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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.
Reminds me oddly of the book version of 2001... Forcing a bit of odd westernization-evolution on the kids...
Like with photoshop? Or with a can of spray paint?
It's running Windows. I hope that slum has a license.
That people are learning so quickly on computers. Perhaps it's the missing link in quick education, we could probably educate the "ghetto" areas very quickly then.
I'd be interested in seeing a learning curve for teachers vs. computers, and in self-learning vs. independant.
Perhaps practical education is MUCH better than being taught, which would show that our education system is very unefficient...
Shouldn't you call them "Natives" instead of "Indians?"
:)
Political correctness.
now i have to move to new delhi for a high speed uncapped connection...grrr
You know, I felt discouraged with all of the dot-com bombs. It seemed as if the promise of the Internet was over.
:)
:)
It's these things that remind me what the Internet is all about: learning and communication. It's not about making money (although that might work for some people). It's just about making the world a better place, one page at a time.
This is seriously cool. Nobel Internet Peace Prize anyone?
qslack.com
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.
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Mitra has a website about his experiments.
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Not anymore he doesn't...
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The computers used for the kiosks are all Pentium PCs with color monitors and multimedia support. The operating system is Windows(TM) (9x/NT) and the Internet browser is MS Internet Explorer(TM).
As you might imagine, deploying Internet kiosks in economically backward parts of India is not quite simple. Besides the lack of infrastructure, the other challenges include providing a low-cost solution that can withstand harsh conditions like dust and extreme temperatures, and a kiosk that can be remotely administered. These and other similar requirements have led to the design for a Cognitive Kiosk for Rural, Outdoor, Tropical Environment (patent pending).
An early prototype of the Hole-In-The-Wall kiosk
Listed below are some of the typical problems encountered while deploying the Hole-In-the-Wall kiosk:
Internet Connectivity
Input Device
Administration
Heat and Dust
Security
Internet Connectivity
Internet connectivity to the kiosks has been provided using various methods including leased lines, ISDN lines and Dial-up connections. Internet access in India is at a nascent stage due to inadequate telecommunications infrastructure. Some kiosk installations have been at places that don't even have phone lines. In such cases, the computers use cached web content to simulate web access. Besides this, a host of edutainment software is installed that has actually proved to be quite popular. Future design includes experimenting with remote connectivity with Wireless LAN and Wireless Telephone Line Extender.
Back
Input Device
Keyboard
There is no keyboard available to the users. This is due to the concern of vandalism. Also, it is anticipated that there would be high level of wear and tear of keys as the device is susceptible to dust, especially as the dust particles have an abrasive quality here. All this meant that the cost of maintenance of a keyboard were unacceptably high. Trials are on to see if virtual keyboards can be used.
Pointing Device
Touch pads were used as the pointing device during the early experiments. The touch pads were found to be wearing out quite fast or being accidentally broken by the kids. On an average the life of a touch pad was approximately 1 month. To avoid this frequent replacement of touch pads, a JoyStick Mouse was devised at CRCS. This device has a joystick control for the movement of the cursor, and a button each for left and right click. This JoyStick Mouse is quite a sturdy pointing device that is low-cost. Moreover, it requires little maintenance as compared to the touch pads.
Back
Administration
Though remote administration software tools have been used in some cases, by and large, the task of administering the kiosk is accomplished manually at this point in time. But work has already begun on a Central Control Website through which it will be possible remotely administer all the kiosks that are online. The plan envisages kiosks that have embedded controllers connected to the computer giving details of the ambient variants such as temperature and humidity. The kiosks will also record the status of UPS/batteries. These records will be put on the Central Control Website, where the central observer can take actions according to the requirements. The idea of a kiosk reporting it's own "health problems", is what drives this effort.
Back
Heat and Dust
To cope with the high summer temperatures, the computers are housed in a brick enclosure with thicker-than-normal walls. The enclosure that has dust filters, also minimises the dust from the dry winds. Initial experiments tried air-conditioning for tackling the heat but that turned out to be too expensive an option. It has been observed that the computers' performance is affected only marginally by the high temperatures. Therefore, for the moment, only ventillating fans have been used to maintain ambient temperature. The ventillating fans also serve to maintain positive air pressure inside the kiosk. Blowing air with high pressure checks the entry of dust particles in case of minor cracks or holes in the kiosk.
Back
Security
The kiosks are unmanned and, therefore, require means for the safe-keeping of all the expensive hardware. The Hole-In-The-Wall kiosks have in-built security system the details of which cannot be divulged for obvious reasons.
Back
Seems to me like more of a sociology experiment than anything...
I wonder if any prominent sociological societies or groups are aware of this project and its collected data?
Palaces, barricades, threats, meet promises
While the experiment sounds interesting, I have this weird feeling that the IRBs might have a few issues with this type of experiment if they were run in the United States (and by experiment, I mean controlled study run through a university). Now, the weird feeling stems from the fact that one would potentially have to answer a few questions about using human beings as unaware subjects.
I am not saying that there are a not great deal of potential positives form this type of "experiment" as well. I just want to point out that there might be some ethical issues. I am sure there are some simple arguements that can point out the cost to implement the hole in the wall system vs. the cost to feed/educate/clothe a number of children. (The counter arguement states that if a single child is able to rise out of poverty due to the exposure to technology, the purely economic analysis states that the experiment was a win...)
The groaning aside, it is again amazing that kids will figure out how to use stuff. It does not seem to matter who the kids are or what the stuff is, they seem to figure out how to use it.
This company (NIIT) is well known as one of the farms for H1-Bs - (e.g. Learn HTML in 21 days and go to America). No joke - if you visit India, you see advertisements like this. They're obviously trying to get an aura of semi-legitimacy by publishing this pseudo-scientific study. Their marketing is well known, their courses - dubious at best. For example, my cousing was offered one of their courses as part of their SWIFT Start program (check out http://www.rediff.com/computer/1999/sep/04niit.htm ) a few years ago. Would go because he thought it was a useless bunch of crap.
Would be like IIT here coming out with a "study" based on putting a computer kiosk in South Central. Wait a minute, I'd like to see that....
Imagine a Bhagavad-Gita cluster of these!
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.
The children were sorely disappointed when the machine wouldn't acknowledge their parent-induced handicaps such as missing limbs and blindness.
When it comes to the Internet, blindness is a handicap (now that much of the web is moving to Flash and that Flash MX's accessibility features have not come into wide use), but not having legs isn't nearly as much of a handicap, especially when you can prop yourself up and use the computer that way.
Will I retire or break 10K?
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?
What amused me the most was the comment about the kids doing things that adults couldn't understand. Children learn at a faster rate than adults, especially it seems where technology is concerned. This can be seen by looking at the case of programming a video. In most households it is the children who are most able to use technology to its fullest.
I would be interested to know whether a childs ability to learn how to use computers (or other technology) is to do with their natural inquisitiveness and readiness to try new things(as opposed to the technophobia that many older people show), or whether there is some sort of 'critical period' (such as for syntax) after which it becomes more difficult to learn such things. This study would seem to suggest that it is not only the increasing contact with computers that makes children more skilled in their use, since these are kids who have never seen (or heard of) computers before.
He should have put Office on those PCs too, to see how long it took the little urchins to begin hating Clippy!
Children have the most curiosity, and the littlest fear. They will try things that people who have experienced negative results previously may not. For example: my 2 year old son can play Halo better than I can, not because I'm bad at video games but because I cannot adapt to the controls and controller the way he can. I'm still stuck in the quake mouse + keyboard point of mind.
they're all lined up waiting to write some java.
So what's their connection at? I bet its the good old fashiond 65 baud tin can and string.
Hardly an acoustic coupler. From the article:
The following was more interesting:
That must be a pretty d*ng big cache. How many clicks is it from the average US site to WinMX.com or Kazaa.com? (WinMX and Kazaa are two popular P2P file-sharing apps for Windows.)
Will I retire or break 10K?
That was my
I heard that they are great in ASF HTTP Server administration. I wonder why.
(Or are they Indians from Indies? Damn you Cristoforo Colombo!)
~shiny
WILL HACK FOR $$$
There are some wonderful observations for educators and those providing government funding for educational infrastructure from the Hole-In-the-Wall experiment.
Perhaps one of the most important observations made by Dr. Mitra was, "The terminology is not as important as the metaphor."
Metaphors, by their nature are transformational. As Marshall McLuhan wrote in Understanding Media, "All media are active metaphors in their power to translate experience into new forms."
(By "medium," McLuhan means anything that we conceive or create - tangible or intangible, everything from tables to televisions to televangelists. The "message" of a medium is the set of effects or changes that the medium will induce in us, our society or culture.)
In this case, the Indian children used metaphors to which they could relate to effect changes in, and transform, the way they experienced common-place life: Indian music, letters, Shiva's drum and so forth. In doing so, they will tend to view the rest of the world through changed eyes, and will undoubtedly "demand" (even tacitly through imagination) these new experiences. They will likely be dissatisfied with the conventional approach to instruction, perhaps preferring more self-guided, exploration and discovery-based education. What effects might this have on the educational system in India? What effects will this have on educators in North America and Europe who will be forced to confront massive investments in seemingly unnecessary "computer literacy" programs. How can approaches to adult education take advantage of child-like curiosity and discovery?
In the graduate-level course I teach, the majority of the course is discovery and exploration. Where we end up at the end of each seminar is largely irrelevant. If we reach a point of being able to ask a profound question as a "conclusion," the seminar is a resounding success. As seen with these Indian children and Dr. Mitra's brilliant experiment, "The teacher's job is very simple. It's to help the children ask the right questions." To which I would add, adult learners, too.
its interesting...
One could never do this experiement (as
presented) in the United States (and
probably other. more controlled societies
as well) because you couldn't get Human
Subjects Approval with out informed
consent.
It would be interesting to get some sort of
grip the real long term effects on the
kids will be.
actually its about keeping government agencies and universities connected (DARPA Net).
it's nice to bring your ideas to the table, but the net is all about 3 things.
1. Commerce - self explanatory
2. Self Glorification - Personal web page? yeah like you weren't trying to show off (unless its just a resume which is practical) (btw, i don't mind showing off).
3. Communication - Communicating between different groups for BAD OR GOOD, whether world peace ensues is not the net's concern
Photos.
"Hardly used" will not fetch you a better price for your brain.
...is irrelevant. *What* information is what is important. I can find anything and everything I need to on the net, what I can't find is WHAT to look for. Don't teach kinds facts and figures, teach kinds how to know what facts and figures they should be looking for!
"Your superior intellect is no match for our puny weapons!"
I wonder if public school ever was supposed to be actually educational. But from my experience, at the time I thought of it like day camp. A place to put the kids while the parents worked.
Now I see it as a camp for the indoctrination of culture. The public education system is pretty much the same from here to Alaska (skipping Canada). They have similar course structures, similar standards, etc...
The point is to make the students all have a commonality. More than just living in the same town, state, or country, because those types of bonds aren't strong. Instead, because we share the same educational structure, we learn the same history, take the same tests, and generally learn to approach life the same way. Public School itself is another bond. No matter what state you go to, you can always find people to b*tch about the crappy public school system with.
But looking outside the mandated structures, the school itself is a tool to be accessed by the students (like the terminal from the article). There is a wealth of possibility, not from the courses, but from the things that are ancillary to your report card. The opportunity to contribute to a newspaper, to perform in a play, sing in a chorus, or compete in a sporting event. All these things are available through the school system. The kids who benefit the most from Public School are those that approach it with curiosity.
Sweat
It breaks my pluginses, my precious!
I happen to live in a small town where a lot of the population are what we call "fisher people"; meaning that one (or less) generations ago they lived on fishing boats, which are their livelyhood, and had little education.
Today the kids do go to school, and have TV and everything but life is still pretty simple for them and your typical fisher family would not have access to a PC. (though dad probably has some fancy sonar and radar on the boat)
Well our public post offices now have free Internet Kiosks as part of a "internet for all" program; which is great.
The other day I saw a fisher girl of about 6 in front of the terminal. I was rather surprised and had a sneaking peek over her shoulder to see what was going on.
She had just gone to some web site which for some reason had crashed the browser. So not hesitating she brought up the task manager, killed the hung task, and loaded the browser again to continue.
I have desktop support people who work for me in the office who are not as comfortable doing things like that!
R.
I hear that Junis has offered some Commodore 64's to help out.
-Sean
Actually, you probably say "slashdotted" in Hindi. "rackmount" in Hindi is "rackmount", so why wouldn't "slashdotted" be "slashdotted"?
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
4. Porn
I like petting kittens.
Well, how do you say slashdotted in Christian? or Jew?
Probably the same place you learn what's a language and what's a religion.
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.
Considering that these computers don't use a real keyboard (because of concerns of vandalism/theft and maintenance), it's not surprising that the kids use paintbrush. It's one of the things that can be effectively used without a keyboard.
And therein lies the humor(?) :-)
pr0n - keeping monitor glass spotless since 1981.
Woah! You can tell this guy isn't working for an American software company. Must be some sort of radical socialist or something...
I've got a bad attitude and karma to burn. Go ahead. Mod me down.
slashdot karti he
--
Just another reminder that it's not the degree you have that counts (though degrees are a good thing), it's what you can figure out / how fast you can learn & adjust to an environment that determines how productive you'll be.
Q: Of all the things the children did and learned, what did you find the most surprising?
A: One day there was a document file on the desktop of the computer. It was called "untitled.doc" and it said in big colorful letters, "I Love India." I couldn't believe it for the simple reason that there was no keyboard on the computer [only a touch screen]. I asked my main assistant -- a young boy, eight years old, the son of a local betel-nut seller -- and I asked him, "How on earth did you do this?" He showed me the character map inside [Microsoft] Word. So he had gotten into the character map inside Word, and dragged and dropped the letters onto the screen, then increased the point size and painted the letters. I was stunned because I didn't know that the character map existed -- and I have a PhD.
Mr. Allen: I happen to have Marshal McLuhan right here, and he has something he'd like to say to you.
Mr. McLuhan: You've completely misunderstood the meaning of my work. How you could have possibly been made a professor is something that I will never understand.
Hehe. I wish I could have quoted that accurately, but it's been a while since I've seen Annie Hall. I don't actually think you misunderstood anything.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
Never mind the review board. I say: Just put in a clickthru agreement. This is cyberspace, after all.
Sell the computer, feed the kids. Sheesh.
Hungry children is a horrible tradgey, but perhaps education - even minimal nontraditional education - can help them break out of the cycle of poverty.
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
Didn't someone once say "It is better to teach a poor man how to fish than to give him fish for a day" or something like that....
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
where a couple of years ago, my next door neighbor decided to throw away his entire old Mac setup, including the monitor, modem, keyboard, mouse, and all of the cables. Everything worked - I grabbed it when I got home. The local kids' response? To spraypaint black graffitti on the monitor. No one thought to take it and play with it, and I'm pretty sure that it this neighborhood computer ownership was pretty low.
one could also reason that these technologies need to be protected from some company that wants to make money with it.
as far as i understand, patents are meant to protect the inventors, and this is IMHO a clear cut case of a good use for a patent. the people that conduct this research appear trustworthy to me. i'd rather have them hold the patent to this setup than let some big company steal it away.
The image of a huge wall that separates a handful of elite technologists from people who live in such abject poverty and squalor that they use this vacant lot as an open-air toilet is incredibly disturbing.
From a typical techno-geek perspective, yes this is an interesting experiment. But take a step back. Psychosocial experiments, especially those involving children, have strict ethical protocols that must be followed -- at least in North America and Europe they do. Was this a relatively benign experiment? It sounds like it was (the site is down so I can't say one way or the other) but that is not the issue. One of the key principles in experimentation is informed participation, and minors cannot give consent to participate. The purpose is to prevent exploitation.
Food, shelter and decent living conditions come far higher on my list of priorities than learning how to surf the Web. I wonder if the experimenter thought about what the potential health consequences might be for children spending more time hanging around such unsanitary conditions as a result of his kiosk.
Technology does not exist for technology's sake. At it's best, technology exists to improve people's lives.
Perhaps NIIT should see what it can do to improve lives and alleviate the misery in the slums that surround its campus instead of sticking Web terminals into walls to see how the local troglodyte children react to it while standing ankle-deep in human waste.
Hello.
But what is a computer?
Regards.
Little fella.
Then wait and see which one gets the most attention and watch how they are used by kids who have no prior exposure to any computer GUI.
That should tell us something about intuitive GUIs.
Idempotent operation: Like MS software, wether you run it once or often, that doesn't make it any better.
Sure, the threshold might be higher for CLIs, but it's by no means certain that children would be stopped by it.
As anecdotal evidence of that, I learned to program on the VIC 20 and C64 largely without assistance.
At the time I started showing an interest in the Vic 20 we had at home I was 5. I started writing "programs" on paper emulating what I saw my father writing.
When he noticed that, he let me use the computer instead, and gave me the manual to look at.
Even though the manual was in English, and I didn't know a word of English at the time, and only knew the basics of reading, I was soon writing small Basic programs that actually did stuff.
All it took was examples, even though I had no idea what they would do.
I'm not claiming everyone would do what I did, but I don't have any illusions that I'm so special that I'd figure out stuff at the age of 5 that not a substantial amount of other kids would figure out as well in the same situation.
What the article pointed out was primarily that you can get a solid foundation without the help of a teacher, and that it is a waste of resources to spend a teachers time on teaching the kids things they can learn on their own in an environment where they don't have nearly enough teachers to cover the need.
In other words, giving kids gentle guidance by giving them access to a computer, and possibly give them some help or access to someone to ask questions of every now and then might be a lot more cost effective (and thus enable them to reach more kids) than having a teacher guide them through every little step.
I especially liked the example with MP3. All the guy had to do was show them the possibility - then the kids explored further on their own, finding sources of MP3s, downloading and installing players etc..
Keep in mind that kids also love showing each other "cool stuff" - this is learning where the kids themselves participate in the teaching process as well.
It would be interesting to see what somewhat more intervention would cause - if the kids got a chance to get some more "nudges" like the MP3 one, and access to more tools (like installing educational games etc.).
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.
i doubt the people who literally wrote the book on sex and porn would spend a lot of effert punishing people who looked for it.
;)
Very true, go into any internet cafe in India and take a look at the browser history and there will be as much pr0n in there as your machine at home
--
Reverse outsourcing: it's the future
flamebait?!?!? how was that flamebait!!!!!!! you guys ever here of humor?!??!!? i got 2 flambaits for that!!!! sheeeeesh
Kids are learning MACHINES!!!
The kids using it place no immediate value on it. There is no sense of destruction with it. The Kids didn't pay for it, their parents didn't save up money for it, so there is no "be careful!" factor involved (as evindenced by the shivpuri results).
Now to those of you who had computers as kids, think of your own past. It was either a gift to you or you were "stealing time" on a machine... You didn't know what you were doing, but you didn't care about doing something wrong. You just did it (and you probably screwed a few things up, too). And you learned from that.
This method of trial and error, the "school of hard knocks" is by far the greatest teacher because that is how human consciousness is wired- to learn and pick up clues on causality from our environment.
To this day, if you ask me how I wrote my CDLI device driver, I'll say "I took some code examples and hacked around until it worked!"
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
"What's a Troll Libs?" you ask. Well, I propose that a Troll Libs is a troll -1 post that has been reposted with a lot of the offensive material replaced by blanks to be filled in, in follow up posts, with words and phrases asked for at the end of the blank (in parentheses).
This idea is to do something along the lines of that classic pencil and paper amusement Mad Libs.
As an example, I will post the first one, based on the troll -1 above. Here is the Troll Libs text:
Have at it. I hope you enjoy.Second, there is the annoying problem of the installed base. Of anything, not just computer software. Sure, we could get rid of film cameras tomorrow. If we (a) wanted to retrain the 1 billion or so people who already know how to use a film camera (b) we didn't care about being able to print those pictures of Great-Grandma taken in 1889. But generally we can't afford (a) and do care about (b).
sPH
I bet head tracking technology as a mouse replacement works a lot better in India. I mean, the dot makes an easy target for the image processing software.
Disconnect your television. Do your own research. Draw your own conclusions. They're probably lying. Don't be a sheep.
yeah. i can't play worth shit on counterstrike on my friend's rig w/a trackball. i had to use it anyways, and ended up turning the trackball upside down, and "invert mouse", and just remember that left was right, and vice versa. frags, sadly, went up :)
moox. for a new generation.
The original quotation is, "Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach him to fish, and you feed him for the rest of his life."
There are lots of cynical derivatives with this -- almost as many as the places where eating the fish will ensure you don't have to worry about a long life...
Comment removed based on user account deletion
No keyboard. A Windows box...
How did they Ctrl-Alt-Delete?
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Next thing you know, they've got the 8 year old girls wearing plad skirts ... :-)
---- It puts the lotion on its skin or else it gets the hose again. It does this whenever it's told.
I have heard of cases where, to avoid the experimenter effect, a benign study was conducted and upon conclusion the subjects were informed and given the option to opt in or out after reviewing the data collected.
I have also read about experiments where the particpants were aware that they were participating in an experiment. However, the stated goal was different from the actual goal. Again, participants were informed after the fact and given the option to opt in or out.
Interesting that suddenly the comment was modded down as FLAMEBAIT of all things. A REDUNDANT moderation would have been fair since I had unknowingly raised questions similar to two others earlier in the thread -- tcyun and drDugan.
Obviously someone was more than a little sensitive to someone raising questions about experimental ethics and the priorities in countries such as India where the disparity in standards of living between the majority and the few (such as our esteemed experimenter) are almost unimaginable to those of us in the West.
HENRY DORS: Why is it worse for people in third world countries to be (relatively) wealthy?
It isn't. But if you've ever lived or traveled in India, or countries in a similar stage of development, you would see the disproportionate mass of the population that lives at or below the poverty line in conditions that we woudn't allow our pets to endure. And it is in an open sewer that the experimenter decided to place his kiosk, where kids would naturally spend more more time. Do you see what is wrong in that?
I haven't missed the point of what he was trying to do. I simply take issue with the method he used and question the relative merits of one action over another.
As for my sarcasm in using the term troglodyte, the choice of words was deliberate so it's too bad you missed the point. However that is exactly how all too many of those elites see these desperately poor children. I think that the project is a worthy one if you first provide for those children's basic human needs. If the government is unable, unwilling or incapable of doing so than it is up to those elements of society with resources and means to do what they can to help.
POWERBARR: The difference between the US and India is that instead of a few yards away, they are probably ten to twenty blocks away so passersby don't have to see them.
While I agree that poverty like you described is a problem in North America, you are incorrect to reduce the difference to one of geography. The problem is also one of magnitude and proportion. The sheer numbers of Indians living in such conditions dwarfs the number in USA. The proportion of Indian society that lives in abject poverty is far greater (some would say the majority) than in the USA.
MKS113: I find this wonderful. One thing you learn very quickly in a society like that is that you can not change the entire society and alleviate poverty.
Nobody is saying that he has to change the entire society. Just try to do something in your community. What would be wrong with relocating the terminal so kids could surf the net in sanitary conditions? Or occasionally providing a bowl of rice or a glass of milk to the kids who participated in his experiment?
NEGATIVEK: How does that old saying go? "Give a man a fish, and he'll eat for a day. Teach a man to fish, and he'll eat for a lifetime," or something like that. Dumping money into a problematic society isn't the way to do things. Educating the members of that society, teaching them how to make money on their own, helps not only the members of that society, but everyone else too. Giving away money will make people dependent. Teaching people is a practice that will pay for itself quickly.
Agreed, but the problem is that sticking a computer into a wall isn't teaching. If he wanted to provide some basic self-directed language, literacy, math, and science lessons then that would be one thing. There was no teaching going on here -- at least not by the experimenter. Nobody mentioned anything about giving away money -- just using it a little more wisely. A hungry kid doesn't learn as well as one who is starving.
SISUKAPALLI1: Familiarity with computers without the background education in reading, writing, composition, and comprehension, not to mention basic math and science will take a person only so far.
Agreed. We are beginning to see that schools equipped with computers don't inherently make children better students by themselves. In fact there is ample evidence that it often does the exact opposite, while diverting critical and scarce funds from other areas of education when these schools are pushed into the upgrade cycle.
Get a solid foundation in the basics and the kids will grow up well-equipped to learn about computers or any other subject they desire.