com As engineers, we give a lot of importance to product design, architecture, code quality, and UX. However, when it comes to the user manual, we often only manage to pay lip service. This is not good. A usable manual is as important as usable software because it is the first line of help for the user and the first line of customer service for the organization. Any organization that prides itself on great customer service must have an awesome user manual for the product. In the spirit of listicles - here are at least five reasons why you should have an awesome user manual! Enhance User Satisfaction In my fourteen years as a
Post a Comment
Read more

Inheritance vs. composition depending on how much is same and how much differs

I am reading the excellent Django book right now. In the 4th chapter on Django templates , there is an example of includes and inheritance in Django templates. Without going into details about Django templates, the include is very similar to composition where we can include the text of another template for evaluation. Inheritance in Django templates works in a way similar to object inheritance. Django templates can specify certain blocks which can be redefined in subtemplates. The subtemplates use the rest of the parent template as is. Now we have all learned that inheritance is used when we have a is-a relationship between classes, and composition is used when we have a contains-a relationship. This is absolutely right, but while reading about Django templates, I just realized another pattern in these relationships. This is really simple and perhaps many of you may have already have had this insight... We use inheritance when we want to allow reuse of the bulk of one object in other
3 comments
Read more