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| EDUCATION TRIBUNE |
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Kindle — the future of reading
Curb corporal punishment
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Kindle — the future of reading The Kindle DX is E-ink reading in a slim form with excellent connectivity to a large selection of books and subscriptions. The design is sleek and simple—no fuss, no frills. It looks and reads like real paper. Browsing in the Kindle store for reading material is convenient and fun. Buying a book or magazine is just a click away and the Kindle DX can hold up to 3,500 books. Your content can get wirelessly transferred to your Kindle in just one minute. Books, magazines and newspapers are also cheaper on the kindle. I subscribe to the Financial Times on the Kindle and the monthly cost is Rs 480 compared to roughly Rs 2,500 per month in Delhi. The physical copy of the FT in India gets delivered on the following day and I get my paper on the Kindle at the same time it hits the stands in the UK. Imagine children in India carrying just one electronic reader to school instead of backbreaking school bags. The compact disc was the end of the cassette and now buying music online is slowly but surely causing the demise of the CD. New information released by Apple states that iTunes is now the third largest music retailer in the US. Electronic readers will become cheaper and improve with time but I can envisage the Kindle proving to be a real game changer. E-readers will be an ideal fit for academia. Portability and easy access to books, journals, etc., could result in students reading more. The built-in dictionary is a very handy tool. While reading, the student can take the curser to the word he/she wants defined and the meaning shows up at the bottom of the page. Electronic readers are searchable and students can annotate text, highlight passages and write in the margins as they read along just as they would do on paper. ‘Text to Speech’, when activated, reads your books aloud and will be useful for students who experience difficulty in reading and for students who generally tend to avoid reading their textbooks. A pilot programme started this fall at six universities in the US in order to determine if Kindle could help them attain a goal of a paperless society or at least a society that uses less paper. The program at Princeton University is titled “Toward Print-Less and Paper-Less Courses”. The universities are trying to consume less paper by using electronic readers without creating an unfavourable impact on the traditional classroom experience. Last year Princeton paid $5 million for paper. College administrators see the Kindle as a means of reducing their budgets and helping the environment. If these six universities have a good story to tell at the end of the fall semester, many other schools and colleges will follow suit. In any event, the result of these pilot programmes will help in the advancement of electronic readers to adapt better to the world of education. Canadian forests are being depleted largely to supply paper to the US. Tree farming in forests is responsible for many species to lose their natural habitats. A report by Cleantech Group says that a single Kindle displaces the purchase of 22.5 books each year, which results in an estimated carbon savings of 168 kg of CO2. The analysis compared carbon emissions from the production of electronic books to that of traditional book publishing. The gist of the study is that if you read more than five books per year, use an electronic reader to benefit the environment. Our present government in its austerity drive should give electronic readers a thought and try to cut down on the usage of paper. Our MPs, MLAs and bureaucrats should be asked to buy their own e-readers. PDF (portable document format) files could be downloaded directly into their Kindles and you never know they might actually start reading their files. There are quite a few electronic readers in market. Sony has a touch screen e-reader and Apple might come out with the best of them all. Right now, Kindle seems to be the better choice because of easy access to Amazon’s vast selection of books. But given time, there will be many choices and the pricing will be competitive. As far as the reading experience is concerned, I would any day curl up with my Kindle than with a hardcover or paperback. It rests snugly in my arm without straining it and after adjusting the font I don’t need my glasses to read. The electronic paper display is reflective, so I can read even in bright sunlight. The Kindle has seriously enhanced my reading. Overall, because it feels more like a text and less like a device, the Kindle comes closer to its stated goal: for the device to disappear leaving only the joy of reading.
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TWO years after a national child rights body sought steps to curb the menace of corporal punishment in schools, Delhi Government has asked school authorities to implement its directions that include keeping complaint boxes for children in the educational campus premises. As per directions from the National Commission for Protection of Child's Rights (NCPCR), schools have been asked to hold general body meeting with all the parents of the students and device procedures for protecting children and their rights. The aim is to make children aware of their rights and that they should not take corporal punishment as a normal activity in the school. "We have recently asked school authorities to inform the children in Assembly that they have the right to speak against corporal punishment and bring it to the notice of concerned people in the school," a senior official from Delhi Education Department said. To sensitise the teachers, they will be counselled regularly in the staff meetings and told that if any kind of corporal punishment is meted out, the concerned teacher will be held accountable. Corporal punishment includes rapping on the knuckles, running on the school ground, kneeling down for hours, forced to sit like a chair, locking one up in a room, pinching or beating with scale or slapping. According to a recent survey by Plan India, an NGO, corporal punishment is an accepted way of life at schools as well as homes. Often, victims do not perceive it as violence. It also found that overburdened teachers use punishment as a means of crowd control. This form of punishment in schools is a violation of the rights of the child and can lead to physical and mental trauma, the survey said. The NGO surveyed 1,591 students in 41 government-run schools across four states namely New Delhi, Goa, Andhra Pradesh, West Bengal and Tamil Nadu which had banned corporal punishment. However the survey found that ban was little effective. The Delhi government, which runs over 1,150 schools, has had to act on 15 or 16 cases of corporal punishment in the last four years.
— PTI
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Guru Nanak Dev University, Amritsar Gurbinder Singh, a student of the Department of Physical Education, has been elected as president of the Students' Representative Body (SRB) of the university. Earlier, the various teaching departments of the university nominated their departmental representatives for the post and on their consent by nomination, the SRB was elected in the presence of a committee constituted by the Vice-Chancellor for the purpose. The other elected office-bearers of the SRB are Maninder Singh (applied chemical sciences and technology), vice-president; Bhumika Kareer (psychology), secretary; Jasjit Kaur (Punjab School of Economics), joint secretary, and Munish Mahajan (computer science & engineering), treasurer. Gurpreet Kaur (applied physics), Charanpreet Singh (architecture), Himanshu Agarwal (chemistry), Jatin Takkar (food science & technology), Ranjeet Kaur (Sanskrit, Pali & Prakrit) and Shivani Sharma (sociology) were elected to the executive committee. The committee members Dr A.K. Thukral, Dean Students' Welfare, Prof. Rajinder Puar (law department), Prof. R.K. Bedi (physics department) and Prof. M.S. Hundal (chemistry department) were among those present on the occasion. Savinderjit group sweeps poll The University Democratic Front led by Savinderjit Singh made a clean sweep in the recently held Guru Nanak Dev University non-teaching employees' elections by winning all the seven seats and claiming 10 executive posts. Savinderjit has once again been elected as president of the association. The University Democratic Employees Front and the University Karmchari Ekta Front led by Achhar Singh and Daljit Singh, respectively, were the other two groups which were contesting the elections. The elected office-bearers include Savinderjit Singh (president), Balbir Singh (senior vice-president), Kulwant Singh (vice-president), Surjit Singh Cholia (secretary), Harbir Singh Nagra (joint secretary), Gurmit Singh (secretary, public relation) and Gaganajit Singh (treasurer). The executive committee members include Aman Kumar, Hardip Singh, Shiv Kumar, Simarjit Singh, Gurmukh Singh Chabba, Avtar Singh, Surinder Kumar, Nirmal Singh, Balwinder Singh and Gurbir Singh. Varsity convocation today Guru Nanak Dev University, Amritsar, will hold its 35th convocation on October 27. The convocation will be presided over by Gen. (retd) S. F Rodrigues, Governor and Chancellor of the university, while Prof Goverdhan Mehta, former director, Indian Institute of Sciences, Bangalore, will deliver the convocation address.
— Contributed by P. K. Jaiswar
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WHEN I first held my Kindle, I had the same feeling of excitement as when I got my first iPod. The iPod forever changed the way we listen to music and in my view, the Kindle will forever change the way we read.