Sunday, December 6, 2015

Maths and Science Education soon in Local Languages on Khan Academy



Tata Trusts has entered into a five year partnership with Khan Academy with the aim to provide free, world- class education in Maths and Science for anyone who seeks it in India in local languages. The effort is also to focus on designing and improving the Academy's content creation capacities primarily for the middle and low income students in urban areas in the first two years. In the following three years, the plan is to reach out to the rural hinterland.

This will hopefully see online education penetration at a much higher level in India - especially in rural India. Read more about the partnership here.

Saturday, July 18, 2015

The Newest Indian Language

We have a new Indian language! OK fine, it is not a real language. I am talking about Kilikili - the constructed language created for the movie Baahubali. As of now, it boasts of 750 words and 40 grammar rules. [1]  It will be interesting to see where this goes - if it will enjoy the success of other constructed languages from film/television like Klingon.

If you want a sample of it, here you go, some soundbites from the movie's audio launch:




Wednesday, April 29, 2015

How the language you speak changes your view of the world

A new study has found that language we are using at a specific point of time impacts the way we view the world at that moment. Read the article here - https://theconversation.com/how-the-language-you-speak-changes-your-view-of-the-world-40721 .

Thursday, October 23, 2014

Create a custom greeting for Diwali!

This Diwali, you can create a custom greeting using Scripton

Type in your message, click "Diwali Greeting", select the card image, click "Create Greeting Link", copy the link and share it with your friends.

Wednesday, October 15, 2014

Identify Patterns in News



I wanted to do something constructive with all the data that I've collected over the years instead of just archiving it - so I've come up with the latest product from writeKA - Trend Search. Plug in any term, and find out how it has been faring in news titles over the last few years. Here are some things to try:
See Narendra Modi's meteoric rise
Patterns for iPhone
Patterns for Nobel, why we were not too surprised with Malala but didn't know who is Satyarthi!
The rising Ebola threat
etc

What I'm providing now is fairly basic, just term prevalence thats it. I plan on adding the following in the coming days (in no particular order):
Trend Search in Indian languages
Trend Comparison
Trend Reasons (showing stories that cause spikes)

Give me more ideas.

Have fun with writeKA trend search.

Thursday, October 9, 2014

Trying to learn a new language? Find a book on writeKA

If you are thinking of learning a new language, here is something new for you. A book search function has been introduced on writeKA with which you can easily pick books to learn a new language through a language of your choice. For example - books to learn Hindi through English. You can compare prices for each book across Amazon India, Flipkart and Infibeam.

I'm still loading the catalog, so there will be many more books to pick from in the days to come.

Friday, October 3, 2014

A good day to start learning (again)


Happy Vijayadashami!

Today is Vijayadashami, the day when Vidyarambham is observed. Vidyarambham is a Hindu tradition where children are formally introduced to any kind of education.




It is considered auspicious to start the day by writing the following mantra:

om hari sri ganapataye namah

ഓം ഹരി ശ്രീ ഗണപതയെ നമഃ

It means "Salutations to Hari (Lord Vishnu), Shree (Goddess of prosperity), and Lord Ganapathy".

If you can't find some sand or a tray of rice to write that to start your day as per tradition, use Scripton. :) Go ahead, follow the link below and type in "om hari sri ganapataye namah"

Type in Malayalam

You can also do the same in Hindi.

Type in Hindi

We're never too old to learn and it's a good day to start again. Coursera is a great place to take up courses from some of the best universities in the world for free. There are many others, including Edx, Udacity, Open Learning, Khan Academy and Udemy, but I have not used them yet. You can read more about "moocs" here.