Iamwarm on wheel - an exercise in development communication

Though Indian academia is familiar to the idea of working in formal groups on various topics, project related assignments, seminars and conferences; the likelihood of Informal conversations amongst the faculty and the students of the same or of different institutions is still sparse. Much of the traditional academia is not typified by flexibility and falls short of realizing ‘Informal conversations’ as the core for knowledge sharing. This paper presents the results of connecting people through the Knowledge café model of discussions held at a private engineering college situated in south India. Few customizations to the Knowledge Café model were carried out by the authors, to match the teaching-learning environment. The overall findings revealed that, promoting informal conversations is a key factor in connecting the silos of the academia and enable sharing of knowledge. Yet another interesting finding observed is that, knowledge cafes proved to be a ground breaking enabler to inspire interest and involvement of all the learners into the topic of study.