3/30/2021 Part 2.51
Let us continue with Deep work.
It means calm mind, meditation and concentration needed to get ready for deep learning. Next, one should find a calm place which provides solitude and isolation. Next avoid distractions including digital distractions. Keep phones and laptops away. Books and papers permitted. Spend several hours reading, absorbing and thinking. Go beyond your capabilities. Extend it. It is difficult initially. But we get the habit over a period of time. We can learn in depth, get new ideas and new concepts.
Let us see some examples given by Cal Newport.
” In the Swiss canton of St. Gallen, near the northern banks of Lake Zurich, is a village named Bollingen. In 1922, the psychiatrist Carl Jung chose this spot to begin building a retreat. He began with a basic two-story stone house he called the Tower. After returning from a trip to India, where he observed the practice of adding meditation rooms to homes, he expanded the complex to include a private office. “In my retiring room I am by myself,” Jung said of the space. “I keep the key with me all the time; no one else is allowed in there except with my permission.”
Cal Newport s definition: Deep Work: Professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limit. These efforts create new value, improve your skill, and are hard to replicate.
Deep work is necessary to wring every last drop of value out of your current intellectual capacity.
Microsoft CEO Bill Gates famously conducted “Think Weeks” twice a year, during which he would isolate himself (often in a lakeside cottage) to do nothing but read and think big thoughts. It was during a 1995 Think Week that Gates wrote his famous “Internet Tidal Wave” memo that turned Microsoft’s attention to an upstart company called Netscape Communications.
The reason knowledge workers are losing their familiarity with deep work is well established: network tools. This is a broad category that captures communication services like e-mail and SMS, social media networks like Twitter and Facebook, and the shiny tangle of infotainment sites like BuzzFeed and Reddit. In aggregate, the rise of these tools, combined with ubiquitous access to them through smartphones and networked office computers, has fragmented most knowledge workers’ attention into slivers. Knowledge workers spend more than 60 percent of the workweek engaged in electronic communication and Internet searching, with close to 30 percent of a worker’s time dedicated to reading and answering e-mail alone. That leads to shallow work.
Shallow Work: Noncognitively demanding, logistical-style tasks, often performed while distracted. These efforts tend to not create much new value in the world and are easy to replicate.
4/01/2021 Part 2.52
Programming computers was considered hard in the olden days. Though Most new developers dedicate a four-year college education to learning the ropes before their first job, the learning is shallow in our institutions. They solve small problems, don’t do many examples or write a large program,. They don’t learn and use advance features. Cal Newport quotes how a person acquired competence.
“Jason Benn didn’t have this time. After his Excel epiphany, he quit his job at the financial firm and moved home to prepare for his next step. His parents were happy he had a plan, but they weren’t happy about the idea that this return home might be long-term. Benn needed to learn a hard skill, and needed to do so fast.
It’s here that Benn ran into the same problem that holds back many knowledge
workers from navigating into more explosive career trajectories. Learning something complex like computer programming requires intense uninterrupted concentration on cognitively demanding concepts—the type of concentration that drove Carl Jung to the woods surrounding Lake Zurich.
I locked myself in a room with no computer: just textbooks, notecards, and a highlighter.” He would highlight the computer programming textbooks, transfer the ideas to notecards, and then practice them out loud. These periods free from electronic distraction were hard at first, but Benn gave himself no other option: He had to learn this material, and he made sure there was nothing in that room to distract him. Over time, however, he got better at concentrating, eventually getting to a point where he was regularly clocking five or more disconnected hours per day in the room, focused without distraction on learning this hard new skill. “I probably read something like eighteen books on the topic by the time I was done,” he recalls.
He attended a Bootcamp: a hundred-hour-a-week crash course in Web application programming. (While researching the program, Benn found a student with a PhD from Princeton who had described Dev as “the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life.”) Given both his preparation and his newly honed ability for deep work, Benn excelled. “Some people show up not prepared,” he said. “They can’t focus. They can’t learn quickly.” Only half the students who started the program with Benn ended up graduating on time. Benn not only graduated, but was also the top student in his class.”
4/03/2021 Part 2.53
Recall our discussion on first principles-based approach to learning. Let us look at those questions.
Let us start with the question why do we learn? For a long time, it was for survival. Tool making is a skill. In addition to hunting, tool making was also learnt. Even when people settled down with agriculture, skills are learnt to construct tools and simple huts. Once settlements came up and languages developed, we started learning social skills and fighting skills. Only a very few people were involved in scholarly pursuits. They generated facts and knowledge. But life has become more complex over a period of time and knowledge is exploding. So learning is to take us forward to a happy life. (Does it? Why so many wars? Are points for reflection.)
The multiple aspects of our life has made learning essential for living. We need a purpose in life beyond eating and sleeping. Life has multiple avatars for humans.
Physical life deals with food, health, happiness and today’s comforts. This means balanced nutritious food, proper eating habits, yoga and meditation, exercises, regular habits, cleanliness. It also involves stress management, emotional controls.
Intellectual life deals with scholarship and knowledge generation. Many people today are intellectually inclined (many are not having balanced thinking is another story.). Thinking, discussions and analysis- all mental activities -dominate this Avatar. Language, reading, writing, enquiry, are part of this form. Creativity is a higher intellectual activity. Intense concentration and work culture are essential.
Family life – taking care of family.
Social life we become part of a community, society or a country. We need to understand and help others. We need a balanced society for survival. It deals with friendships, networking and managing relationships.
Civic life . Become part of schools, local clubs, councils, office groups, self-help groups, NGOs, etc.
This leads to learning communication skills, citizenship concepts, governance, and building relationships.
Another aspect of social life is the concern for nature, environment, ecology and resources.
Next form is work life and professional life. We learn skills and knowledge to perform many tasks and solve daily problems. We help in making life comfortable, convenient and easy. Financial life makes our living within our income a good possibility. It minimizes risks.
Spiritual life leads us to larger questions like what is life? How did the world come into being? How are large forces like earthquakes and tsunamis occurring and can we control them? Is there a unifying force governing the universe? Is there a super force or God? How do we become equanimous? How do we get inner peace? How do we find truth and absolute truth? What is cognition? What do we believe and How do we believe and to what level do we believe? How do we avoid wars? Etc. We find some answers and keep refining them. Spirituality leads to intense contemplation.
Each person chooses the avatars and the aspiration levels. There is a lot of options for selection. Learning is dependent on the avatars chosen, their importance and achievement levels in each.
Habits, behaviors and values run across all these avatars
4/05/2021 Part 2.54
As said earlier, one has choices to contribute to different sectors. Social includes cultural also.
What are the major objectives of life and learning?
To be a well-balanced, healthy, happy person with good habits and behaviors; to understand the physical and mental aspects of body, relationships with others; to eat healthy food, be regular in doing yoga, meditation, exercises every day;
To get motivated to learn; know how to motivate others;
To have belief in you and start self-learning. It is hard but very effective. It gives you better understanding and retention;
To learn and practice ethics and values; know ethical values;
To have a purpose and goal in life; read books, biographies and information about famous scientists, industrialists and leaders; think and identify steps to achieve your goals;
Cultivate habit of taking notes and writing regularly;
To understand the significance of technology, developments and their impacts with objectivity and without bias;
To know your village, it’s functioning, your taluk/ district/ state / country and world;
To learn to observe the neighborhood and even outside the country through regular searching for information; be curious to know what is happening around you and elsewhere;
Learn concentration, absorption and retention as well as analysis and application skills;
Learn from everyone and from everywhere not just at schools and educational institutions;
Learn discussions skills;
To help in creating an environment for people in the society to learn and do good;
To participate, help and appreciate games and different art forms;
To support the society, nature and environment; to conserve resources like water, energy and materials;
To be a good citizen understanding the nature and problems of civic and public systems; following rules and performing civic duties;
To learn necessary skills and knowledge for survival, growth and scholarship;
To become a good skilled serious minded and dedicated professional;
To be creative in at least one area;
To become a leader by knowing and following qualities required for leadership;
To become a researcher, an innovator and a scholar;
To excel in what one does with concern for quality, and usage. That is the big map.
4/07/2021 Part 2.55
we need detailed scoping for each option of each Avatar. Hence these were not discussed. But if there are questions,we can look at them.
As Mr Jayashankar comments
Parents have a primary responsibility followed by society and further followed by educational institutions.
Motivation for learning is important. We have mid-day meals and free text books. This is what governments can do? But we need motivation by parents, by NGOs and most importantly by teachers. Good teachers have inspired many students. But is it a rare occurrence?
Another level of motivation is examinations and good scores. Again, the exam system is misused as a punitive system. As I keep saying exams don’t define quality of education. It has become a punitive system much worse than caning. We stopped canning and it is time to stop punitive exam system. Hope implementors of NEP look at this.
We can see one has a lot of options in life and may need help in selecting a suitable option. This means counselling should be part of the education system but it should not brand students. Schools can go for online counselling.
Learning goes beyond lectures. It should have a large activities component and self-learning component. Reading books and writing an abstraction at regular intervals is an important and highly useful aspect that is missing in our curriculum today. We also are missing on the basic requirements to learn. One aspect is taken care of in mid-day meals. But aspects like calming the mind, improving concentration, improving absorption and recall, good analysis etc. are missing. You need to achieve these for success of learning. What it means is our learning is highly syntactic. It is highly structured with no interactions, no localization. It is artificial and does not provide motivation, understanding or excitement. It does not connect one to his neighborhood and to activities known to a student and to known cultures . It does not connect to realities. Hence the high percentage of dropouts at school level. We need to move towards semantic learning which helps one to appreciate, know the uses and impacts, to apply and to analyze. Context setting for subjects, lessons, topics are missing. Discussions are not allowed. Make a class room an informal learning through discussions. Provide for thinking sessions and recall methods. These are not formal. Create challenges to each student. Create students’ teachers. That will take us far. Change school working hours and days to suit local needs. This will lead to cognitive learning wished by NEP. But we need a very big transformation in mindsets of teachers and they need a new skill also. A very large change in structures is needed. We need alternate structures and approaches to bring in the desired changes to education. Society has to get involved if we want to build a good humane skilled surviving India with a great future.
4/09/2021 Part 2.56
The new education policy wants to make education leading to cognitive learning instead of rote learning. What is it and how to achieve it? It needs large scale changes in teaching processes, evaluation and major shift in mindsets and thinking by teachers. Hope they won’t go on strikes.
Cognition is defined as ‘the mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience, and the senses. … It is in essence, the ability to perceive and react, process and understand, store and retrieve information, make decisions and produce appropriate responses.
Cognitive Skills: The requirements for cognitive skills:
1.Sustained Attention and concentration over a period of time.
2.Recall
3.Listening habits, Read ,recall, abstract, write and critique habits
4. Self-learning we need a good tool book for this and monitoring the progress.
5.identify scope, focus, importance of a topic
6.Analyse – define, differentiate, derive, prove, categorize,
7.Apply
8.Impact analysis
9.Context fixing
10. Activities and Discussions
11.Innovate
12. Establish Connectivity and relationships
13.Cognitive Flexibility and Control.
14.Multiple Simultaneous Attention.
15.Working Memory
16.Category Formation
17.Image visualization
18.Pattern Recognition.
Cognitive skills are the core skills your brain uses to think, read, learn, remember, reason, and pay attention. Working together, they take incoming information and move it into the bank of knowledge you use every day at school, at work, and in life.
Cognitive learning is a style of learning that encourages students to use their brains more effectively. This way of learning encourages students to fully engage in the learning process so learning, thinking, and remembering get easier and easier.
4/11/2021 Part 2.57
Let us see some comments.
Prof Mahendra Babu says
“I find more important given in cognitive learning than rote learning>
AS in computers we need both memory and processing.
Both will help overall learning.
People may argue that processing could be replaced by techniques like AI and memory has become so cheap now a days.
Chess Anand has been beaten by powerful computer I understand.
When 6800 Microprocessor was invented 64 K memory was a big deal.
Hope the process described by DKS could be implemented.
WE need suitable teachers and training to the current teachers.
Babu”
Mr Bala Ajjampur has the following comments:
“Sir, I sincerely hope people in this group are actively and with great intensity are reading your elaboration on learning. It is providing a great deal of insight that both teachers and students can avail of. Moving away from instructional learning to cognitive learning has its own challenges for both. Unless we find a way to sync avatars on both ends if learning, I am afraid we may create a chaotic situation that may take its own sweet time to settle down. The consequences of such a chaotic situation lasting longer than expected periods of time may have a large impact on speeding up knowledge collapse.”
Mr K V Ramaprasad comments on the enormity of costs of tuition.
“Interesting to know the amount spent on tuitions by Students”
My response is
“Terrible. NEP starts with a premise to abolish tuitions. There is no simple solution. Deregulate education. Go for online learning in place of tuition. Stop transferring teachers. Conduct tests every three years and failed teachers dismissed after one more chance. Create a good library. Parents take control, understand what is happening. Make schools transparent to parents. Have a pta meeting every 15 days. Have a school committee with parents no businessman. It goes on. Will we see the light? Dks”
Mr Aravind queries on implementation:
“Sir, did you have time to go through implementation plan of NEP 2.0? Any views on HS Nagaraj new building at Kanakapura road on teaching science through exploration”
He sent a report on prayogshala also.
My response
“I saw several implementation plans. They are not concrete. Educationists are not changing. Focus is on training. We need a new model of learning away from teaching. Hope the prayoga will work. Experiments have become ritualistic not learning centric. Do people experiment in labs? Are they allowed? Is there time to think time to read time to discuss time to write in curriculum? Is there time to build, time to experiment? More need to be thought about. Can you change teachers? What about toolkits for evaluation?”
Thanks for comments.
4/13/2021 Part 2.58
Let us go further on cognitive learning. Engineering education needs more aspects like reading a drawing, visual inspections, simplification, realistic problem solving, realistic selection of problem-solving methods, performance aspects and parameters like efficiency, cost, ruggedness, reliability, repairability, usability etc., design, creative designs and product development, failure diagnosis, cross discipline applications etc. We need to look at a few terms like explainability, interpretability, relationships, causality to have better understanding of a topic.
Mathematics is a great mechanism to formalize many aspects, analyze and solve various problems in engineering. With computations, its scope of use increased. But there are limitations. Problems are simplified with many assumptions. We found a way of linking mathematics and numerical methods with logic through programming. But compartmentalization is strong in mathematics.
Let us look at one example. We are taught variables. What is a variable? It is clear to some extent in engineering like voltage, current, power, force, pressure, temperature, speed, flows etc. We can visualize these. But what about variables in medicine, health, nutrition, social behaviors. Most variables are qualitative. Some are quantified approximately on a small scale. Like level of satisfaction is given from one to ten.
The next is we declare X as independent variable and Y as dependent variable. In real life, how does one determine which is independent and which is dependent. It is based on the context and cause effect analysis. Some are easy, some are simple, some are complex, some have a multiple cause effect relationship. These are not considered as a part of mathematics. We need to address these to become competent to assert on your selections and solutions. Let us see causal aspects next.
4/15/2021 Part 2.59
Mathematics is a great transformational thinking approach to solving problems. It gave us approaches to quantification, abstraction, formalism, structuring, large variables etc. It also provided multiple representational mechanisms like real and complex numbers, algebras, geometry, vectors, matrices, tensors, sets, groups, graphs, networks, calculus and dynamics and also defined possible operations in each form. Logic and statistics evolved differently. Unfortunately, explainability is not easy in mathematics.
There is confusion between assignment and equality- we use the same symbols. Similarly, variables and unknowns are used interchangeably. We don’t know why existential quantifier is needed and where it is used.
We have large real-life problems. They don’t fit into mathematical constructs always. So, we introduced assumptions and approximations to solve problems in real life. This was a great success. It was Leibnitz who found out the interturn fault in a generator. Galileo tried to integrate it with experimentation. Physics used it to explain theories and principles.
But the drawback was that we were not able to solve problems realistically. This is due to compartmentalization of multiple distinct mathematical forms like real algebra, logic, set theory, graphs etc. The arrival of computers and programming allowed us to build an integrated approach to solving problems. We introduced logical and arithmetical operations in a simple program. We introduced dynamics, repetition, large number of variables into an algorithm. We integrated set operations, matrix operations into the algorithms. It also connected with statistical calculations leading to a unified mechanism. It led us to solve many real-life problems. Machine learning is another inclusion today.
This is due to different focus – mathematics focused on abstractions and formalisms; numerical mathematics was considered inferior. But computer algorithms focused on problem solving. We need to focus our teaching of mathematics through the approach used by algorithms. It will give meaning to concepts, bring abstracts nearer people and make mathematics user friendly. We need a context sensitive and semantic mathematics. Purist like S Ramanujan will turn in his grave (not sure there is a grave for him, maybe it is his soul getting revolted with my idea.) Purists have a definite place in mathematics. But a larger number of people need a semantic and integrated view of learning this subject.
This post is technical with too many terms. But it makes to bring in cognitive learning in a very fundamental subject like mathematics. Welcome questions and comments.
4/17/2021 Part 2.60
Education vs training
Let us see the comments by Aravind.
Mr Aravind, TCS, wants to know the difference between education and training. This doubt or confusion exists with many big industrial giants also.
“Thank you, Sir, for the insights. A teacher relative asked me the difference between Education and Training. My cousin was saying that Education develops thinking. It is a process for developing abilities, knowledge, understanding of the world, that helps you act independently, that allows you to discriminate between good and bad ideas, that gives you a space to argue with or play with ideas, so that you can test how they fit with your world.
Training is merely a set of instructions received to improve their performance or knowledge for a specific task and it is work related training, then it improves employability.
Request your views on this Sir – Difference between education and training, whose gap is employability gap according to my cousin.”
My response
Your cousin is right. Education teaches values fundamental principles and tells you how to find truth. Training is learning a skill like say Java. So, if one knows electric field theory, he or she is not employable. If one knows Java, he or she is employable. The problem is genuine core engineering jobs are only a few. IT jobs are huge. So, employability is measured on knowledge of Java. We have seen lakhs of people with only COBOL knowledge losing jobs at a prime age. That is a danger of training. You stay at the bottom rung only with training. But those whose fundamentals are strong, who can think, who can analyze, who can adapt to new situations and who are agile will move up. It is the difference between a plumber and a designer. Training gives you a fish. Education tells you how to catch a fish or look for alternate food sources or innovate new sources.
Education provides inputs for our knowledge, intellect and cognition. Training only skills. Part 2.54 is a big list of things to learn. The basics for that wish list and for the avatars comes from education and not training. Remember some have a great capacity to self-learn . But not all can learn all aspects by themselves. They need gurus. We have several names -guru, acharya, Sastri etc. These mean more than teachers. A look at Guru by shankaracharya will enlighten us on education.
Guru is a Sanskrit term for a “mentor, guide, expert, or master” of certain knowledge or field. In pan-Indian traditions, a guru is more than a teacher. In Sanskrit, guru means literally dispeller of darkness. So agurukula teaches you a whole lot of things not just some subjects.
Shankaracharya in Upadesha Sahasri ( thousand teachings) – its English version was published by Ramakrishna math – talks in detail about the role of a teacher in detail. I am quoting his writings below.
When the teacher finds from signs that knowledge has not been grasped or has been wrongly grasped by the student, he should remove the causes of non-comprehension in the student. This includes the student’s past and present knowledge, want of previous knowledge of what constitutes subjects of discrimination and rules of reasoning, behavior such as unrestrained conduct and speech, courting popularity, vanity of his parentage, ethical flaws that are means contrary to those causes. The teacher must enjoin means in the student that are enjoined by the Śruti and Smrti, such as avoidance of anger, Yamas consisting of Ahimsa and others, also the rules of conduct that are not inconsistent with knowledge. He [teacher] should also thoroughly impress upon the student qualities like humility, which are the means to knowledge.
The teacher is one who is endowed with the power of furnishing arguments pro and con, of understanding questions [of the student], and remembers them. The teacher possesses tranquility, self-control, compassion and a desire to help others, who is versed in the Śruti texts (Vedas, Upanishads), and unattached to pleasures here and hereafter, knows the subject and is established in that knowledge. He is never a transgressor of the rules of conduct, devoid of weaknesses such as ostentation, pride, deceit, cunning, jugglery, jealousy, falsehood, egotism and attachment. The teacher’s sole aim is to help others and a desire to impart the knowledge. He asserts that the best way to guide a student is not to give immediate answers, but posit dialogue-driven questions that enable the student to discover and understand the answer. That is an important step in cognitive learning.
Acharya is a Sanskrit term meaning “one who teaches by their conduct.” An acharya is a teacher who leads by example.
Sastri means a scholar who has mastered a sastra – a discipline like nyaya sastra, vyakarna that is grammar etc.
What is the reality in our education system? Training institutes are commercial but motivated. The old typing centers in many small cities generated typists for government and industries. Same is true of computer training institutes. But what about primary education? It needs a repurposing, reimagination, re-motivation. So your friends doubt is genuine in the reality.