Twitter, Twitter: A Case for Social Media

I am sure you are going to start thinking that this blog is less about education issues and more about social media. Well, that isn't really true but it is clear that social media has great power, which is waiting to be unleashed at various places.

I am not writing this post in the form of a formal seminar paper and I am going to maintain my chatty tone throughout. However, the title "Twitter, Twitter: A Case for Social Media" is certainly a catchy seminar paper title.

I would like to approach this issue from various perspectives in my posts and in this post, I am going to focus on Twitter. However, let us begin with Mr. K Srinivasan of PR Point, a leading Public Relations practitioner in India. Mr. Srinivasan sincerely believes that social media should be taught to students in Indian colleges. I would be tempted to agree with him. Recently, I asked my media students to write about the way in which Barack Obama used social networking to his benefit. There was one student in my class, who said, "Sir, I don't know what this is all about." There were twelve students present there and we are referring to a very reputed institute in the country. There were two other students that day who didn't articulate it the way, this person did but they too seemed quite lost. Then, another day, I was speaking to another set of students, again students who are studying at a very reputed institute. I was teaching them public relations and we were discussing how various social networking sites could be used to create good PR. I spoke about Twitter and my students-- young 20-somethings, who stay in New Delhi, study media and are net-savvy--had heard of Twitter but they didn't know what it was all about.

This does show that there is a great need to educate young people about the uses of social media. Going back to Mr. Srinivasan, he is running an online poll on the Impact of Social Media on Indian Voters. Only Indian voters are eligible to participate. However, even if you are not an Indian voter, you can still access the website.

Sometime, early this week, I wrote a status update about myself on Facebook and I said I would like to explore Twitter for education and one of my Facebook contacts asked me how I would go about it. I thought that query gave me more food for thought. When I explained about Twitter to my students. I told them that it was a microblogging service where you could post updates about what you were doing in 140 characters. I also told them that you could follow other peoples' updates and that you could update others. The first question that five students asked in unison was: What's the use of following other peoples' updates? Why should anyone follow you? Those were pertinent questions. I explained the advantages to them. Then it made some sense to them.

Speaking about this Facebook friend, who asked me how I could use Twitter for education. I would like to be brief here and I would follow up with future posts which would demonstrate how Twitter could be used for education. Let us take an example. Let us speak about language teaching. However, one could form a limited Twitter group with students / speakers who are second language learners of English. The teacher could use Twitter for writing small phrases and could use the service for explaining the sentence structure used in the English language. The teacher could post an incorrect sentence and ask the students to correct it in real time. The teacher could use a conversational method to teach language.

Now, let us change track a bit. From the domain of education, media, and public relations, where Twitter can be quite powerful, let us speak about what Twitter is doing to the internet these days. John Battelle believes that Twitter is the You Tube of real time search. I thought that was a very powerful idea. Battelle wrote a post yesterday, February 25th. He calls it Twitter=You Tube. He says that You Tube generates more searches than Yahoo and he says that Twitter is community driven and Battelle states that Google wasn't that strong in that part of the media business. I liked the piece and I also liked the way he titled it.

Mercury News also has a very interesting article on the issue. Chris O'Brien wrote How Twitter could be a threat to Google. There is a great online buzz about Twitter and how it can be a transformational idea. We are already in the transformational age now with the election of Barack Obama and everything seems possible these days. Twitter hasn't made a penny yet and it suffered from a major PR disaster recently when some famous accounts were compromised. Figures tell me that Twitter has six million users and that a search function, http://search.twitter.com is growing rapidly.

The co-founders of Twitter, Evan Williams and Biz Stone, have already sold a business to Google: Can you guess which one? They sold: Blogger. The same blogger that I am using right now to write this post. Twitter is based in San Francisco and is known as a microblogging service. O'Brien feels that the way Twitter has developed shows that it can do to Google, exactly what Microsoft did to IBM years ago. He feels that this is the way Goliaths are beaten. Twitter has already refused a $500 million offer from Facebook.

I am sure there will be more action in the near future. I wanted this post to focus on Twitter and to show how social media has developed. I would follow up with related posts soon.

If you would like to follow me on Twitter, please go to www.twitter.com/roomynaqvy

Immigrant Teens Struggle With Formal Schooling

About a month ago, I read a very interesting article about how immigrant teens were struggling with formal schooling in the schools of New York. To some people, this may look like an alien topic but I would first like to discuss the article and then speak about its various ramifications.

This article spoke about how many young people fled persecution in their countries, reached United States and got enrolled into schools. So, there was this girl, who was 18 years old and her name was Fanta Konneh. She grew up in Guinea after her family had fled from Liberia and she had never walked into any classroom all her life.The problem here is that we have very diverse set of students in a school, where some are from privileged settings, while the others are natives with lesser privileged homes, and while some others like Fanta Konneh have never known any formal schooling in their lives.

It would be a great challenge for the schools to impart any kind of education to the lesser privileged or the under privileged students because of the great diversity that existed among the students. Many students don't even understand the notion of being a student. The article states that New York is the only state that identifies them as Students with Interrupted Formal Education but it does not give them a special curriculum, nor does it provide additional financing or track their progress. So, in effect, it makes a mockery of the system.

Now, in India, we do not have such students who are immigrant teens. However, we do have students who enter college from such school settings from many rural settings where formal schooling is pathetic. I have taught students from diverse places in India such as Mizoram, Nagaland in the North East to Kashmir and Ladakh in the upper North. I do notice similar problems there. It becomes very difficult at the college level to help these students improve. There should be special provisions to identify exceptionally weak kids so that they could be given remedial classes.

My blog was featured on a Spanish forum

Dear All,

My blog, Issues in Academics, was featured on a Spanish forum. You might like to look at the link. It looks good. See it here: http://www.ndet.org/foro/showthread.php?tid=7557

Roomy Naqvy

Writing across the city

I was reading an article on Slumdog Millionaire and how the residents of Bombay had objections to the movie. They didn't object to the word 'dog' but to the word 'slum'. I read the article and then read about the contributors and it said that they were associated with 'Partners for Urban Knowledge Action and Research'. I knew nothing about this organization and did a Google search and a very interesting world opened up.

Partners for Urban Knowledge Action and Research is an NGO working in Bombay and has some very well-known people associated with it, including Arjuna Appadurai and the Sir Ratan Tata Trust and Kalpana Sharma, who is a senior journalist and writes for The Hindu, a national Indian English newspaper.

Partners for Urban Knowledge Action and Research or PUKAR as it is known commissioned a very fascinating project called Writing across the city. To quote from their website:

Writing across the city

The Writing Across the City project aims to address the various cultures of writing that exist in the city of Mumbai, across linguistic, disciplinary and social divides. By examining the various proliferating modes of writing, which include forms and genres that are both creative and critical, we hope to uncover and understand the network of processes that underpin urban identity formation at various inter-connected levels.

This project was completed in 2007 and it was titled, "Mumbai’s Cosmopolitan Archive: Documenting Multi-lingual Literary Histories, Facilitating Translations".

It just set me thinking. This was a very interesting concept. We haven't had anything like this about New Delhi. Have you seen such a project about New York? London?

The PUKAR website is here: http://www.pukar.org.in/

They haven't told me to write about them and they don't even know I have written this piece. I thought it would be fascinating information for most of you.

Forthcoming posts and updates

First of all, I would like to congratulate and thank all of you for helping me improve the traffic ranking of my blog on a regular basis. My blog's Alexa ranking now is 793,487 and it now has 25 visitors every day. This is the first time that any blog of mine has breached the 800,000 mark. The next target for me is to breach 500,000. I am sure we would make it.

Now, let us talk of updates. I am a member of a number of online groups, forums and mailing lists.

I have read with a lot of interest a discussion on online teaching and how some teachers find it frustrating when students plagiarize. So, I am going to speak about plagiarism, about adjunct teachers. I am also going to talk about immigrant and first generation learners. I spoke to somebody on a social network and this person works as a school head in the US and s/he asked me a very interesting question: How do people expect schools to deliver on education quality in India?

I thought that was a fascinating question too. Please keep tuned. I am going to make things even more interesting, informative, educative in various ways.

The issue of student evaluation

In India, the Sixth Pay Commission for government employees, including university teachers was implemented recently. About ten years ago, the Fifth Pay Commission was implemented. I remember both at that time and now, the issue of student evaluation has cropped up. It has also led to severe protests and a lot of heartburn among the teaching community in India.

Around four months ago, I was discussing this issue with one of my seniors in the university, where I work. This person has been quite active in the teachers' movement and the teachers' association in the university. I remember telling him, "I think its a pretty good idea to let the teachers be evaluated by the students." However, he told me, "No, Roomy, you don't understand. India is not a mature democracy and this can be misused throughout the country."

So, I fell silent. When the University Grants Commission wants to enact something, it applies all through the country. However, I remain quite intrigued by this issue. I can understand that India is not a mature democracy in many ways and that a number of extraneous factors could influence university and college administrators to harass teachers. At the same time, there are other thoughts that swim through my mind.

I understand that student feedback plays some role in US universities. I know we would say that US is a matured democracy. So, it is. However, I also know from a number of my friends and colleagues, who have taught in Saudi Arabia, that student feedback, whether formal or informal, is considered important there as well. I don't know if Saudi Arabia is a mature democracy. It is a monarchy. Thus if student feedback could work in some ways both in the USA and in Saudi Arabia, I tend to feel it could work in India too.

I can understand the fears and the apprehensions. It is quite possible in India for 3-4 students to be swayed in a class of 50 and it is quite possible for the university or college to take action based on those 3-4 cooked up complaints. However, it wouldn't be legally tenable and would go against rules of natural justice.

I would like to hear more views on the subject. I am sure if student evaluation is accepted, then it should certainly be accepted properly, with clearly spelt out guidelines.

Creating a Higher Education Commission

The National Knowledge Commission in India has recently submitted its report and it believes that a new body called the Higher Education Commission (HEC) should be formed in the country. Right now, there are two bodies that work in the realm of higher education in India. They are known as UGC, University Grants Commission, and the AICTE, the All India Council for Technical Education. AICTE also governs universities and colleges. So, technical courses would be governed by the AICTE. The National Knowledge Commission believes that this creates confusion in the administration and has called for both these bodies to be dissolved into a larger Higher Education Commission.

I agree with the views of the Knowledge Commission. What is the situation in other countries regarding higher education?

How to write recommendation letters?

As I wrote in an earlier post, I had been invited to attend a workshop on Effective Communication in July 1999 at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, India, where I learned ‘How to write recommendation letters?’

Recommendation letters or letters of reference are central to our professional growth. We need them all the time. From applying for scholarships to applying for jobs and applying to work for new translation companies, we always need these references. A reference letter is a testimonial that a person writes for us, detailing our strong points and how we would be appropriate for a particular assignment. Reference letters for different purposes must be written in various ways. For instance, a reference letter for someone applying for a fellowship should be different from the one where someone applies for a job.

I would like to quote from a reference letter that I received from someone. I have left out some portions, for obvious confidentiality reasons. However, you would get the drift of the letter.

We highly recommend Roomy Naqvy for complex technical translation services….He is an extremely talented, professional and prompt translator and we consider him an asset to our team.

The original reference above is not more than 70 words in all and the extract above is 27 words. So, letters of reference could be short. They could also be long. Look at the text above. It says ‘we’ uses active voice; ‘highly recommend’, not ‘recommend’. The person could have written: ‘We have no problems in recommending Roomy Naqvy for translation services’. However, ‘no problems’ is actually negative in tone and stating ‘for translation services’ does not have the same effect that ‘complex technical translation services’ would have.

If you look at the second sentence, the person could have easily written:
1. We are happy with his work.
2. We are satisfied with his translations.
However, such sentences would have been examples of a ‘neutral’ tone and would convey a kind of flat response. Instead, the person writes: He is an extremely talented, professional and prompt translator and we consider him an asset to our team. You cannot have anything more positive than such words. I am indeed thankful to the person who wrote such a glowing reference for me.

If you wish to run down people and if you don’t want them to progress in life, you should write flat and neutral letters of reference.

I hope you liked this little post about letters of reference. I would follow this up again in more detail. In future posts, I would also give you examples of some letters of reference that I have written for other people. Do keep on reading and do tell your friends about it.

Teach English through tweets

Roaming through blogosphere, I learned about an interesting idea. There was this person who wanted to know how Twitter [tweets] could be used to teach English. I think it is indeed a very interesting idea.

How to create effective CVs?

In July 1999, I went to the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, India, for a week long course on Effective Communication, where I learned how to write effective letters of recommendation and resumes.

I would like to focus on How to write effective resumes/CVs? in this post.

A resume comes in a variety of formats and it is usually known as a CV these days. A long time ago, in India, they used to be known as 'biodatas'. The biodata was a strange format by Western standards and looks pretty quaint by Indian urban standards now. However, I am sure it is still prevalent in rural Indian settings. The biodata included diverse data such as the person's name, father's name, weight, height, 'sex', date of birth (why on earth!) and it included every possible educational qualification, including what you did at High School.

I am really happy that the biodata has become completely redundant in our age. It was an atrocious format.

These days, we are in an age of CVs and resumes. For those with an international perspective, we are into specifics such as the European CV format.

CVs usually include an objective. However, these days, even objectives are no longer required. Out go the details about date of birth etc and if personal details are required, they are kept to the bare minimum and only mentioned under the head 'personal details' toward the end of the CV. In the earlier biodata format, the details were written from the earliest to the latest. Now, the focus is on the latest to the earliest, which makes a lot of sense.

The European CV format also wants you to understand your core competencies and state them, which is even better.

If you master the format but you do not know what you must write in it, then you must count as a failure. The first thing to understand is that you never have one CV to fit all occasions. If you make a generic CV to fit all jobs, then you are committing harakiri, suicide for Japanese. Please do not do something reckless. Every job, every professional situation, would need a CV that caters to the specific situation.

So, now, we know that we must write CVs that fit different jobs. Good. What else?

The next thing is to ensure that we describe ourselves in proper terms. We should use words and verbs which are positive in nature and that denote action. No company would like to hire people who sound defensive, morose, jealous, insecure or average. Please do keep in mind that every company is likely to receive thousands of CVs and the only way your CV would elicit a reply is when it stands out.

My CV always gets me excellent responses. About fifteen months ago, I was offered a job (with a pretty high salary) by a very reputed international company (without applying for it) based on the strength of my professional work and my CV. I turned it down, even though it is rare to be offered a job without applying for it, because of certain social reasons. I have no regrets about it.

If you would like to look at examples of good CVs, do let me know. Or if you would like me to look at your CVs and give you some suggestions, you can always mail them over to me and I'll do my best for you. If you want, I might even be able to ask other people in my professional network to help out.