Hm, looks like the editors of NeltaChoutari were writing almost everything for the monthly issues back when it started. What a difference there is today, with a big community being involved!
Author: admin
Nelta Choutari, July 2011 Issue
This was the editorial that I wrote for NeltaChoutari blog when I was one of the editors back in July 2011. Sharing it here…
Freire’s Ideas (intro to reading)
This was possibly my first blog post–or at least it was the first serious thing I wrote on a professional blog (the NeltaChoutari). This was an attempt to prompt some conversation by introducing Freire’s ideas about education among English language educators in my home country Nepal. Just sharing here on my personal blog by using the “reblog” tool…
My Story of the Computer
When I was in sixth grade (in a Catholic mission school in east India around 1986), an older student who had just failed his high school exam for maybe the fifth time and also broken up with his maybe seventh girlfriend told a group of credulous sixth graders a fantastic story about the computer.
Interestingly, this “true story” was as much about love as about the computer, maybe more! He said that a year or two ago, a hundred or so scientists of the world had gathered in New Delhi to learn more about the universe, the organisms, the society, and so on—from the computer! None of us had actually seen or knew much about the computer till that time, except for the one chapter at the end of our math book that described how the computer uses some common mathematical logic in the form of computing loops. Continue reading
Navigating Cultural Technologies
The first two weeks of June, I am attending the summer institute Digital Media and Composition at the Ohio State University. For the final “digital book” project, I am planning to focus on the issue of how we learn and use ICTs, how we transition and make use of previous knowledge/skills to learn new technologies, and how we navigate cultural/epistemological worldviews that undergird the technologies that we learn and use.
In particular, I am interested in the way people view, understand, use, or assimilate into new ICTs when the new means and modes of communication have little resemblance to those that they have used in the past. Although culturally alien or radically new means or mode of knowledge-making create anxiety and learning curves, people with relatively little background knowledge or skills in new ICTs often seem to be more willing to invest great efforts, expect and accept more difficulty, and explore new affordances of new technologies further than people who have stronger background knowledge and skills. For example, when a person who has never owned/used a land phone will complain less about how cell phones infringe on privacy, influence social relations, and change the “natural” pattern of their life; while it is certainly important that overlapping skills and common grounds behind the two technological constructs (like voice mail box, or answering machine) will no doubt facilitate the learning of cell phone skills for the land phone user much better in some ways, the person who starts off with the cell phone might explore and use new affordances better because expectations, habits, and attitudes don’t hold them back (text messaging, call history, web access, and the wide range of tools and settings). Continue reading