On Mon, Dec 14, 2009 at 8:46 AM, Vickram Crishna <[email protected]> wrote: > > > On Mon, Dec 14, 2009 at 8:36 AM, Amol Hatwar <[email protected]> > wrote: >> >> On Dec 14, 2009, at 1:50 AM, H.S.Rai wrote: >> >> > Student's competition of IIT Kharagpur want presentation only with >> > proprietary format. See rules under round 3 of >> > http://www.ktj.in/#eureka >> > >> > "For the final round the participants will have to give their >> > presentation in Macromedia flash 8.0/Microsoft PowerPoint." >> >> Yuck! >> > Imagine the state of the country's IT sector, if college students at India's > top graduate engineering institutions are unaware of alternatives to > proprietary software and unconscious of the need to keep an open > environment, even at such innocuous events.
IITs, like all other establishments across the country have their mix of good and bad. While you'll see IITs hosting public mirrors of various distributions, you will also come across instances where the faculty and students are blithely unaware of the concept of "Free as in Freedom" since it never got included in their routine. > In attempts to change this situation at other, less prestigious, colleges, I > have personally seen that the entire infrastructure is designed to > perpetuate 'conventional wisdom', 'currently accepted norms' and so on. This > lethargy presents the greatest challenge. It is at the core of a failure > within the Indian educational system, where we are 'training' millions of > young people to behave like sheep. Or, given the proportions in our own > animal husbandry scenario, like goats. The operative word here is "training" and not "teaching". That's what makes the difference. It is a sad story that a significant percentage of the students coming out of IITs are fundamentally unaware of the details of their courses. -- sankarshan mukhopadhyay <http://sankarshan.randomink.org/blog> _______________________________________________ network mailing list [email protected] http://lists.fosscom.in/listinfo.cgi/network-fosscom.in
