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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.
From the article:
Minimally Invasive Education (MIE) is a pedagogic method and derives its name partly from the medical term minimally invasive surgery. MIE believes that in the absence of any directed input, any learning environment that provides adequate level of curiosity can cause learning.
This is not a new theory, ./'ers. People have been teaching themselves all along - indeed, our school system is the newcomer to the scene. Read, oh, "A People's History of the United States"... but I'm drifting off my topic...
An education system such as this already exists in the States. It's called "unschooling". Give the child materials to learn with, help learning when they need it, and said child will actually teach themselves.
Children are supposedly "lazy" and "not wanting to learn" because they've been forced into it by repetitive cookie-cutter education. This study just gives an old technique a new and more politically-correct name - "unschooling" pisses off the NEA.
That was my
I owe my career - my life - to this sort of experiment, except that at the time, nobody knew it was an experiment.
My first encounter with a computer was on a "professional activity day" - the teachers take the day off to eat donuts (the professional activity), and the kids get the day off school.
My folks, unable to find a babysitter that day, took me to work. Mom worked in a place with an Apple ][ that was used to do data entry and run rudimentary statistical analyses.
I was left alone in an office at age 10ish with a computer and two complete strangers.
Stranger: "How 'bout playing with the computer?"
Me: "What do you do with it?"
Stranger: [wanting the kid to stop bugging her so she could get some work done] "Well, we use it to enter our test data. You might want to try those books in the bottom shelf."
Me: [Picks up an Applesoft BASIC guide, concludes that "programming them" is what one does with "computers", and doesn't say a word for the rest of the day]. I was hooked by that afternoon. Went through the book that day, then hit the campus bookstore, bought a magazine with some programs you could type in, came back and "played with it" on the rare occasions I could.
A year (only about 6 "professional activity days", and maybe a couple of hours a week during the summer holiday) later, and I'd found the monitor ROM and was experimenting with 6502 assembly.
So in answer to your question - probably about 6 months, tops.
Ok. Enough of the sarcasm. I agree with you that more should be done to fight poverty. But instead of complaining about an experiment that included one PC being made available to poor kids, and the person doing the experiment pushing ahead to get funding for more access to technology for underprivileged illiterate kids, you might instead try to direct your complaints against people who do nothing.
Yes, he isn't giving them food or shelter, but he isn't solely responsible for stopping poverty in the world. However giving these kids knowledge is as important as a long term strategy to help people out of poverty as food and shelter is as a short term strategy. Both is needed. Without better education most of these kids will never get out of poverty.
Do you seriously prefer to make people stay dependent on charity?
Of course your complaint about "Western civilization" is quite amusing when the article is about an experiment being done in India, by an employee of an Indian company.
Yet, having worked for almost 20 years in IT and software implementation, I have to say it is more complex than that. First, adults have to deal with something kids do not: consequences. Kid accidently deletes Paint drawing, cries a bit, sits down and does new one. Adult accidently deletes the Accounts Receivable database and remembers that he forgot to change the tape yesterday. He loses his job, and he can't borrow money from his friends because the company went out of business the next day [exaggerated for effect but more realistic scenarios are easy to construct]. When adults do things with computers, there are real effects that have real, and sometimes devastating, consequences. That can understandably create fear, keeping in mind that fear is designed to keep us alive.
Yet even that is too simple, because some adults manage to figure out where they can safely push the barriers, and where they must call for help first. These people manage to teach themselves what they need to know, and often move up to the next level. Yet the person sitting next to an "explorer", with the same job, same educational background, same starting level of knowledge, either (a) sits paralyzed with fear (b) does random stuff until he causes real damage.
What is the difference between these two types of people? How can they be identified in advance? Could the second type be taught to act like the first type?
sPh