The past one week has been one of discovery for me. I'm attending this training programme on 'A Paradigm of Advanced Computer Networking and Soft Computing' from Monday along with 66 others from different parts of the state. 

I'll confess...I signed up, because I needed to meet AICTE norms regarding staff development, but surprisngly,  what a good week it's been.

I found some incredible teachers in the resource persons -  Dr. Thamarai Selvi from MIT, Chennai,  Dr.Vaidehi from Anna University, Chennai, Dr. Ramamoorthi, Dean/Sri Sakthi Institute of Tech and a former TPGT and GCTian, and Dr.Purushothaman, most notedly.

From Dr.TamaraiSelvi, I learnt how to be confident and passionate about education. She introduced me to Grid Computing and Cloud Computing. Her session moved fast from the evolution of Knowledge Age to Evolution of Sharing. Grid computing falls back on Service oriented Architecture for its operation, wherein companies can 'Publish', clients can 'Find and Use'. It is a collection of distributed resources connected by a network. 

She also touched on e-learning under cloud computing and invited teachers interested in it to work with her. That sounds interesting as I'm also introducing  technology in the classroom and her work sounded interesting and worth exploring. 

Her second PPT on Teaching and Learning methodology was an interesting and enthusing one. She focussed on Bloom's taxonomy and encouraged teachers to consider 'productive pedagogies' which would induce higher order thinking and listed out the strategies that we should inculcate in students : Creating, Evaluating, Analysing, Applying, Undertanding and Remembering'. I felt that this is what students should be taught in classes, not the rote learning/ shallow, surface level kind of learning that goes on now.

Dr.Vaidehi was the quintessential professor, calm, sedate, confident in the knowledge of her area, concrete and illustrative. She gave examples wwith which one could relate to the topic. She spoke on Wireless Sensor Networks. Her example when she explained why a packet should be dropped - A teacher tells everyone to pass a message : 'I want to meet Anita'. The message goes around and finally comes to the teacher herself. Now, the message must be dropped, as it may otherwise be duplicated'. Oh, how well I understood that concept.

He rexplanation of Cluster Head of sensors : A person selected as a Class representative for a semester/ A professor appointed HOD for three years and rotated after that. She explained how vineyards are monitored using WSN and how in Health Care, a patient is monitored for changes in breathing, ECG, posture, pressure, etc by video, ECG, Noise etc. Her example of Ambient Intelligent Home as the future of Wireless Infrastructure was fascinating. What was even more wonderful was that, she was heading project teams carrying out these studies. 

Dr.Ramamoorthi was full of information and knowledge gathered over his nearly 35 years of academic work. He explained how Neural networks use bio-mimetic techniques. An example he gave of Lofti Zadeh's Good Hybrid vs. Bad Hybrid was hilarious. 

Good Hybrid                                Bad Hybrid

British police                           British cuisine

German Mechanic                    German police

French cuisine                          French mechanic

Swiss Banking                          Swiss lover

Italian Lover                             Italian banker 

He said the correct components must be selected to build a good hybrid system. 

He also gave an interesting story in the course of his talk. A paper was being reviewed. The reviewer sent the following report: 'Good and original, but, what is good is not original; and, what is original is not good'. That was a light hearted  info presented with humour.

Dr.Purushothaman's session on Cryptanalysis was the stealer of the show. He presented a session that showed how encryption and decryption in the web are easy for one who knows how to do it. He presented classical techniques such as Substitution Technique, Caesar's Technique, Modification and Fabrication. The revelation that the letters of the English alphabet offered simple sets  of  26 factorials caused surprise that the English language which is the cause of heart-ache in new learners, is also the base for Cryptanalysis. English never fails to surprise me. 

There's one more session tomorrow and then the week of lectures, warming chairs, good food and cool classrooms comes to an end. 

However, my year of hard work, incessant labour and thankless jobs that I've carried out, ends on a note of hope for me, for I've learnt that my joy in learning has not diminished. I'm ready for the next academic year.