Some efforts to LEARN from and support

Khan Academy-the useful stuff

Salman Khan's labelled as Bill Gates' favourite teacher in a recent article by Fortune magazine. This Khan is not the Hindi movie actor. He's an Indian-American Harvard-Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) graduate who quit his job as a hedge fund manager with Wohl Capital Management to found a non-profit education initiative in 2009.

Khan become an online sensation after his virtual school khanacademy.org — a collection of free self-narrated video-lectures on YouTube —caught on.

Khan got the idea in 2004 when he helped a cousin with a math problem over the telephone while using Yahoo Doodle as a virtual, real-time notepad.

He says he has at least 300,000 followers a month for his mini-lectures, including Gates' children. The aim is to "provide education to anyone, anywhere," including children who have to work for a living.

The 33-year-old teacher plans to take his tutorials to iTunes as well. "Also, over the next two years, the tutorials will be translated into Hindi, Urdu and Bengali," says Khan, whose mother hails from Kolkata and father from Bangladesh. "It's motivating for me when people tell me they didn't fail after using these tutorials."

Achievement: Khan's 1,800+ tutorials on YouTube are viewed about 100,000 times a day on an average. He says his virtual academy, being developed as an open source project, reaches at least 300,000 students a month in the US, Canada, Australia and India. "Over 10% of our viewers are from India," he says

Room To Read

Room To Read (RTR) was launched globally in 2000 by John Wood, who after trekking through schools in Nepal was shocked by their lack of resources and inspired enough to quit as Microsoft Corp’s director of business development for China to begin his non-profit venture.

RTR came to India in 2003, making the country its fourth home after Nepal, Vietnam and Cambodia. It aimed to partner with local communities and foster reading as a habit, especially where government efforts were inadequate.

Today, RTR India's interventions have reached at least 3,500 schools.

"The Right To Education, in laying out basic parameters, said that schools must have libraries. So we began with giving books to schools and training teachers for day-to-day transactions," said Sunisha Ahuja, RTR's India country director.

"In 2006, Pratham's Aser (annual state of education report) confirmed that children (53 per cent of those surveyed) didn't have basic reading skills. So in 2007, we started developing textbook for teachers to train children. There were picture cards, word cards, local rhymes… the idea was to develop a reading habit so that they become independent readers."

Reading, says RTR India's global chief officer Dhir Jhingan, is a foundation skill. "It helps other skills."

Achievement: RTR expects to establish 4,000 libraries in India by the end of 2010 and add another 850 by the end of next year. Worldwide, it says at least four million children have benefited from its programmes, and in India, about 825,000.

Pratham

Pratham, one of the largest non-profit organisations in the country, was established in 1994 in five Mumbai slums. It aimed to identify gaps in education in terms of dropouts and teaching techniques.

Its annual status of education report, or Aser, is the largest household survey on elementary education in India. The survey was first carried out in 2005 and is used in policy formulation by the Union and state governments, including for SSA.

Pratham launched its flagship programme — Read India (RI) — in 2007. The idea was to improve reading, writing and basic arithmetic in children aged 6-14.

Today, taxpayers pay an additional two per cent education cess to support elementary education and at least 90 per cent of all children in the 6-14 age group are enrolled in schools, according to the Aser report. Still, by many counts, basic learning levels are far from satisfactory.

"SSA's projected impact by 2010 hasn't taken place as expected but somehow the new RTE Act will help fill this gap," says Himanshu Giri, chief operating officer of Pratham Books, the publishing arm of the non-profit body.

Achievement: In 2008-09, RI reached 33 million children in 19 states; 400,529 books were read by children and 600,000 teachers and govt workers were trained under RI.

source-Hindustan Times

News and media sites.

I have compiled a list of some news sites.
Not the one that we already know. But some real useful, satirical and humorous stuff.


1.Faking News is an Indian news satire website that publishes fake news reports containing satire on politics and society of India. The website also publishes occasional serious articles related to television journalism in India. The website was launched on September 15, 2008.

2.lolland is a site where people have actually stop procastinating and doing some real useful stuff. read news and articles in an entire humorous and satirical form. Real good site for MANGOMEN.

3. Another useful and infact a site where you can actively participate and be assured that you will be heard. This is a site for MANGOMen who are finding answers for the atrocities done in the name of democracy. And as the name suggests....Why Democracy. You may not agree with the content but then everyone has something to blabber about.

Reader's Stuff

Here are some sites from which you can download or read eBooks for free. Most of them are initiatives by Universities, open source communities etc. 

1. Internet Archive includes texts, audio, moving images, and software as well as archived web pages in its collections, and provides specialized services for adaptive reading and information access for the blind and other persons with disabilities.  It also has a cool web service which takes you to the archived versions of the websites. You can select your date in this time machine 

2. Project Gutenberg has over 33,000 free downloadable eBooks in various formats. This is one of the oldest text digitization projects. 

3. Nalanda Digital library also have some free eBooks, journals etc cataloged on it's site. This project is in infant stage. 

4. The World Digital Library makes it possible to discover, study, and enjoy cultural treasures from around the world on one site, in a variety of ways. These cultural treasures include, but are not limited to, manuscripts, maps, rare books, musical scores, recordings, films, prints, photographs, and architectural drawings.

5. Digital Himalaya is a project from University Of Cambridge to develop digital collection, storage and distribution strategies for multimedia anthropological information from the Himalayan region.

6. The Digital Library of India is a portal by IISc - Bangalore which offers free-to-read, searchable collection of one million books, predominantly in Indian languages, available to everyone over the Internet.

7.  ArXiv by Cornell University offers open access to 626,006 e-prints in Physics, Mathematics, Computer Science, Quantitative Biology, Quantitative Finance and Statistics. 

8. The Open Library is a project of the non-profit Internet Archive, and has been funded in part by a grant from the California State Library and the Kahle/Austin Foundation with a mission of one web page for every book ever published.

9. Read Print is another website which offers free online books library in an organized way.

10. Sacred Texts  has largest freely available archive of online books about religion, mythology, folklore and the esoteric on the Internet. This site is dedicated to religious tolerance and scholarship, and has the largest readership of any similar site on the web.

11. The European Library is a free service that offers access to the resources of the 48 national libraries of Europe in 35 languages. Resources can be both digital (books, posters, maps, sound recordings, videos, etc.) and bibliographical. Quality and reliability are guaranteed by the 48 collaborating national libraries of Europe. But this is not eBook download service. 

12. Online Mathematical Textbooks  has a small collection of mathematics text books.

13.  Ibiblio is an online collection of various media including text on various topics where you can browse them categorically.

14. Shelfari (now acquired by Amazon) helps you to make a virtual online book shelf where you can also see the brief information on books. Similar service is offered by Goodreads.   There are other but these two are most popular. Also there is a web service named What should I read next  which suggests you pretty accurately the name and description of books of similar genre or on similar topic which you had just read.

15. In India Infibeam and Flipkart are very good sites for purchasing book online, offering very reasonable prices.

Reader's Stuff Extended

1.      Filestube is a media search engine which searches among various media hosting sites like Rapidshare, Megaupload, Depositfiles and many more. And it is extremely efficient for searching and downloading eBooks.

2.      Free Book Spot  is a site which provides eBook download links from various media hosting sites for free. Also contains description and cover page of the book for great browsing experience. Much like Google as the site says. J

3.      Many Books  allows you to browse through the most popular titles, recommendations, or recent reviews from site visitors and boast a collection of 28,000 free eBooks.

4.      Wowebook is a great source of links computer science eBooks hosted on various media hosts. Here also you can browse them by category. And it also provides description and cover page with the book link.  

5.      Planet eBook  offers a beautiful compilation of free classic literature on its site. It is also a well maintained site but not many eBooks as it also hosts them on its site. Shows you the excerpts the book hosted and also gives you option between one page and two page versions of eBook.

6.      Free eBooks  has a collection of free eBooks on various subjects and in various categories. You also get the option to download in various formats, even for mobile. Here you need to create an account to download the books.

7.      Planet PDF  is a site which hosts few free downloadable eBooks and also offers Nitro PDF services, software for free.  

8.      The Online Books Page  is a simple site which offers so many old classic eBooks which can be browsed in various ways. It has over 40000 eBooks available for download.

9.      Mathematics Book Online contains links of various Mathematics eBooks on its page.

10.   Scribd is the largest social publishing and reading site in the world which gives free space to its users to upload text files and read the files uploaded by others after subscribing them. A reader/writer should have an account on this. J

11.   eSnips is a social content-sharing site, where you can publish and share any media type including text. You have practically unlimited flexibility in choosing what you want to share, and with whom, in 5GB of free space.

P.S. - You may have to wait for few seconds if you downloading from external media hosting sites for free.

Read This Everyday

CONTRIBUTE TO YOUR SOCIETY SITES

I will put down some sites here that I think might come handy if you want to do some community service....

1.
you can become a voluntary blood donor on this site and help the needy who need blood, instead of getting it from blood peddlars.. they can get your blood and who knows .. you can save a life...

click on this link to donate blood


2.
This is a charity site. One can select one's fav charity (all the credible ones are registered with the site) and donate by credit card.
One can even volunteer for social work.
click to go the site


3.
This site has a button on the main page. Every click on that button will result in a cup of food to be donated to poor and needy ( cost borne by sponsors )
click here to go to this site

4.
enhance your knowledge and in the meantime give rice to people who need it...
just play a simple game on this site and you can contribute..
click here to go to this site