online lecture sites

http://www.videolectures.net provides a wide range of video lectures on several different topics from eminent researchers from top universities.

http://lecturefox.com links open source lectures from several universities including MIT and UC Berkeley.

Local news by Yahoo!, MSN in native scripts

Yahoo! and MSN have started the news contents in Indian languages, while Google is summarizing it for Hindi (all of them in UTF-8!!)

I cann't explain the joy of reading MSN Telugu, it is so good to read news in your native language specifically international and information technology news items which are rarely covered by local papers.

The other big advantage is this data can be used to build language models which turn to help to build better speech synthesis and speech recognition, machine translation systems for Indian languages.

The other big advantage I see is to the students of MSIT/IIIT/JNTU. As a part of their soft-skills they can have reading and comprehensive assignments in native languages. This would serve in two folds.
1. Preserve reading, comprehension abilities of the student in native languages
2. Better reading, writing and comprehension in native language could lead better to reading, writing and comprehension in English too.

MSN:

www.msn.co.in/hindi
www.msn.co.in/tamil
www.msn.co.in/telugu
www.msn.co.in/kannada
www.msn.co.in/malayalam

Google:

http://news.google.com/news?ned=hi_in

Yahoo!

http://in.telugu.yahoo.com/
http://in.hindi.yahoo.com/
http://in.gujarati.yahoo.com/
http://in.punjabi.yahoo.com/
http://in.kannada.yahoo.com/
http://in.malayalam.yahoo.com/
http://in.tamil.yahoo.com/

BBC:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/hindi/
http://www.bbc.co.uk/tamil/
http://www.bbc.co.uk/bengali/
http://www.bbc.co.uk/urdu/

Will IITs remain centers for excellence

Bhamy V Shenoy an alumnus of IIT Madras has an interesting view point conveying the effect of coaching centers on IITs being the center for excellence. Read more at http://in.news.yahoo.com/070311/43/6d55o.html

The problem of education: Prof. Raj Reddy

Prof. Raj Reddy has given a interview to Sramana Mitra on the problem of education (Sramana Mitra writes on several interesting issues which include strategy and industry trends). In this interview Prof. Reddy discusses the origins of his thinking for a different way of learning, and his experiments and views on learning. The interview is being relayed as a series of blogs. The following are the links for the released parts.

Part I: http://sramanamitra.com/blog/656
Part 2: http://sramanamitra.com/blog/664
Part 3: http://sramanamitra.com/blog/663
Part 4: http://sramanamitra.com/blog/665
Part 5: http://sramanamitra.com/blog/666
Part 6: http://sramanamitra.com/blog/667
Part 7: http://sramanamitra.com/blog/670
Part 8: http://sramanamitra.com/blog/671
Part 9: http://sramanamitra.com/blog/672
Part 10: http://sramanamitra.com/blog/674
Part 11: http://sramanamitra.com/blog/675

Worksheet for report/proposal writing.

Below is the worksheet suggested by Prof. Raj Reddy for many of his graduate students and researchers to formulate their ideas and work. This worksheet acts as excellent guidelines to write course/technical reports, papers, presentations, project proposals and thesis!

• Introduction with Unique attributes
• What are we trying to do?
• What is the key make-a-difference capability we bring to the table?
  
• Current Context
  
• How is it being done today?, How are others approaching the problem?
  
• What are the limitations of current/proposed approaches?
  
• The Vision
  
• What is new in the approach?
• The Plan
  
• What is the plan for realizing the goal?
• Impact
• If you succeed who will care? What is the impact?
• Financials
• How much will it cost and how long will it take?
• Evaluation
• What are the mid-term and final exams?
  

MSIT NET On Ning.com

Please check http://msitnet.ning.com - a social network created to connect MSITians! This url has discussion forums, blog, upload photos, videos etc - almost anything you could have done on blogger, myspace, flickr, youtube but comes as a package!

Would be good to see photos on it from recent MSIT's Kerala trip!

http://www.ning.com (created by Netscape team) allows us to create any number of social networks.

We can use it to create *n* number of networks, one for each course (or for each batch) and thus connect learning centers of MSIT and/or Gurukulam centers. The discussion forums here would be most useful to post queries and seek answers from internal as well as from remote mentors/colleagues across the centers/countries.

PS: It is free with little hassles of infrastructure, setup and maintenance.