Slashdot Mirror

The main thing college and university provide are motivation for people to learn and guidance / direction on what you should learn, but the majority of this is done in your own time. If you have the capacity to motivate yourself to learning these things then you may find university to be an expensive waste of time teaching you things you already know or are very capable of teaching yourself. The one advantage university provides is the certificate that many jobs in the field do not even require any more and tutors who are sometimes capable of showing you what you did wrong. It's also quite possible that the things you spend time learning in University may be obsolete by the time you graduate.

There are many great, free resources out there. Learning does not need to be expensive. Such as:
http://www.khanacademy.org/ ::maths is always handy for computer science)
http://nptel.iitm.ac.in/courses.php?disciplineId=106 ::complete degree level courses for free as long as you don't mind lecturers with Indian accents.

If Indian instructors are nearly as hard to understand at the tech phone supports I've had from "Bob" lately....well, it will surely degrade the already failing US education system. Hard to learn if you can't understand a damned thing the instructor is trying to say...

I'm going to have to strongly disagree with the stereotyping going on all over this topic, having recently experienced the reverse of this phenomenon. In my computer science degree we covered advanced AI + Intelligent systems in the second and final years and I found the local based lecturer difficult to understand. Not his accent I hasten to add, he spoke very clearly but he taught in an overly complicated manner. In the end I was saved from panic/ruin and ultimately failing the course when I found a massive set of free lectures on YouTube by some Indian professor who explained it really clearly in spite of his strong Indian accent.
I guess the Einstein quote rings true in my experience, "If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough."

Interestingly the lecturer is part of some government funded Indian University that do free e-courses on a wide range of science + Engineering topics (all in English it seems) with all the lectures online and handouts / coursework up for free digital download. Not looked through the site in depth but seems to be genuinely free beer learning on degree level e-courses. Again I stress that I've not looked through the site in detail yet, but it seems like they take some of the strongest lecturers from Indian universities and basically record their lectures and upload all their hand outs etc.

Here's the address if anyone is interested: http://nptel.iitm.ac.in/

Please don't perpetuate stereotypes, yes sometimes they do hold some truth but that's no reason to write off so many other really cool things out there.

You'll find many at http://www.iitm.ac.in/madept

What India needs is one laptop and a projector per teacher/class and decent content developed centrally and a decent broadband infrastructure India has developed very good content for higher engineering education check http://nptel.iitm.ac.in/ or http://www.youtube.com/iit and is planning a three tier structure to distribute the same to all engineering colleges. The $35 is the last link in this distribution chain for this content Unfortunately similar content is not developed for primary education(still 40% of Indian population is illiterate) and the primary education delivery is very poor in spite of governament pouring lots(relatively) of money in to it. The whole education field is tightly controlled by government. The relatively rich (top 5% of people mostly in cities) manage to get some reasonable education for their children by sending their children to private "english medium" schools and to tuition and coaching classes for upto precollege(first 12 years of education) and by paying donation and very high fees for admission in "private"engineering colleges. Even in these the quality of teaching and infrastructure is poor compared to abysmal standard in government run primary schools(not english medium) Good and cost effective ICT can change the scene very fast some other points why the $35 access device may not be important are - 3G is being rolled out in India by this year end - this gives broadband access on mobile - most engineering students can afford a $100(approx Rs 5000) mobile phone with 3G capabality and the excellent content is already there for downloading

They only have two PCs sold Ubuntu and two PCs sold with no OS - none of which are even halfway modern systems. It's almost like they don't want to make money from Linux users.

In India dell is not offering many/no ubuntu options . Dell store India shows 3 netbooks ,all of them with "Genuine Windows® XP Home Edition" :( There is a discussion in chennai linux users group regarding this .

You'd almost think that some large monopoly was using them for a hand-puppet.

No need to guess :P

This happened years ago at IIT Madras, India http://www.civil.iitm.ac.in/events/paper-bridge.html

A correction there - IIT does not graduate anywhere near the 50,000 graduates that you refer to. It may be closer to 5000 each year (could be lesser) and of them most will never get into programming. CS is not the only subject IIT teaches. IIT short for Indian Institute of Technology has only a few colleges spread across India.

For more details, you can check out the web pages of IIT. I have posted a link to IIT Madras - http://www.iitm.ac.in/

IIT is also the top-tier engineering college in India and very, very few people actually get admitted into IIT.

But yes, there are a lot of other colleges in India which do also conduct CS and other engineering courses and a lot of graduates come from those colleges every year - far more than the 50,000 graduates you refer to.

If you need decent Unicode support, don't try Ruby, 'cos it's author arbitrarily dislikes Unicode and refuses to implement it.

The dislike isn't arbitrary. There is considerable resistance in Japan and China to Unicode, in part due to the fact that the ordering of characters is different than the order of established standards. The same is true for East Indian languages (although the objections are rather different).

Unicode is western-centric, a bias that can be seen in the fact that 7-bit ASCII maps one-to-one to UTF-8. Imagine, if you will, if -- rather than a clean 1-1 mapping of ASCII-7 to UTF-8 -- UTF-8 rearranged the characters, so they were ordered:

P e g 6 u l o G K x 1...

These aren't the only objections, but they illustrate that any dislike of Unicode is far from arbitrary.

Ruby does have Unicode support; granted, Ruby strings are not UTF-8 by default, like they are in Java, and you can't write Ruby programs using UTF-8 characters for variable names, and so on, like you can in Java. But Ruby does have basic support for dealing with UTF-8 strings, sufficient for most purposes.

Ten years ago, I taught at the Indian Institute of Technology - Madras, and met Prof. Kalyana Krishnan. At that time Krishnan was struggling with how to render characters on a web page so that he would produce Hindi, Tamil, etc web pages. Over the years, Krishnan's project has expanded, now has voice rendering of web pages and was recently recognized as a major innovation benefiting many in India. His project website will give you an idea of the tools he and his students are bringing to all of India. e-Governance is a small segment of the challenges facing India. Skilled practitioners, coming from the IITs in India are effectively penetrating the digital divide.

Why do you think Indian Institute of Technology needs to have Americans attend?

Qualifications and ability would be all over the map, like they are in every other field. The best are typically as good as the best anywhere else in the world.

How many people graduate from a (technical) university on an average? (As a fraction of all people born a certain year, for example.)

Very, very few. 35% of the population is illiterate (as per the 2001 census). India's Ministry of Education has some stats on primary/secondary education and on higher education (in Indian terminology a graduate degree is a Bachelors and a post-graduate degree is a Masters/Phd)

What you're looking for is the percentage of children graduating from high-school who enroll at a college. Using the census numbers, there were 157 million children under 6 years of age. That's 25 million approximately in any given year. Assuming they all survive to turn 18, you're looking at 75 million children between 18-21. There were 5.13 million people pursuing a Bachelors degree in 1998. The population between 18 and 21 is likely around 60 million because India's population has been growing. That would suggest 10% of college-age kids end up pursing a Bachelors degree, 25% of whom are studying the Sciences. I think the US figure for college enrollment out of high-school is 40%, American Universities graduate 1.2 million students every year, US population is 30% of India's.

Does the government subsidize university-level education in any way, or is a degree only possible to attain only if you are rich enough?

It's subsidized. That said, the public primary/secondary education system in India is a mess. You've typically got to be middle-class before you will even get to school. Most of the rural poor don't have access to an education in English (which is essential at the best colleges). You'll find that most of the people who end up at engineering schools are from the middle-class (about 30% of the population, still a healthy 300 million).

What does a M.Sc. or B.Sc. degree cost you?

Depends on where you go and what sort of scholarship you can get. The most prestigious Universities are the most liberal with their aid. Costs are a fraction of what they would be in the US. You can expect to pay anywhere from USD 100 to USD 1500 a year depending on the location of the college.

What are the most prominent higher-level education universities in the technology sector? Homepage URLs?

The seven IIT campuses are generally considered to be a cut above the rest. The entrance exam to IIT is offered country-wide and people often spend a substantial part of their final high-school year cramming for it. You can start at the Madras campus or Delhi or Bombay . The IIT is run by the Indian government. The entire program would cost $1500 plus room/board. IIT is a general sciences college, not all students study CS.

A comprehensive list of Universities is maintained by the Ministry of Education.

Looking through the web-pages, I see that Indian colleges aren't doing a particularly good job marketing themselves. Do they specialize in any particular fields of technology? What's the teaching like, compared to curriculums in Europe or the US? Are certain subjects and fields emphasized more or less? Are there any major differences in teaching methods? (lectures, homework, group projects, tuition by teaching assistants, etc.)

There is a lot of focus on examinations and remembering/reproducing conce

I live in Chennai, India (just a few hours from Bangalore). I'm finishing school in about 6 months, and I'd kill to get this job! I've been developing gtkboard for a while, so I think I'm not a n00b and I can qualify. So, are you still hiring? If yes could you tell me whom I can contact to put myself through the selection process?
Thanks
Arvind

Its IIT (Indian Institute of Technology) that is equivalent of MIT, notIIIT which is International Institute of Infomation Technology formally know as Indian Institute of Information Technology. IIIT is a new Institution started in 1998, that still has a long way to go get any recognition and standard of IIT (The MIT equivalent). Check this article Bill Gates inaugurated IIT meetIIT

Try Festival from the University of Edinburgh. It's been available for years and the team continues to make improvements to the system all the time. Source is available here. In the past, the Systems Development Laboratory at the Indian Institute of Technology has also experimented with using Festival for reading out documents in Indian languages, although I don't know the current status of the project.

Try Festival from the University of Edinburgh. It's been available for years and the team continues to make improvements to the system all the time. Source is available here. In the past, the Systems Development Laboratory at the Indian Institute of Technology has also experimented with using Festival for reading out documents in Indian languages, although I don't know the current status of the project.

The series of twelve lessons is aimed at giving the student a reasonably good introduction to the language. The student will be able to frame sentences relating to daily activities in life and thus will gain enough confidence to converse in Sanskrit though with a smaller vocabulary to begin with. The structure of the lessons is quite different from that of lessons found in conventional Sanskrit primers. It is hoped that the twelve lessons would provide enough details for the student to understand the basic grammar of Sanskrit and sentence formation rules.