Member, Gnowledge Lab | Critical graphicacy, GNOWSYS, digital literacy
(photo to be added)
Amit Dhakulkar is a member of the Gnowledge Lab, with a long-running involvement in three threads of the lab’s work: critical graphicacy, modelling and indirect measurement, and the development of the lab’s GNOWSYS knowledge-network software.
With Nagarjuna G., he leads the Critical Graphicacy research thread — analysing how graphs are introduced (and under-used) in school science and mathematics textbooks, and designing constructionist activities that let students read, construct and interpret graphs across disciplines. The 2011 Analysis of graphs in school textbooks paper at epiSTEME-4 is one entry point into this work.
A second thread, with Samir Dhurde and Nagarjuna G., is the Measuring the Mustard Seed line of work on indirect measurement and mathematical modelling — first presented at epiSTEME-5 (2013) and later published in School Science Review (2015) — using a simple measurement exercise as a first taste of modelling the real world.
He was also part of the team — with Nagarjuna G., Chandita Mukherjee, Arun Ganesh and Haimanti Pakrashi — that built the MOOC on Digital Literacy for the NUSSD project at TISS, framing digital literacy as a project-based, collaborative course.
Amit has been a sustained contributor to GNOWSYS, the lab’s graph-database/semantic-computing system, and is listed among its current active contributors along with Siddhu, Mahesh, Surendra, and student interns of the lab.
He has also co-authored, with Rafikh Shaikh, the 2016 essay A slate for every child: rethinking education in the age of computers (Teacher Plus) and the 2018 epiSTEME paper Zone of Proximal Development in the Era of Connected Computers (with Nagarjuna G.).
Outside the lab’s formal projects, Amit runs Mir Books (mirtitles.org) — a long-running, entirely voluntary digital archive of Soviet-era science, mathematics, engineering and children’s books, including the much-loved Mir Publishers, Progress Publishers and Raduga titles that shaped generations of STEM readers in India and around the world. It is a quiet labour of love: scanning, cataloguing and making freely available titles long out of print, sustaining a devoted international readership. The work sits naturally with the lab’s commitments to free knowledge, public-domain science writing, and the long arc of self-learning — and is, in its own right, a model of what frugal, patient, community-scale digital preservation looks like.
(public email to be added)
To collaborate with the lab community, the recommended channel is metaStudio.org.