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"Education should open up vision, self-confidence"
Education should instil confidence to face life boldly, Justice V. Ramasubramanian, Judge, Madras High Court, told students of National College on Friday.
Utilise all opportunities to acquire knowledge to experience the benefits later in life, Justice Ramasubramanian said, addressing the 93rd college day celebration of the institution. The High Court Judge, who was the chief guest, emphasised that education should be delinked from employment and money, explaining how it (education) should open up the vision and self-confidence.
Interspersing his speech with humour, Justice Ramasubramanian narrated anecdotes from the lives of Swami Vivekananda, Socrates, and other philosophers who aimed at truth and confidence through education. Students ought to lend their support to their needy and downtrodden counterparts, he said. The chief guest honoured meritorious students and teachers in the presence of K. Raghunathan, college secretary, K. Anbarasu, principal, and A. Krishnamoorthy, controller of examinations. The principal presented the annual report for 2011-12.
Justice V. Ramasubramanian, Judge, Madras High Court, presenting award to an academic achiever at the college day celebration of National College on 21.04.2012.
Shrimati Indira Gandhi College claims shield at NACOFEST 2012
Shrimati Indira Gandhi College won the overall shield at the two day inter-collegiate cultural festival ‘Nacofest 2012' held at the National College here recently. Students from various colleges across the central districts enthusiastically participated and displayed their talents in elocution, essay writing, poem composing, drama, and folk songs at the competitions. The festival was inaugurated by the noted author Indra Soundararajan. K.Raghunathan, secretary of the college and P.M.Mansure, principal, MIET Arts and Science College, offered felicitations. Yugabharathi, lyricist, was the chief guest at the valediction. He said that students should cultivate a sense of perseverance, without falling prey to defeats and disappointments, failure and hurdles. Success could be the climax of their efforts, but it could not be achieved overnight. A sustained effort with a sense of confidence and optimistic approach would lead them towards their goals, he added. M.Ramasamy, professor, Department of Drama, Tamil University, Thanjavur, urged the students to face and overcome the future challenges with total confidence. Mr.Yugabharathi and Dr.Ramasamy gave away the prizes. A pattimanram also formed part of the festival and Dr. Mansure was the moderator.
Winners' row:Students of Shrimati Indira Gandhi College receiving the overall shield from lyricist Yugabharathi and M. Ramasamy, professor of drama, Tamil University, Thanajvur, in Tiruchi on Saturday.
PHOTO: R. M. Rajarathinam, THE HINDU.
Thursday, April 5, 2012
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Thursday, March 29, 2012
Read......to be a Literate.....not an Aliterate.!
Read to be a Literate not to be an Aliterate, says
If you belong to the tribe that can read but do not, and read just enough to get by, you are losing a lot. Read on to find out how reading is invaluable for life.
In the last week of February, I was writer-in-residence at Pondicherry Central University. During the residency, I had a conversation with Dr. Murali Sivaramakrishnan, the head of the English department, when he told me that the amount of discretionary reading the modern-day student was doing had declined alarmingly. I had heard that before from other educators. But I was taken aback to hear it from someone who runs a department of language and literature. Furthermore, Dr. Sivarmakrishnan was talking about reading in the context of his department's master's and Ph.D students.
You would think a person embarking on a postgraduate or terminal degree in English would want to make a career teaching the subject, in which case avid reading would form an integral part of his or her job description. Imagine a language or literature teacher who can't get excited about reading. How does such a person motivate students? Furthermore, as Jim Trelease, the author of The Read-Aloud Handbook, points out, people who have stopped reading can be dangerous because they “base their future decisions on what they used to know.” In the case of a teacher that can be tantamount to passing on obsolete information to the coming generation. That is scary. The next day, I asked a room full of M.A. English students about the reading they were doing outside the curriculum. At least a third did not do any, which makes them functional aliterates. Aliterates are people that can read but do not. They read just enough to get by. If a language and literature department can have so many of them, then what about students in other disciplines?
What do you lose by becoming an aliterate? Quite a lot, actually. According to Maryanne Wolf, Director of the Center for Reading and Language Research at Tufts University in the United States, while reading “we are forced to construct, to produce narrative, to imagine. Reading gives you a unique pause button for comprehension and insight. By and large, with oral language — when you watch a film or listen to a tape — you don't press pause.” Hence, the mind receives a far more vigorous workout whilst reading than consuming any other form of media. It is not surprising that avid readers tend to possess better memories and minds more equipped to resist the exigencies of ageing than those who do not read. Their capacity for learning also tends to be far more advanced. In addition, since reading requires more concentration than other media, an avid reader's mind tends to be more focused which allows him or her to make good decisions.
Furthermore, reading is inextricably linked to writing. It is impossible to write well without reading voraciously. Here I am not talking about literature or writing for the media where the ability to write well is a given. Most white-collar jobs require good communication skills, both spoken and written. Corporate executives of every stripe have to write reports, memos, and proposals. The same is true of bureaucrats. Scientists have to present their research in writing. Even political parties have to come up with election manifestoes. So unless there is a new invention that wipes out the need for the written word in all these forms of communication, the only way to do them well is to read well. Reading develops the vocabulary and expands the imagination. It also educates with regard to grammar and sentence structure, and allows the writer to make his or her writing more readable by embellishing it with examples, parables, and metaphors. It comes as no surprise that according to a study commissioned in 2007 by the National Endowment for the Arts, a U.S. government body, nearly two-thirds of the employers ranked reading comprehension high among their list of desirable qualities for high school graduates.
My experience in Pondicherry took me back to the Eighties where I was well on the way to becoming an aliterate. The VCR craze was sweeping middle-class India, and I was as hooked as any other kid. The moment I came home from school, I would park myself in front of the TV to watch a movie on the VCR. One day my mother decided she'd had enough. Watching videos was restricted to weekends and the quota was no more than one movie a week. I fretted for a few days, and then went back to my books. Today I thank her for that intervention.
The reading habit is ingrained early. It has to be instilled into children by parents at home and teachers in schools. These days, where children are more independent and have many more forms of media clamouring for their attention, it may be more difficult to enforce than in the Eighties. But, as all evidence shows, it is well worth the effort.
Published in THE HINDU, Education Plus.
Published in THE HINDU, Education Plus.
Saturday, March 24, 2012
Grab your copy...
Title Bioremediation of textile dyes and effluent:
Evaluation in crop plants
Publisher LAP LAMBRET Academic Publishing GmbH & Co. KG
Dudweiler Landstr. 99, 66123 Saarbrucken, Germany.
Author Dr. S. Senthil Kumar
ISBN no 978-3-8433-7885-7
Selling Price 79.00 Euros/ INR 5,091/-
No of Pages 208
Year of Publishing 2010
Tuesday, March 20, 2012
Change in biotech curriculum at IIT-M
With biotechnology being considered by most students merely as a launching pad for an IT career, educational institutes are now realising that they need to change this trend, and the Indian Institute of Technology - Madras has taken the lead.
The department of biotechnology has done away with their four-year B.Tech Biotechnology programme and their five-year dual degree. Instead, they are introducing two dual degrees, M.Tech in Biological Engineering and M.S. Biological Sciences.
Biotechnology is a research-intensive industry and also requires good experimental skills, which is usually obtained by working on long-duration projects and integrating a variety of experimental skills.
“Ph.D students have the research experience and well-developed lab skills, which the B.Tech. students lack,” says Prof. Guhan Jayaraman. If the students have to be hired for performing routine tasks, an M.Sc. Biotechnology student can do this as well as a B.Tech one (and at a lower salary), he notes.
To him, a chemical engineer would perform better than a B.Tech. Biotechnology student for routine process engineering type of jobs (since in-depth biology knowhow is not required and Biotech students have less chemical engineering expertise).
“A bioprocess engineer with a Ph.D degree has a tremendous advantage over chemical engineers and biologists when it comes to process research and development. Therefore, there is a huge demand for Ph.D-degree holders in bioprocess engineering,” says Mukesh Doble, head, Department of Biotechnology, IIT-M.
Apart from the above-mentioned biology courses, B.Tech Biotechnology programmes contain standard chemical engineering courses and some biochemical engineering courses.
“The problem with most B.Tech. Biotechnology programmes is that majority of the faculty are either pure biologists (without sufficient engineering knowledge) or pure chemical engineers without sufficient depth of study in biology,” says Mr. Doble.
“Faculty trained both in biology and engineering are a scarce commodity and that is one reason the programmes suffer and the employment-potential of the graduates is poor. So, from both a teaching and industry viewpoint, we need more Ph.D-trained bioprocess engineers,” he explains.
The new curriculum emphasises more on the general application of engineering principles to biological systems (be it human physiology or a microbial system). These are followed by specialised package electives in fields such as bioprocess development, computational biology, biomaterials engineering, and synthetic biology.
For this, institutions need not have specialised faculty. “We do require biological engineers from different backgrounds (chemical engineering, computer sciences, electrical engineering, etc) to teach this course. Currently, we are managing with faculty in our own department since we have that diversity. But the way to go forward (for us and other institutes) is to have engineers and scientists in different departments, doing inter-disciplinary research in the area of biological engineering, to offer courses in the Biological Engineering programme,” says Prof. Jayaraman.
The new course in biological engineering will offer a greater breadth in the undergraduate programmes, help students develop a better perspective before specialising in one area and foster better inter-disciplinary research, he adds.
Published in
EDUCATION PLUS
Monday, March 19, 2012
Research outsourcing — at what cost?
Making things work in an instant is the order of the day, so much so that it seems thorough research is being given the go-by. The unhealthy trend of hiring people for Ph.D. work is a reality. What is the remedy?
Earning a doctorate may not be as difficult as it was years ago. It is not always about years of research and study. Many students are now outsourcing research work, and the prestigious prefix ‘Dr.' can be bought for a price.
A recent trend noticed in research circles in Chennai is the increasing instances of Ph.D. scholars outsourcing their work to companies that offer to “complete your Ph.D. on time.” Such outsourcing not only poses challenges in terms of evaluating the research scenario in the country but also calls for urgent measures to curtail the trend, say academics.A company in Mylapore, calling itself a “research guide organisation,” agrees to work on a Ph.D. thesis for a cost of Rs.1.5 lakh. “We should be informed about the title eight months in advance. We take care of the entire thesis — right from the title till the work is completed. We will be in constant touch with the candidates and every 15 days we will mail them the details. Also we train them for viva-voce,” says Ganesh, an employee of an outsourcing firm. His company claims that it has students from almost all the universities in India, and from countries such as the UAE and the U.K. for Master's work too. “In India, the demand for master's thesis work is less,” he adds.
Another company in Vadapalani offers to complete the thesis work in the engineering and science domains. “Our professors and experts are in various parts of the State. Some are attached to universities while others are full-time employees. The candidate can contact them over the phone. The guide should not be informed as the thesis would not be accepted if it is prepared by someone else,” a staff at the company told this correspondent when asked about the procedures involved.
The company brochure pinned on the notice board even has this clarification: “Please note that this brochure is not an invitation to outsource the requirements of Ph.D. scholars. We are assisting research scholars to complete or expedite their work without compromising on the regulation of the institution they are affiliated to.” Another city-based company offers two options — The ‘Complete Consultant Plan' wherein the scholars are advised right from identifying the university and research guide to crafting the proposals to the preparation of thesis. The ‘Partial Consultant Plan' identifies the problem and devises the solution for the problem till the work is published in international journals. The charges for the complete work or partial work vary.
To act upon allegations of plagiarism and complaints against scholars, universities are beginning to put in place some stringent measures. “The doctoral committee that is in place has members from other universities and other States. They monitor the candidate every six months unlike earlier when the candidate had to submit the work only towards the end of three years,” says Koteeswara Prasad, Dean of Research, University of Madras. The grievance committee is also in place at the university to look into the grievances of scholars and their supervisors.
Expansion
With the rapid expansion of higher education, as seen in the mushrooming number of colleges and universities and more students gaining entry to research programme, it has become a challenge to maintain quality in research. “While the nation is focussing on improving the research talent, the practice of outsourcing the work to ghost writers has become widespread. It has taken roots in the past five years and is so prevalent now that these outsourcing firms are advertising openly,” says S.P. Thyagarajan, pro-chancellor (research), Sri Ramachandra Medical College and Research Institute (SRMC) and an expert member of the University Grants Commission (UGC).
Since many institutions do not have sufficient facilities for pursuing research, malpractice is resorted to fulfil the academic requirements. “In many cases the university may not have the sophisticated equipment to carry out the research. So the students give their sample to another institute where the study is done.
Thereby, he or she is not really involved in the process,” he points out. The key to curb plagiarism is in the hands of the supervisors who have to keep track and constantly monitor the progress of the research scholars, say experts.
“Many professionals are keen to do research at IIT-Madras and enrol. The system is so rigorous that many of them opt out mid-way,” says Prof. L.S. Ganesh of the Department of Management Studies and dean (students) at the institute.
Unless the system is stringent and uncompromising, original research may not happen. The research scenario at present has all the pitfalls found in many engineering colleges where final students outsource projects to firms for a price. If research is the fuel for innovation and growth, then the government and universities have to act fast, say academics.
Published on: March 19, 2012 00:00 IST , in
Education Plus.
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