STEP – Science, Technology, and Education in Pakistan

“Kabhi kabhi to humaray zayhen main aisay khayal aata hay keh agar Zardari ki baytee Swat main parhti to shaid school bund hee nahein hotay”. Read the rest of this entry »

“Love thy neighbor” is how the saying goes, but words don’t always reflect reality. While the intense rivalry between India and Pakistan is not new, the World Trade Center event in September 2001 and its aftermath have left Pakistan in an unfamiliar and delicate relationship with its neighbor Afghanistan. The ongoing war and recent surge in NATO troops in Afghanistan, several suicide bombings in Pakistan, and the Bombay attacks in India last year have all but alienated not only the three countries of South Asia but also the United States.

Dreamfly hopes to bridge this gap by connecting children in the schools and community centers it funds and operates in the region.

“Kids in these countries grow up hating people from other countries in the region”, said Umaimah Mendhro, a recent graduate of Harvard Business School and one of the co-founders of Dreamfly. Umaimah has roots in Akri – a small village in Sindh, Pakistan – where Dreamfly built its first school. “Kids of Akri can’t even spell Harvard”, continued Umaimah, “and I want to make sure that the opportunities that enabled me to pursue higher education in the US are available to these kids as well”. Mona Akmal, the other co-founder of Dreamfly, believes she enjoys the life she has because of the opportunities provided to her by the education she received. Referring to the opportunities available to her, she said: “If you level the playing field, amazing things can happen”.

Mona and Umaimah joined hands two years ago to start Dreamfly with the bold aim of providing first-class education to children, in areas such as Akri where there are either no schools or no substantial resources for schools that might exist. Dreamfly chooses the location of a school (or a community center), raises funds, and designs its program (curriculum, summer camp etc.), and partners with local organizations (such as The Citizens Foundation in Pakistan, and Rubia in Afghanistan) to run day to day operations.

Dreamfly aspires to create an environment where kids dare to dream. While educating children remains at the core of its ambitions, what’s really striking about Dreamfly’s approach is its aim to bridge the gap between countries such as Pakistan, Afghanistan, India, and the US.

Here are some of the elements of Dreamfly’s projects.

Providing role models to the children. Dreamfly aims at building a strong bond between sponsors (most of whom are in the United States) and kids. The idea is to provide role models to students and to keep the community and sponsors involved in the growth of the children. For example, half way across the world in the United States, at events aptly called Dreamwall Pakistan and Dreamwall Afghanistan, attendees shared pictures of personal significance and wrote messages directly addressed to the children. In return, each student shared his or her name, age, and a dream. Students also shared their pictures taken using digital cameras provided to them by Dreamfly.

Connecting with sister schools. Dreamfly is working on establishing a sister relationship between its first school in Akri and a school in Seattle. Also, the curriculum in Dreamfly schools in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India is designed to keep students in touch with students in the neighboring countries. This, in the long term, will play a part in reducing tension between these countries – one school at a time.

Providing computers and technology. Most of the schools in rural Pakistan do not have any computers. But the school in Akri has a computer lab and is aimed at addressing three problems at once.

1. Computer programs and videos such as Sesame Street are used to educate children and help them learn things in a more intuitive and fun way.
2. Computers provide a means to help children learn about technology itself, by learning how to program or how to use Office software and other tools.
3. Computers serve a big part of Dreamfly’s mission: bridging the gap. Students learn how to use email to stay in touch with their peers and sponsors. Moreover, Mona and Umaimah are designing curriculum in a way such that students can use social networking tools (such as Facebook) to stay in touch. This is still work in progress, as they want to ensure that social networking tools are used in a way that does not hinder their education.

While kids pursue their dreams in Dreamfly schools, their sponsors will stay updated with the impact of their donations. Similarly, the children will get to know more about their peers and role models in the US and other countries. It’s hard not to see why this will help bring these kids together and pave the way for strong relationships between these, sometimes very alienated, countries.

Saad Fazil does freelance writing for VentureBeat, where he focuses on deep analysis of emerging trends in the industry. He is the founder of Whizner Consulting, a technology strategy consulting firm. Prior to consulting, he held business analyst, product management, and sales consultant positions at Kayak.com, Oracle, and Alcatel. He received his MBA from MIT Sloan School of Management. He blogs at IT Valley and tweets at @sfrocks.

The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of STEP.

What is the crucial quality important for succeeding in graduate school? I will provide a few examples that suggest that: i) The answer is not intelligence — a minimum of intelligence, such as what everyone reading this article has, is sufficient for succeeding in any graduate school, ii) it is … hard work. I apologize for the disappointment.

Here is what some of the great mathematicians, after having done work considered the very peak of human thought, think about the factors in their success:

Grothendieck, Fields Medalist 1966: “Since then I’ve had the chance, in the world of mathematics that bid me welcome, to meet quite a number of people, both among my “elders” and among young people in my general age group, who were much more brilliant, much more “gifted” than I was. I admired the facility with which they picked up, as if at play, new ideas, juggling them as if familiar with them from the cradle — while for myself I felt clumsy, even oafish, wandering painfully up an arduous track, like a dumb ox faced with an amorphous mountain of things that I had to learn (so I was assured), things I felt incapable of understanding the essentials or following through to the end. Indeed, there was little about me that identified the kind of bright student who wins at prestigious competitions or assimilates, almost by sleight of hand, the most forbidding subjects.”

Gauss: “If others would but reflect on mathematical truths as deeply and as continuously as I have, they would make my discoveries.”

The reason why I give credence to these remarks is that, while both Grothendieck and Gauss were considered amazing geniuses by their contemporaries, neither was known for being modest. (Grothendieck said: “In the history of mathematics, I have produced the greatest number of new ideas”, and Gauss was famous for putting down other mathematicians.) This, together with the fact that even at graduate schools in the US which attract the best and the brightest of students, the drop-out in computer science is over 50%, should suggest that other factors play a larger role in determining success or failure. In my opinion, a rather large reason for failure is the following, rather fragile, learning psychology.

In the current environment, everyone wants to be smart, or at any rate, appear smart. This severely interferes with learning, naturally: students who consider being smart important become more conservative in the length and hardness of problems they attempt, which is a reasonable risk-averse way of preserving their image. This approach works for undergraduates, especially under the diseased quarter system since the material covered is relatively shallow and easy. However, once one starts graduate studies and begins to think about problems where it is not even clear if a solution is possible, the habit of following the risk-averse strategy just doesn’t cut it.

Students not used to prolonged thinking on a single problem start off well. However, soon they find motivation and inspiration leaving them, and they start dreading working on the problem as failure would lead them to question something they (by now) crucially identify with: “smartness”. Procrastination kicks in, and soon the student is busy in a diverse set of academic (but non-research!) activities to hide the reality of not working, like writing complicated scripts to automate their soon-to-be-coming publication phase, optimizing their daily vitamin B12 intake, getting heavily involved with political and religious movements and so on. Few students are able to critically introspect, which is reasonable since society has informed them that smartness is what matters, and if they are unable to solve the problem quickly, the logical conclusion is that they are not smart. In this world-view, it is hard to even consider the suggestion that smartness matters fairly little in such matters and most fall prey to heavy depression. Some do manage to climb out: Feynman, physics Nobel Prize 1964, had developed a reputation for being an extremely smart guy at Los Alamos. He paid for this afterwards as an assistant professor at Cornell, where for the first two years he was paralyzed by this fear, and unable to do any worthwhile work. During this time, he received an invitation to join the prestigious Institute for Advanced Studies (where Einstein was one of the members) but refused since he felt useless as a researcher. Fortunately for science, later a positive reaction set in for  him and he was able to overcome his fear (and later ended up writing  books with titles “What Do You Care What Other People Think’”).

Instead of intelligence, persistence is the crucial parameter for success in graduate school:

Gowers, Fields Medalist 1998: “To illustrate with an extreme example, Andrew Wiles, who (at the age of over 40) proved Fermat’s Last Theorem … and thereby solved the worlds most famous unsolved mathematical problem is undoubtedly very clever, but he is not a genius in my sense. How, you might ask, could he possibly have done what he did without some sort of mysterious extra brainpower? The answer is that, remarkable though his achievement was, it is not so remarkable as to defy explanation. I do not know precisely what enabled him to succeed, but he would have needed a great deal of courage, determination, and patience, a wide knowledge of some very difficult work done by others, the good fortune to be in the right mathematical area at the right time, and an exceptional strategic ability.

This last quality is, ultimately, more important than freakish mental speed: the most profound contributions to mathematics are often made by tortoises rather than hares. As mathematicians develop, they learn various tricks of the trade, partly from the work of other mathematicians and partly as a result of many hours spent thinking about mathematics. What determines whether they can use their expertise to solve notorious problems is, in large measure, a matter of careful planning: attempting problems that are likely to be fruitful, knowing when to give up a line of thought (a difficult judgment to make), being able to sketch broad outlines of arguments before, just occasionally, managing to fill in the details. This demands a level of maturity, which is by no means incompatible with genius, but which does not always accompany it.” [Excerpted
from  the excellent book "A Short Introduction to Mathematics"].

Though not directly related to research, the phenomenon that is Judit Polgar provides another fascinating insight into the reasons behind spectacular success in intellectual activities:

“Forty years ago, Laszlo Polgar, a Hungarian psychologist, conducted an epistolary courtship with a Ukrainian foreign language teacher named Klara. His letters to her weren’t filled with reflections on her cherubic beauty or vows of eternal love. Instead, they detailed a pedagogical experiment he was bent on carrying out with his future progeny. After studying the biographies of hundreds of great intellectuals, he had identified a common theme — early and intensive specialization in a particular subject. Laszlo [sic] believed he could turn any healthy child into a prodigy. He had already published a book on the subject, Bring Up Genius!, and he needed a wife willing to jump on board.” [Psychology Today]

The result were three sisters: Susan, Sofia, and Judit. Judit is by far the best female chess player in history, and ranked in the top-10 chess players in the world. Susan is the next(!) best female chess player in history. Sofia has a record-breaking performance in Italy  that has become known as the “Sac of Rome”.

“Anders Ericsson is only vaguely familiar with the Polgars, but he has spent over 20 years building evidence in support of Laszlo’s theory of genius. Ericsson, a professor of psychology at Florida State University, argues that ‘extended deliberate practice’ is the true, if banal, key to success. ‘Nothing shows that innate factors are a necessary prerequisite for expert level mastery in most fields,’ he says … His interviews with 78 German pianists and violinists revealed that by age 20, the best had spent an estimated 10,000 hours practicing, on average 5,000 hours more than a less accomplished group. Unless you’re dealing with a cosmic anomaly like Mozart, he argues, an enormous amount of hard work is what makes a prodigy’s performance look so effortless. ‘My father believes that innate talent is nothing, that [success] is 99 percent hard work,’ Susan says. ‘I agree with him.‘ “

The effect of psychology on learning is illustrated nicely in an interesting recent experiment: A group of researchers led by Carol Dweck of Columbia University went to a very competitive school’s 5th grade class, and randomly split it into two groups. Both groups were given the same easy puzzles to solve, and the performance of each child noted. Both groups scored well. After the exam, the first group was told ‘you must have really worked hard’, while the second group of children were rewarded by saying  ‘you must be smart at this‘. For the second round, both groups were given the same choice: either take another easy exam, or a much harder exam.  Here’s the punchline: over 90% of students in the first group chose the harder exam, while the majority of children in the second group chose the easier exam. In the third round, everyone had to do the harder exam:

Dweck:  “When we praise children for their intelligence, we tell them that this is the name of the game: Look smart, don’t risk making mistakes … [In the third round, children in first group] got very involved, willing to try every solution to the puzzles … Many of them remarked, unprovoked “This is my favorite test” [while for the students in second group] you could see the strain. They were sweating and miserable.”

The NYMag article ends with the following sage advice, on which I’ll also end: “The brain is ultimately just a muscle. Make it stronger by working it out.”

Editor’s Note: The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of STEP.

While security remains the biggest concern for Pakistani citizens, there are those who believe that education is the best way to ensure security in the future. Bringing education to the masses is no easy task, especially when parents cannot afford education for their children, and would understandably prefer their kids to make money by looming carpets for example. Business and Life Skills School (BLISS) wants to solve this “either school or work” problem. Read the rest of this entry »

A 1997 study of data from the University of Delaware found that across a wide range of universities in the US “education programs were funded below the institutional average for all disciplines” and at the more prestigious research universities “education programs were less well-funded than other professional programs, with the exception of social work and accounting”. The idea that quality teachers cannot be prepared “on the cheap” is getting a renewed look and gaining significant traction in the US and there might be important lessons for Pakistan to learn from this discussion.  Read the rest of this entry »

The second talk of the STEP Lecture Series will be given by Dr. Sonesh Surana on November 12, 2009 at 8:30pm PST. The talk has been organized in collaboration with LUMS Department of Computer Science, NUST School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (SEECS), and Air University, and will be streamed live. A brief Q&A session will follow the talk. The talk will be aimed at a general audience. Undergraduate and graduate students with non-engineering backgrounds are also encouraged to attend.

Title: Enabling Sustainable Rural Wireless Telemedicine

Where: LUMS Department of Computer Science, Auditorium A-16, NUST SEECS, Air University
When: November 12, 8:30pm Pakistan Standard Time (7:30am Pacific daylight time)

Abstract:
With one ophthalmologist per over 100,000 people in India, there is a critical need to improve the utilization of eye doctors. In this talk, we discuss our work in deploying a long distance wireless network that enables high quality video-based telemedicine between rural eye clinics and centrally located doctors at the Aravind Eye Hospitals. In particular, we take a close look at the issues of financial and operational sustainability.

Bio:
Dr. Sonesh Surana focuses on the design and implementation of low-cost information and communication technologies (ICT) and related power infrastructure for developing regions. He received his PhD in Computer Science with the TIER research group at UC Berkeley in 2009. As part of TIER, he co-developed new WiFi-based long-distance technology enabling inexpensive targeted rural broadband coverage, and demonstrated high bandwidth point-to-point links as long as 380 Kms, a new world record. He also led the deployment of this technology for a live video-based rural telemedicine network at the Aravind Eye Hospital in South India, managing a range of non-profit, government, university and private stakeholders. This network, now financially and operationally sustainable, provides coverage to 500,000 people in areas with no other option for eye care. It has enabled over 100,000 remote patient examinations in three years, and 20,000 of those patients have received their sight back due to early diagnosis. He has done ICT work in Romania, Rwanda, India and Venezuela. He advises several non-profit development organizations and is also the co-founder of QVSense Inc, a company focused on building photovoltaic power management hardware solutions.

Acknowledgments: STEP is very grateful to Dr. Shahab Baqai at LUMS for his continued support and help in organizing the lecture series. Special thanks to Higher Education Commission of Pakistan (HEC) for facilitating the video broadcast of this talk.

Correction: An earlier version of this post mistakenly posted the time for the talk as 7:30PM Pakistan Standard Time. The correct time for the talk in Pakistan is 8:30PM.

Image credits: http://berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2006/06/06_telemedicine.shtml

In this article, I make the case that grade I-XII textbooks, prescribed by the provincial and federal textbook boards, should be made available on the Internet for free. I discuss the reasons why this is necessary and the benefits that will accrue from such an effort.

Outdated and Incorrect Curriculum

In a household survey conducted by Gallup Pakistan in May 2009, 70% of the respondents said that they send their children to government-run schools. These schools are often faulted for imparting incomplete, incorrect, and rot education to children. The school textbooks prescribed by the provincial and federal textbook boards are part of the problem. The description of the relevant material in science and math textbooks is at times inadequate whereas the social sciences, religious, and Pakistan studies textbooks have been used by the successive governments to further their political agendas.

Making textbooks available online will allow educational experts both inside and outside Pakistan to easily scrutinize their content for clarity, correctness, and completeness. The feedback received from educational experts will greatly help to improve the quality of these textbooks. Read the rest of this entry »

Nature’s recent article on higher education in Pakistan has re-ignited the debate on higher education reform, evoking strong responses from both supporters and critics of the HEC. Recently, we interviewed the lead author Dr. Athar Osama, to learn more about his wider conclusions, and his response to some of the criticisms of the methodology used in the Nature article.

To seed this discussion, we present commentary from Dr. Pervez Hoodbhoy and Dr. Atta-ur-Rehman. Dr. Hoodbhoy presents his opposing point of view, arguing that the measures presented in the article were inadequate, and further that the conclusions drawn from the metrics were flawed. Dr. Atta-ur-Rehman, founding (and former) chairman of the HEC, who led the higher education reform effort during his tenure, responds by pointing to data that, in his view, shows the depth and breadth of the reform’s success.

We invite our readers to contribute their thoughts on what metrics are appropriate for measuring the success of higher education within the context of Pakistan.

NOTE: Both commentators have significantly shaped the landscape of Pakistani education over the last few decades. We request our discussants to avoid personalizing the discussion and to maintain a civil and constructive tone.

Read the rest of this entry »

Dr. Pervez Hoodbhoy has reproduced his email but not my subsequent response to it.

There are four aspects of the comments of Dr. Pervez Hoodbhoy that need to be considered:

1. Firstly, Dr. Hoodbhoy himself admits that there has been a huge increase in international publications at QAU after HEC came into existence when he mentions the number of international publications in the two time periods. Strangely, he picks a six year period, 1998-2003, and then compares it with the subsequent 4.5 years (?) , 2004 to mid 2008, (the correspondence occurred in August 2008, so he could not possibly have had access to the figures for the entire year) I can only assume that he has mentioned 2003 by mistake in the second “5 year” period as there is no reason to include the publications of the year 2003 in both time periods, which he has done. It is clearly unfair to take two time periods of different durations and compare them.

Read the rest of this entry »

This communication is concerned with “Pakistan’s Reform Experiment” (Nature, V461, page 38, 3 September 2009), and the response to my critique by its lead author.

Unfortunately, I find the response as unsatisfying as the original article. Since Nature is unwilling to accord me a chance for a satisfactory reply on its pages, I shall clarify the basis of my criticism in some detail here.

In the said article, strong conclusions have been derived from weak data. The authors have not dared to ask the basic questions whose answers are essential for ascertaining whether there has been actual progress in Pakistan’s higher education system and, if so, by how much. Instead, in giving a thumbs-up, numbers have been quoted that have doubtful significance. Take, for instance, the claim that:

“In mathematics, for example, an average paper by a Pakistani author is cited around 20% more than the worldwide average for the discipline”.

Read the rest of this entry »