Serendipity and Learning

 As schools have gone online, after the initial hiccups it has somewhat started working well. Not perfect, but well. And around now has come the first hurdle. Exams.  How to tackle exams in a covid scenario. I am only referring to school internal exams - not competitive ones like JEE entrance or anything of that sort.  Like everything else, the default approach to a new situation is to force fit everything we learnt in the earlier situation to the new one. So, in the same way schools have asked students to keep the camera and volume button on, camera to always the student in view at all times. I don't see how an invigilator can actually keep an eye at multiple students - seems impossible.  This is apart from technology solutions like no alt -tab of browser, connection drop = exam submission and all that.  The reason that all this is being done is to stop the child from "cheating" in the exam.  Why can't this be tackled differently? Why not have the onus of ...

Many years ago, when I was a newbie in my corporate life, our team was managing an xl sheet. And I was looking at the xl sheet when my boss told me, well, that is basically used an electronic ledger. It is not a real xls. Indeed, another of our colleagues had this adage, “it is not an xls until it has atleast 1 pivot table”. It took us a few weeks of cleaning the records to harness some part of the analysis powers of xl and then we figured out what we could do with it. As I read The second machine age, in that it says, how when Steam engines were the prime source of power in factories, the factories were often driven by a huge steam engine and all machines were connected to it via different shafts to derive power from the engine. This meant that the orientation of a factory was largely vertical due to mechanical reasons of machines having to be closer to the steam engine (above and below). When factories switched to electric power, the layouts continued for a while (almost 30...