Opinion piece: A case for the ‘boring’ classroom
A case for the ‘boring’ classroom There is a growing disdain for the traditional classroom, but for a teacher, the blank walls can be a canvas to play with, thinks Payal Arora.
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IDEAPLAY: New Media, Society & Change
Recently I was invited by the Department of Education at Michigan State University to give a public lecture and some interviews on how people learn to leisure and labor with new technologies in rural India. They did a wonderful job in capturing the interview through their multimedia portal IDEAPLAY , an excellent way to disseminate and share conversations that take place at this department. Below are the links for the interview: IDEAPLAY: Payal Arora on New Media, Society and Change PART 1 PART 2 PART 3 PART 4 PART 5 Learning to leisure and labor with new technologies in rural India There is an intricate relationship between leisure, labor and learning. Much is revealed from eight-months of ethnographic fieldwork on computer-mediated social learning in rural India. The role of educational institutions against informal learning spaces such as cybercafés in fostering digital engagements is explored. Issues of global knowledge constructions, pl...
Plagiarism: Moral hazards or strategies for the 21st century?
My book chapter/ case study on academic plagiarism just recently came out - " Copycats of the Central Himalayas: Learning in the age of Information ." Basically, I spent about 8 months in Almora, a rur-town in Central Himalayas, investigating what people do with the Internet. Given that cybercafes had sprung up relatively recently, I volunteered to work for one in exchange of playing witness to internet usage. It was amazing as I really actually pictured people to be using it for the usual browsing and entertainment oriented stuff. Instead, I became an active accomplice to plagiarism by college students - open, active, ingenious plagiarism! Of course as soon as one says "plagiarism," academics and others get all hassled about it, frothing in the mouth about it immorality, the decline of this generation and more. Rather than focus on the "pathological" reasons why students do what they do, I thought it would be worth stopping and asking how on earth did t...