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

My HSQLDB schema inspection story

This is a simple story of my need to inspect the schema of an HSQLDB database for a participar FOREIGN KEY, and the interesting things I had to do to actually inspect it. I am using an HSQLDB 1.8 database in one of my web applications. The application has been developed using the Play framework , which by default uses JPA and Hibernate . A few days back, I wanted to inspect the schema which Hibernate had created for one of my model objects. I started the HSQLDB database on my local machine, and then started the database manager with the following command java -cp ./hsqldb-1.8.0.7.jar org.hsqldb.util.DatabaseManagerSwing When I tried the view the schema of my table, it showed me the columns and column types on that table, but it did not show me columns were FOREIGN KEYs. Image 1: Table schema as shown by HSQLDB's database manager I decided to search on StackOverflow and find out how I could view the full schema of the table in question. I got a few hints, and they all pointed to
Post a Comment
Read more

Commenting your code

Comments are an integral part of any program, even though they do not contribute to the logic. Appropriate comments add to the maintainability of a software. I have heard developers complain about not remembering the logic of some code they wrote a few months back. Can you imagine how difficult it can be to understand programs written by others, when we sometimes find it hard to understand our own code. It is a nightmare to maintain programs that are not appropriately commented. Java classes should contain comments at various levels. There are two types of comments; implementation comments and documentation comments. Implementation comments usually explain design desicisions, or a particularly intricate peice of code. If you find the need to make a lot of implementation comments, then it may signal overly complex code. Documentation comments usually describe the API of a program, they are meant for developers who are going to use your classes. All classes, methods and variables
Post a Comment
Read more

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