About a year and a half back, I had made a blog post on Innovations in teaching : https://mmpant.com/2021/02/21/innovations-in-teaching/ to further spread some of the ideas that I was presenting at an FDP program at Central University Jammu.
It so happens that later today, I will be doing a webinar for Bhartiya Vidya Bhawan on the theme “ Innovation as an ecosystem in schools”. This blog has some useful content for this webinar as well, the most important of which is the UKOU reports on Innovative Pedagogies for the last 10 years. Here is a link to the essential ideas in those reports spanning a decade : https://www.open.ac.uk/blogs/innovating/?page_id=582
It is quite overwhelming to process 100 such innovative pedagogies for their underlying principles and then try to adopt and adapt them to one’s special circumstances. This will be best done by building on the experience of senior education leaders, and cannot be handed out to them as ‘best practices’ to be followed, but rather they will come up with their own ‘next practices’ to make the learning experience more fruitful and help all learners realise their full potential.
I have explored innovation in teaching practices, since almost 50 years back. I had experimented with personalised mastery learning long before personal computers had become available. A report was published in:
M.M. Pant, “Experiment with self–paced instruction in undergraduate Physics”, J. of Phys. Education, 3, 1 (1975).
If something is future-proof, it will continue to be useful or successful in future when the situation changes.
Being an educational futurist is not only about building scenarios for the future, and sharing it with others and exhorting them to follow your suggestions. It is more about developing in all who care about their future or the future of their children, grand-children, nephews and nieces, the attitude. competencies and skills for anticipating their own possible futures and choosing the best one.
Since most learners and educators today depend on some other person or committee to give them an ‘authorised’ vision of the future, this is a rather challenging task. To make it easier for such persons I have created a set of 4 WhatsApp sessions of about an hour each, which can be pursued on Friday evenings. The set of 4 sessions can be completed over a month.
1: Developing Foresight:
Backdrop:
All of us must learn to anticipate the future. All sportsperson playing cricket, football or tennis for example have to guess ( successfully) where the ball is headed. Foresight is the secret ingredient of all success, because without foresight we cannot prepare for the future.
One characteristic of intelligence is to be able to imagine the future. It may be a short time ahead or even a long term future. In fact the biggest success of AI applications is in making good predictions at low cost, giving rise to the success of companies like Amazon or Netflix.
All of us can learn to anticipate the future. All sportsperson playing cricket, football or tennis for example have to guess ( successfully) where the ball is headed. Foresight is the secret ingredient of all success, because without foresight we cannot prepare for the future. Effective foresight has always been important in human life, but it is now much harder to come by, because our modern world is changing faster than ever before. Our technologies, jobs, institutions, even some of our treasured values and ways of thinking are all shifting radically, making it very difficult to plan ahead and prepare for future challenges and opportunities. Indeed, in our age of hyper-change, many people have no notion of what sort of world they should prepare for.
Proposed flow of WhatsApp posts for this session. The sequence and titles of these themes may be tweaked for each edition in response to recent developments as well as the specific interests of the learner cohort.
Why anticipating the future is important.
Ostrich versus Giraffe : Newton’s quote about standing on the shoulders of giants.
Challenges to predicting the future
The Gartner Hype cycle
Technology MegaTrends
Developing foresight: 5 ways
The world in 2030
Social MegaTrends
Resources to be kept informed
2: Avoiding natural stupidity:
Backdrop:
The literal opposite of Artificial Intelligence is natural stupidity, and you would be surprised by its pervasiveness. Even if we may not have the help of AI technologies to empower ourselves, we could significantly improve our lives, if we could cut down on the natural stupidity prevailing in our lives.
These are times when Artificial Intelligence is everywhere. Either Godlike who will help in solving the most difficult problems of the day or as the devil incarnate out to harm us in every imaginable way.
The literal opposite of Artificial Intelligence is Natural Stupidity, and more people are regular practitioners of this. There is a famous quote attributed to Einstein “ Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I’m not sure about the former.“ Edward de Bono has also noticed the rampant stupidity all around and has a book with title “ Why so stupid? How the human race has never really learned to think “
There is another interesting book by David Robson. The Intelligence Trap: Why Smart People Do Stupid Things and How to Make Wiser Decisions
There’s even a word for the significant mismatch between intelligence and rationality: dysrationalia.
Earth has its boundaries, but human stupidity is limitless : Gustave Flaubert
If we want to avoid repeating past mistakes, we must acknowledge that even the brightest people can do monumentally daft things.
Gullibility is a failure of social intelligence in which a person is easily tricked or manipulated into an ill-advised course of action. It is closely related to credulity, which is the ( stupid) tendency to believe unlikely propositions that are unsupported by evidence.
The purpose of this session is to help us reflect on our actions, and avoid the elements of stupidity in them. One definition of critical thinking is to “ thinking about your thinking while you are thinking to improve your thinking”. To that extent this may be seen as drawing attention to critical thinking.
Proposed flow of WhatsApp posts for this session. The sequence and titles of these themes may be tweaked for each edition in response to recent developments as well as the specific interests of the learner cohort.
What is stupidity? Definitions, Descriptors and its basic laws
Why take interest in Stupidity? Reflecting on one’s own stupidity
Avoiding stupidity is easier than seeking brilliance.
Common Causes leading to Stupidity ( functional stupidity)
Stupidity in the digital world
Stupidity in Everyday life: Laws, Regulations, Conventions
The intelligence trap : why smart people do stupid things?
Protecting oneself against deception and frauds
What next?
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3: Ideas: their generation and spread
Backdrop:
It is widely believed that we have evolved from hunter-gatherers, agricultural, industrial to a post industrial society driven by creativity, innovation and entrepreneurship. And ideas are the currency of such a society. The goal of this session this is to give you pointers and examples of how you could play an important role in both generation of new ideas, as well as being a propagator or evangelist of useful ideas generated by others.
Proposed flow of WhatsApp posts for this session. The sequence and titles of these themes may be tweaked for each edition in response to recent developments as well as the specific interests of the learner cohort.
What is an idea? Philosophical perspectives
Creativity: generation of new ideas
Where good ideas come from?
The structure of good ideas
Innovation : incremental and disruptive
Propagation of ideas: memes, diffusion and viral
Brilliant ideas that are not so well known
Protection of ideas: Intellectual Property Concepts
Begin your own ideation process
4: Questioneering : the skill of asking incisive questions.
Backdrop:
We were not only born learners, but naturally curious with a lot of questions. The growing up process required that we stop questioning and accepting the various authorities. This session draws attention to the importance of asking questions and how one becomes wiser for having asked good questions.
Isidor Isaac Rabi, the Physicist who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1944 was once asked what made him choose a career in Science. He said “My mother made me a scientist without ever intending to. “Izzy,” she would say, “did you ask a good question today?” That difference — asking good questions — made me become a scientist.”
It seems that children aged about 4 years ask the most number of questions. On average, kids under four ask an average of 73 questions per day, some over a grueling 14-hour stretch. But there was an instance of a 3 year old girl who asked her mother about 400 questions in a day.
It may come as a surprise to many that the Indian Constitution is perhaps the only one where the citizens have been cast a duty to ask questions.
Article 51A: FUNDAMENTAL DUTIES
It shall be the duty of every citizen of India-
(h) To develop the scientific temper, humanism and the spirit of inquiry and reform;
Developing the spirit of enquiry and a Scientific temper begin with asking questions. That is why I began this piece on Questioneering ( the skill of asking incisive questions) with the story of Rabi’s mother checking whether he had asked a good question at School.
At the end of the session, we share a playlist of videos that help you develop the skill of Questioneering.
The proposed flow of the sessions is as follows. The sequence and titles of these themes may be tweaked for each edition in response to recent developments as well as the specific interests of the learner cohort.
Why Questioneering ?
The story of Rabi
El Dorado: Robert Louis Stevenson
Thorstein Veblen
Why no questions ?
A template for questions
Attributes of a good question
How to ask a better question?
A questioning habit
Enrolment and delivery process:
These sessions are being offered for the first time on Friday 9th, 16th, 23rd and 30th September. And thereafter on the first to fourth Friday of every month.
A WhatsApp group will be created for each ‘talk’. The group formation is not contingent on a minimum number enrolled. Even if there is only one person enrolled for a particular slot of a course, the course will be delivered to that person.
I will be making my posts during the scheduled time slot of 10pm to 11pm. These posts may be in the form of text, images of PowerPoint slides, my audios, my videos or curated videos of others…
About 10 minutes before the scheduled time of my posts I will post a message in the group to the effect that the session is about to begin
If any course participant has a query, question or observation, they may go ahead and make it right there. If this concerns the whole group, please make it in the group. If it is meant as a message to me, then please send me a direct message rather than posting it in the group.
If I can make a quick short and effective response, without losing the thread of the conversation, I will respond right then, else I will pool all these and make a special post in response.
Towards the end of the session I will share the PowerPoint slides as a pdf file that can be used in ways that the learners find convenient.
You may keep posting your queries and comments even after the scheduled time for my posts is over. All the posts and conversations ( including audio) will remain with you until you consciously and deliberately delete them. This is the greatest advantage of this method
As these ‘talks’ are being delivered through WhatsApp, the enrolment process is simply that of sending a WhatsApp message to Prof MM Pant at +919810073724.
There is no FEE for participation in any of these evening events.
Those who have already expressed their interest in joining these sessions, and have received a confirmation from me, need not confirm again. They will be included in the WhatsApp group, and receive a message within that group a few days before the start of the session.
To know more, please send a WhatsApp message to Prof MM Pant at +919810073724
India is perhaps the only country which has an entry in its Constitution Article 51A(h) about fundamental duties that are expected to be performed by the citizens,among which is the duty ‘to develop the scientific temper, humanism and the spirit of inquiry and reform’.
Until the maturing of the Internet it was not easy for an ordinary citizen to fulfil this obligation, but today, especially with the 5G connectivity likely to be available soon, this should well become possible. The internet has become increasingly more relevant as a source of information about science.
I am sharing in this post, a wide range of resources for the interested citizen to develop a scientific temper by just viewing videos. And the curious would then follow Wikipedia, Medium and other relevant resources to know more.
We begin by listing a few YouTube channels to watch. YouTube is a particularly relevant platform because of its enormous reach: it is the second most accessed website worldwide, where 2 billion registered users watch videos monthly.
1: World Science Festival
2: Closer to truth
3: Royal Institution
4: Nobel Prize
5: Big Think
6: TED talks: TED, TEDx, TED-Ed
7: MIT
8: The European Graduate School
9: Oxford University
10: UCTV: University of California TV
11: Santa Fe Institute
12: ICTP: International Centre for Theoretical Physics
13: Talks at Google
14: Microsoft Research
15: IBM Research
For those who want to get into Physics at length, here are some :
It is also a good idea to follow a few individuals that are great science communicators:
1: Carl Sagan
2: Michio Kaku
3: Brian Greene
4: Brian Cox
5: Max Tegmark
6: Richard Feynman
7: Lex Friedman
8: Niel de Grasse Tyson
9: Jim Al Khalili
10: Jeff Hawkins
11: Arvin Ash
For those who may want to pursue more rigorous academic courses, here are a few distinguished academics to follow:
Walter Levine: Physics
Gilbert Strang: Linear Algebra
Andrew Ng: Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning
Michael Sandel: Justice, morality and ethics
While it may not be obvious, democracy is strengthened by citizens having a scientific spirit of enquiry and reforms. Active, engaged citizens strengthen the institutions of a good democracy, and build a better society.
This is not a complete or exhaustive list, but something that I could put together easily and contains many sources that I am familiar with and follow regularly. I would be happy to learn of more resources from others that helps make this a better collection, and I will include them in my later versions of this
For those who want to explore this theme a little more, I have created the following weekend course delivered through WhatsApp
FAST: First Principles and Scientific Temper
First Principles is a framework for deconstructing complex problems, applied by Elon Musk for his enterprises, and inculcating a Scientific Temper is a Constitutional duty cast upon all of us under Article 51A(h).
In the NEP2020, the phrase is mentioned at 4 places: on pages 5 and 6, on pages 16,34 and 38.
Elon Musk has said that if he hadn’t used first principles thinking to advance Tesla technology, he would have been stuck in the horse-and-carriage stage of the transportation revolution. The real power of first-principles thinking is moving away from incremental improvement and into possibility.
The two together help in creativity, innovation and entrepreneurship, and are essential to flourish, thrive and prosper in an unknown and uncertain future. This course is perhaps a rare effort to make these concepts accessible to a large number of interested learners, simply through WhatsApp on a mobile device. We elucidate what are and more importantly what are not ‘first principles’. We also share strategies to enhance our scientific temper.
In this era of availability of large number of digital learning resources, it is even more important to become aware of the importance of thinking from first principles and training the youth in it.
The structure of this weekend course is as follows:
Day 1 ( Saturday): What are first principles?
1.1: Philosophical Origins
1.2: Elon Musk on the importance of first principles and its applications
1.3: The step-wise approach to first principles thinking
1.4: What is not a first principle? Barriers to First principles thinking
1.5: First principles in marketing strategy, in law and in daily life
Day 2( Sunday): Developing a Scientific Temper
2.1: Origins of the phrase: mentions in the NEP
2.2: Directive principles of the Indian Constitution
2.3: The Scientific approach : Science and pseudoscience
2.4: Asking Questions : the basis of Science
2.5: Science as public knowledge
Enrolment and fee payment:
Fresh cohorts for the above weekend course begin on the 1st Saturday of every month.
As the course is delivered through WhatsApp the enrolment process is simply that of sending a WhatsApp message to Prof MM Pant at +919810073724.
The fee for the above course is Rs 1000/- and can be easily remitted through PayTM to MM Pant ( mobile number : +919810073724).
For those who would rather pay into a Bank account, the relevant information is :
There are of course many challenges that the country faces today, but I will focus on just one, and perhaps a very important one, on which I have experience and some insights: education. Having always been engaged with ‘what’s next?’ I may perhaps describe myself as an “education futurist”, meaning thereby that my interest is not only in being ‘future ready’ but more so in actively “shaping the future”. This is a point made by RA Mashelkar in his book “ From leap-frogging to pole vaulting”.
Being an educational futurist is not only about building scenarios for the future, and sharing it with others and exhorting them to follow your suggestions. It is more about developing in all who care about their future or the future of their children, grand-children, nephews and nieces, the attitude and skills for anticipating their own possible futures and choosing the best one.
Since most learners and educators today depend on some other person or committee to give them an ‘authorised’ vision of the future, this is a rather challenging task. To make it easier for such persons I have created a set of 4 WhatsApp sessions of about an hour each, which can be pursued on Friday evenings. The set of 4 sessions can be completed over a month.
The themes are :
1: Developing Foresight:
2: Avoiding Natural Stupidity
3: Ideas: their creation and spread
4: Questioneering
Brief descriptors of the themes:
1: Developing Foresight:
All of us must learn to anticipate the future. All sportsperson playing cricket, football or tennis for example have to guess ( successfully) where the ball is headed. Foresight is the secret ingredient of all success, because without foresight we cannot prepare for the future.
2: Avoiding Natural Stupidity:
The literal opposite of Artificial Intelligence is natural stupidity, and you would be surprised by its pervasiveness. Even if we may not have the help of AI technologies to empower ourselves, we could significantly improve our lives, if we could cut down on the natural stupidity prevailing in our lives.
3: Ideas: their creation and spread
It is widely believed that we have evolved from hunter-gatherers, agricultural, industrial to a post industrial society driven by creativity, innovation and entrepreneurship. And ideas are the currency of such a society. The goal of this session this is to give you pointers and examples of how you could play an important role in both generation of new ideas, as well as being a propagator or evangelist of useful ideas generated by others.
4: Questioneering??
We were not only born learners, but naturally curious with a lot of questions. The growing up process required that we stop questioning and accepting the various authorities. This session draws attention to the importance of asking questions and how one becomes wiser for having asked good questions.
Enrolment and delivery process:
These sessions are being offered for the first time on Friday 9th, 16th, 23rd and 30th September. And thereafter on the first to fourth Friday of every month.
A WhatsApp group will be created for each ‘talk’. The group formation is not contingent on a minimum number enrolled. Even if there is only one person enrolled for a particular slot of a course, the course will be delivered to that person.
I will be making my posts during the scheduled time slot of 10pm to 11pm. These posts may be in the form of text, images of PowerPoint slides, my audios, my videos or curated videos of others…
About 10 minutes before the scheduled time of my posts I will post a message in the group to the effect that the session is about to begin
If any course participant has a query, question or observation, they may go ahead and make it right there. If this concerns the whole group, please make it in the group. If it is meant as a message to me, then please send me a direct message rather than posting it in the group.
If I can make a quick short and effective response, without losing the thread of the conversation, I will respond right then, else I will pool all these and make a special post in response.
Towards the end of the session I will share the PowerPoint slides as a pdf file that can be used in ways that the learners find convenient.
You may keep posting your queries and comments even after the scheduled time for my posts is over. All the posts and conversations ( including audio) will remain with you until you consciously and deliberately delete them. This is the greatest advantage of this method
As these ‘talks’ are being delivered through WhatsApp, the enrolment process is simply that of sending a WhatsApp message to Prof MM Pant at +919810073724.
There is no FEE for participation in any of these evening events.
To know more, please send a WhatsApp message to Prof MM Pant at +919810073724
Artificial Intelligence and education: the educator’s perspective.
General public access to the internet began in India on 15 August 1995, 27 years back. It was earlier limited to an academic and research community within the project ERNET. Indira Gandhi National Open University was perhaps the first one to adopt Internet based learning for formal University credentials.
Internet access has grown exponentially and soon we will also have 5G. What does the future look like?
“SCHOOLS, COLLEGES AND UNIVERSITIES as currently constituted will be redundant in 2035. Instead, we will have institutions of learning that are virtual/meta/open in character. Although the actual education needs of different segments of our population would vary enormously based upon life circumstances and livelihood opportunities, certain core targets in the area of education would be critical to achieve. Due attention would be paid to their cognitive development even before informal education begins at age 3. All people would have affordable re-skilling opportunities to meet the changing requirements of the job market. In a longer-living and ageing society, everybody would have access to second careers and lifelong learning.”
“SCHOOLS, COLLEGES AND UNIVERSITIES as currently constituted will be redundant in 2035. Instead, we will have institutions of learning that are virtual/meta/open in character. There would be no school dropouts. All children would have access to quality and affordable education, independent of social, economic, geographic, physical and even mental constraints. Due attention would be paid to their cognitive development even before informal education begins at age 3. All people would have affordable re-skilling opportunities to meet the changing requirements of the job market. In a longer-living and ageing society, everybody would have access to second careers and lifelong learning.”
In 2015 the UNGA adopted SDGs of which goal 4 is regarding education, and is in the same spirit as above. The targets for 2030 of this goal can only be achieved by an AI driven teacherless education model suggested by Thomas Frey :https://youtu.be/E3bUn9-j0yo
If we continue to insert a teacher between ourselves and everything that we need to learn, we will never be able to learn in time everything we want to or need to learn.
AI will soon replace traditional human teachers standing in front of a class of about 20-40 students and transacting a prescribed ( often obsolete and irrelevant) curriculum designed by an ‘authority’.
We have to prepare ourselves for a future with driverless cars and teacher-less learning or what we may better call as SmartLearning. The learners will of course make this transition relatively easily as bots and recommender systems are already part of their environment. I have created a one month course to become a SmartLearner delivered through WhatsApp and augmented with Zoom sessions on Saturdays. More information about this course : https://mmpant.com/basl-become-a-smartlearner/
But erstwhile educators/ teachers will have to make conscious efforts to transform to their new roles of mentors, coaches and cognitive development facilitators. Perhaps in their avatars as entrepreneurs for which I have created this course: https://mmpant.com/fostering-educational-entrepreneurship/
For any further information please send me a WhatsApp message at +919810073724
This post is largely driven by the opening words in the preface to Prof John Ziman’s book “ Principles of the theory of Solids”. The frontiers of knowledge (to coin a phrase) are always on the move. Today’s discovery will tomorrow be part of the mental furniture of every research worker. By the end of next week it will begin every course of graduate lectures. Within the month, there will be a clamour to have it in the undergraduate curriculum. Next year, I do believe, it will seem so commonplace that it may be assumed to be known to every schoolboy.
It has also been inspired by an anecdote attribute to Albert Einstein. The story is told of how Albert Einstein one day gave his students a final exam that was a year old. In fact, Einstein had given his students the exact same final exam the year before. His assistant noticed the “error” and timidly made the famous physicist aware of his mistake. Einstein looked closer at the newly distributed sheet and answered: “You’re right, these are the same questions as last year – but the answers have changed.”
And more recently the futurist Thomas Frey made an important observation ( https://youtu.be/McV9AMV2LiI ) that if we continue to insert a teacher in between ourselves and everything that we need to learn, we cannot possibly learn fast enough to meet the demands of the future.
I have been for sometime now evangelising and advocating the use of Internet and allied technologies, including the often maligned social media as a means of self-directed learning. I am sharing here a list of 10 topics at the frontiers of new knowledge on which one can get useful information, which as Thomas Frey says you are unlikely to get from a CBSE recognised School, a UGC approved University or an AICTE/ NAAC degree awarding Institution, whether public or private. And if you are not ready with new relevant knowledge, you have your place reserved in what Yuval Noah Harari describes as the “ useless class”: https://youtu.be/OMDlfNWM1fA
Amongst the top contenders of the most trending words of the year 2021, Metaverse offers a parallel virtual universe. It opens up a whole new world of economic prospects, from virtual music events to NFT-based products. Due to its vast potential, many big tech giants are already taking a leap and entering the world of Metaverse.
Serious and concerted perusal of these resources will enable you to comprehend Metaverse in a more effective manner, giving you a significant advantage, in reaping its benefits.
You will gain an understanding of the issues and acquire insights on several key points:
Have an idea of the emerging Metaverse
Know of various technologies involved in Metaverse
Learn how you can benefit with Metaverse
Explore different Use Cases of Metaverse, especially in education.
There is a section on the Metaverse in Healthcare/ Medicine as education can benefit from the models of healthcare delivery. Much like we have doctors running their clinics in the Metaverse, we will have educators dispensing cognitive advice byway of ‘ learn8ng prescriptions’ in the Metaverse.
We also share stories of Banking and FinTech in the Metaverse, because innovation often happens by adopting and infusing ideas from an apparently different context.
Since 2021, the concept of the metaverse has been widely discussed. It refers to the internet accessed via virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) glasses, and is considered to be the next-generation mobile computing platform that will be widely used in the future.
Professor Chunxue Bai and colleagues have recently proposed the metaverse in medicine, and suggested naming 2022 as the “Year of the Metaverse in Medicine”. Their expert group further discussed the definition of the metaverse in the medical context, and its concept and application scenarios, as well as its clinical importance. It is expected that this new concept will contribute to improving comprehensive healthcare as well as prevention and treatment of diseases, and to upgrading the current diagnosis and treatment model – which varies widely between doctors and hospitals, creating uneven standards akin to production in handicraft workshops (referred to as the “handicraft workshop model”) – to a modern high quality “ six sigma” model that consistently delivers high standards.
Three areas in which the metaverse is likely to gain dominance in the healthcare industry are : Surgical operations, mental health and medical education and training.
The UN General Assembly’s 2015 resolution regarding “ good health and well-being” will be realised most likely with leveraging the Metaverse. The SDG Goal 3 aims to achieve universal health coverage, that seeks equitable access of healthcare services to all men and women. It proposes to end the preventable death of newborns, infants and children under five and end epidemics.
The potential of the Metaverse in healthcare/ medicine is now well appreciated, but it may take another decade for it being used actively in the hospitals or medical practices. However practical implementation is already happening. The link at number 5 below describes a product that was shown at Dubai in January 2022.
Louis Pasteur, pioneer of the “ germ theory of disease” had said that “ fortune favours the prepared mind”. Let’s get fortunate with the Metaverse.
A few carefully chosen links for further information:
The first bank to enter the metaverse with much fanfare was JP Morgan earlier this year. The US investment giant took a large plot in Decentraland and boasts a prowling tiger as a feature in its Onyx Lounge.
Since then, South Korea’s Kookmin Bank has opened up its customer services options by providing one-to-one consultations in the metaverse.
HSBC then followed, opening a branch in the established Sandbox region of the metaverse, while the UK-based payments fintech Sokin recently announced its imminent foray into the augmented reality platform.
Launched in 2021 Sokin operates as a next generation payments provider rather than a bank, but the fintech is set to enable full ecommerce payments for the first time in the metaverse, allowing brands and businesses to grow from its physical store into the virtual world.
Currently no single metaverse world exists where consumers can shop their favourite brands, however, Sokin will launch its own metaverse community designed to process full ecommerce transactions.
Genome Sequencing is 10 million times cheaper and 100,000 times higher quality than it was just a few years ago. Quantum Computing is around the horizon. Artificial Intelligence is displacing erstwhile white collar jobs. Engineering education loans are now NPA’s of Banks. Time to wake up! If you can only do what you have been taught how to do, you are replaceable by a piece of software or by a robot if sensing and motion are also involved. You have to become an ‘आत्मनिर्भर’ self-learner. Join the 5th education revolution.
Since 2021, the concept of the metaverse has been widely discussed. It refers to the internet accessed via virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) glasses, and is considered to be the next-generation mobile computing platform that will be widely used in the future.
Professor Chunxue Bai and colleagues have recently proposed the metaverse in medicine, and suggested naming 2022 as the “Year of the Metaverse in Medicine”. Their expert group further discussed the definition of the metaverse in the medical context, and its concept and application scenarios, as well as its clinical importance. It is expected that this new concept will contribute to improving comprehensive healthcare as well as prevention and treatment of diseases, and to upgrading the current diagnosis and treatment model – which varies widely between doctors and hospitals, creating uneven standards akin to production in handicraft workshops (referred to as the “handicraft workshop model”) – to a modern high quality “ six sigma” model that consistently delivers high standards.
Three areas in which the metaverse is likely to gain dominance in the healthcare industry are : Surgical operations, mental health and medical education and training.
The UN General Assembly’s 2015 resolution regarding “ good health and well-being” will be realised most likely with leveraging the Metaverse. The SDG Goal 3 aims to achieve universal health coverage, that seeks equitable access of healthcare services to all men and women. It proposes to end the preventable death of newborns, infants and children under five and end epidemics.
The potential of the Metaverse in healthcare/ medicine is now well appreciated, but it may take another decade for it being used actively in the hospitals or medical practices. However practical implementation is already happening. The link at number 5 below describes a product that was shown at Dubai in January 2022.
Louis Pasteur, pioneer of the “ germ theory of disease” had said that “ fortune favours the prepared mind”. Let’s get fortunate with the Metaverse.
A few carefully chosen links for further information:
We need innovations in education. One such innovation is the “ Learning Prescription”. I had earlier espoused the idea of a “to learn” list like the “to do“ list that is well known in management.
By investing in a reading habit, you can ensure you’re growing yourself every day. That’s why the 1st example is of ‘Reading Effectively’. The NEP 2020 emphasises ‘learning how to learn’. The 2nd sample learning prescription is therefore on ‘ Building Learning Power’. It has been said that the future will in due course, become the present, whether we are prepared or not. It has also been said that success happens when preparation meets opportunity. Hence the 3rd sample learning prescription on ‘Anticipating the future’. In the present and coming era of information explosion, available information must be absorbed critically,hence the 4th sample learning prescription is on ‘ Critical Thinking’. Finally there is both a hype about as well as great promise from the Metaverse. The 5th sample learning prescription is therefore about ‘ Education in the Metaverse’.
It builds upon the concepts of “ Bibliotherapy” and “ CBT: Cognitive Behavioural Therapy” to create a product for self-directed learners, who would want to stay away from joining the useless class predicted by Yuval Noah Harari.
Distance Learning has used self-instructional learning materials designed by specialised Instructional designers for its learners. This was done by the UK Open University, the Indira Gandhi National Open University and other similar Institutions. But that course material was the same for all the learners pursuing a particular course. Learning prescriptions are designed for an individual learner.
The next edition of this weekend course is on Saturday May 28th and Sunday May 29th 2022. Thereafter it will be on offer every fourth weekend of the month.
Flow:
Day 1: The Concept of a Learning Prescription
1.1: What is ‘prescribed’ in education?
1.2: The elements of a medical prescription
1.3: Generic format of a ‘learning prescription’?
1.4: Self-learning and ‘learning prescriptions’
1.5: Who should be giving ‘ learning prescriptions’?
Day 2: Examples of Learning Prescriptions
2.1: Reading effectively
2.2: Building Learning Power
2.3: Anticipating the future
2.4: Critical Thinking
2.5: Education in The Metaverse
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Enrolment and fee payment:
As this weekend course is being delivered through WhatsApp the enrolment process is simply that of sending a WhatsApp message to Prof MM Pant at +919810073724.
The fee for the course is Rs 500/- and can be easily remitted through PayTM to MM Pant ( mobile number : +919810073724).
For those who would rather pay into a Bank account, the relevant information is :
