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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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
"Hardly used" will not fetch you a better price for your brain.
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.
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.
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.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
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.
"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.Forcing a bit of odd westernization-evolution on the kids...
Funny, I didn't see any mention of kids being held at gunpoint and commanded to use the computer.
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?