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Web-Surfing Indian Slum Kids Ask: "What's a Computer"
chaoticset writes "An experiment in minimally directed self-learning has been going fairly well, from the article: To test his ideas, Sugata Mitra launched something 13 months ago he calls "the hole in the wall experiment." He took a PC connected to a high-speed data connection and imbedded it in a concrete wall next to NIIT's headquarters in the south end of New Delhi. The wall separates the company's grounds from a garbage-strewn empty lot used by the poor as a public bathroom. Mitra simply left the computer on, connected to the Internet, and allowed any passerby to play with it...he discovered was that the most avid users of the machine were ghetto kids aged 6 to 12, most of whom have only the most rudimentary education and little knowledge of English. Yet within days, the kids had taught themselves to draw on the computer and to browse the Net." Update: 04/17 22:23 GMT by M : Mitra has a website about his experiments.
Like with photoshop? Or with a can of spray paint?
It's running Windows. I hope that slum has a license.
I'm picturing a ghetto kid, shoeless, standing in front of this magical screen embedded in a dingy concrete wall, and saying:
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these...
Yet our organization still has full-grown, western-educated employees who hold the fucking mouse upside-down.
pr0n - keeping monitor glass spotless since 1981.
Imagine a Bhagavad-Gita cluster of these!
We're amazed that a bunch of kids in India can use the web, but have no trouble believing that a survivor of war-torn Afghanistan can (a) get a Commodore on the 'net and (b) emails Jon Katz when he does.
Did anyone else read the title on this and think they'd accidentally gone to The Onion instead of slashdot?
I wish there was an easy way to send that message to companies every time I delete my cookies.
I'm really seriously scared about what would happen if suddenly the whole wide world had access to these kids.
I imagine they would just suddenly have a lot of people trying to sell them printer toner, university diplomas or penis enlargers.
which would show that our education system is very unefficient...
heh, no kidding...