Collaborative Learning
Our college reunion is coming up shorty and I am eagerly looking forward to rekindle the sweet memories with friends after long time. Handful of our collage mates have been working hard for the last 2+ years to put together this event and my sincere heartfelt thanks to them. ACCET, the short & affectionate name for our college, ACCULFES (the cultural festival) and Sangamam (college magazine), NRSC (the nonresidential student center), SCH/Ezhil (hostels) are all etched in our memories with many incredible stories of friendship and learning together.
Alagappar, single handedly transformed the entire Karaikudi region in Tamil Nadu, India with education as the tool and path forward for ‘Indian dreams’. I have witnessed hundreds of students from rural low income families attain affordable higher education through the institutions that vallal Alagappar established and transform the economic equation for their families and villages. I am forever indebted to his generosity as one such beneficiary. It provided the perfect platform for us to transition to young adults, cross the language barrier, form lifelong friendship, ask questions and learn together to dream big.
While I have my own share of issues & failures, one thing that I learned during this period always come to the rescue and that is ‘deep diving’. Collaborative learning helped develop the habit of diving deep and not just memorize the books.
Deep diving always sound little scary and subjective. You always want to go further deep but for that you first need to be comfortable with the current, knowing fully that there are still unknowns. Then you should be ready to get out of that comfort zone and go further deep, which require hard work and unabashed optimism to try.
The various circuit theories, numerical analysis, network synthesis and other hard problems in the college reference books provided the perfect opportunity to explore and develop the habit of diving deep. What motivated and helped me during this time is collaborative learning with my group of friends. Bouncing of ideas and your own explanatory stories with your friends to uncover the logic behind the formulas helped the learning process. Group collaborative learning during the study holidays made the taunting tasks easily bearable and I spent most of the time at my friend’s place during this period.
Many of us use continuous education even after your graduation as a tool for acquiring new skills and be relevant in the job market. While you have the most advanced tools at hand through various online programs, I always felt the missing freeform collaboration and bouncing of ideas. Last week, I read “Google’s AI Guru Says That Great Artificial Intelligence Must Build on Neuroscience” , which is probably true. But I think human intelligence flourished because of collaborative learning. Fundamental to that is debating and building on each other’s ideas. Without that AI can do specific things at scale & precision but can’t deep dive to develop subconscious general knowledge which could later be applied for unanticipated domains.
