Re: [suse-schools-usa] Fwd: [alg] Was in Linuxjournal now /.ed

19 Apr 2002


      I totally agree with this article. I think too many people look at a computer
through the eyes of an adult rather than the eyes of a child. The eyes of an
adult are eyes that have been crushed by society continuously telling them
"that's too hard" or "you're too stupid to learn this new thing" or, in the case
of some well-known corporations in the technology scetor, "you don't need to
learn, we'll tell you everything you need to know to use our special computers,
because we know what you like." The eyes of a child, on the other hand, are thus
far untainted, and learn instinctively and voraciously if you let them. They
don't miss a trick, and change and adapt to new experiences almost instantly.
And, it's obvious by this article, you don't need to be a part of the
priviledged "haves" to learn how to use a computer. Every one of these
"have-not" children have picked up their computer skills faster than most "have"
children I've observed.

If computer companies can start making "donations" to community organizations,
I'm sure they'd discover an awful lot of receptive future-customers that would
long remember their generosity (are you listening, computer companies???)

Alex Heizer
http://www.synchcorp.com/alex
http://www.synchcorp.com/alexheizer


tom poe wrote:
...
Hi, Jim:  Wonderful article, and may be the most recommended reading for our
entire world community, I think:
http://www.worldccr.org/kids.htm
Thanks,
Tom Poe
Reno, NV
http://www.studioforrecording.org/
http://www.ibiblio.org/studioforrecording/
http://renotahoe.pm.org/
On Thursday 18 April 2002 08:42, you wrote:
...
Sorry. Apparently me intended message failed the copy. The article concerns
what happens when a computer attached ti the internet is placed where
activity can be observed - remotely. Here is the article. I found it
interesting working with my school district on various performance seeking
projects.
###
An Indian physicist puts a PC with a high speed
internet connection in a wall in the slums and watches what happens. Based
on the results, he talks about issues of digital divide, computer education
and kids, the dynamics of the third world getting online.
New Delhi physicist Sugata Mitra has a radical
proposal for bringing his country's next generation into the Info Age
from a Businessweek Online Daily
Briefing, March 2, 2000.
Edited by Paul Judge
Sugata Mitra has a PhD in physics and heads research efforts
at New Delhi's NIIT, a fast-growing software and education company with
sales of more than $200 million and a market cap over $2 billion. But
Mitra's passion is computer-based education, specifically for India's poor.
He believes that children, even terribly poor kids with little education,
can quickly teach themselves the rudiments of computer literacy. The key,
he contends, is for teachers and other adults to give them free rein, so
their natural curiosity takes over and they teach themselves. He calls the
concept "minimally invasive education."
To test his ideas, Mitra 13 months ago launched something 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 monitored activity
on the PC using a remote computer and a video camera mounted in a nearby
tree.
What 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.
Some of the other things they learned, Mitra says, astonished him.
The physicist has since installed a computer in a rural
neighborhood with similar results. He's convinced that 500 million children
could achieve basic computer literacy over the next five years, if the
Indian government put 100,000 Net-connected PCs in schools and trained
teachers in some basic "noninvasive" teaching techniques for guiding
children in using them. Total investment required, he figures: Around $2
billion.
On Feb. 25, BW Online Contributing Editor Thane Peterson sat
down with Mitra, a stocky 48-year-old with a mustache and a mop of graying
black hair, in his tiny, triangular office at NIIT's R&D center on the
campus of the Indian Institute of Technology in the south part of New
Delhi. Here are edited excerpts of their conversation.
Q: What gave you the idea of giving slum kids access to the
Internet?
A: It was a social observation rather than a scientific one.
Any parent who had given his child a computer would invariably remark to me
about it. I could hardly ever find an exception. Within a very short period
of time, the parent would be claiming that the child was a genius with a
computer. When I poked a little further, I invariably found that the child
was doing things with the computer that the parent didn't understand.
I asked myself whether the child was really doing something
exceptional or if what we were seeing was adult incomprehension. If the
adult was simply underestimating the child's ability to cope with a
computer, then that should happen with any child. And I asked myself, "Why
then would we want to use the same teaching methods for children as we use
for teaching adults?"
At first, I tested my ideas with children who were easily
available -- children at the company here, whose parents are in our
executive group ..
Then we tried this "hole in the wall" concept, where we put a
high-powered Pentium computer with a fast Internet connection into a wall
and let [slum] children have access to it with no explanation whatsoever.
To be very brief on what happened, the results have been uniform every time
we've done this experiment. You get base level computer literacy almost
instantly. By computer literacy, I mean what we adults define as computer
literacy: The ability to use the mouse, to point, to drag, to drop, to
copy, and to browse the Internet.
The children create their own metaphors to do this. To give
you an idea of what I mean, a journalist came up to one of these kids and
asked him, "How do you know so much about computers?" The answer seemed
very strange to her because the kid said, "What's a computer?" The
terminology is not as important as the metaphor. If they've got the idea of
how a mouse works and that the Internet is [like a wall they can paint on],
who cares if they know that a computer is called a computer and a mouse is
called a mouse? In most of our classes here at NIIT, we spend time teaching
people the terminology and such. That seems irrelevant to me with these
children.
But we also found that they would tend to plateau out. They
would surf the Web -- Disney.com is very popular with them because they
like games. And they would use [Microsoft] Paint. It's very, very popular
with all of them.
Because these are deprived children who do not have easy
access to paper and paint. Every child likes to paint, so they would do it
with that program. However, that's all they could do. So I intervened, and
I played an MP3 [digital-music file] for them. They were astonished to hear
music come out of the computer for the first time. They said, "Oh, does it
work like a TV or radio?" I said, in keeping with my approach, "Well, I
know how to get there but I don't know how it works." Then I [left].
As I would have expected, seven days later they could have
taught me a few things about MP3. They had discovered what MP3 was,
downloaded free players, and were playing their favorite songs. As usual,
they didn't know what any of it was called. But they would say, "if you
take this little box, and you drag this file into this box, it plays
music." They had found out where all the Hindi music was on the Web and had
pulled it out.
Q: What does it mean? What does it say for the potential of
these slum kids? After all, being able to download music isn't enough to
get them a job.
A: I don't wish to claim that this shows anything more or
less than what it has shown, which is that curious kids in groups can train
themselves to operate a computer at a basic level. In doing so, they also
can get a generally good idea about the nature of browsing and the nature
of the Internet .... And, therefore, if they view these things as worth
learning, no formal infrastructure is needed [to teach them].
Now, that's a big deal, because everyone agrees that today's
children must be computer-literate. If computer literacy is defined as
turning a computer on and off and doing the basic functions, then this
method allows that kind of computer literacy to be achieved with no formal
instruction. Therefore any formal instruction for that kind of education is
a waste of time and money. You can use that time and money to have a
teacher teach something else that children cannot learn on their own.
Q: What else have you learned?
A: Well, I tried another experiment. I went to a middle-class
school and chose some ninth graders, two girls and two boys. I called their
physics teacher in and asked him, "What are you going to teach these
children next year at this time?" He mentioned viscosity. I asked him to
write down five possible exam questions on the subject. I then took the
four children and said, "Look here guys. I have a little problem for you."
They read the questions and said they didn't understand them, it was Greek
to them. So I said, "Here's a terminal. I'll give you two hours to find the
answers."
Then I did my usual thing: I closed the door and went off
somewhere else.
They answered all five questions in two hours. The physics
teacher checked the answers, and they were correct. That, of itself,
doesn't mean much. But I said to him, "Talk to the children and find out if
they really learned something about this subject." So he spent half an hour
talking to them. He came out and said, "They don't know everything about
this subject or everything I would teach them. But they do know one hell of
a lot about it. And they know a couple of things about it I didn't know."
That's not a wow for the children, it's a wow for the
Internet. It shows you what it's capable of. The slum children don't have
physics teachers. But if I could make them curious enough, then all the
content they need is out there. The greatest expert on earth on viscosity
probably has his papers up there on the Web somewhere. Creating content is
not what's important. What is important is infrastructure and access ...
The teacher's job is very simple. It's to help the children ask the right
questions.
Q: Are you saying that if we put computers in all the slums,
slum kids could become literate on their own?
A: I'm saying that, in situations where we cannot intervene
very frequently, you can multiply the effectiveness of 10 teachers by 100 -
or 1,000 - fold if you give children access to the Internet.
Q: This is your concept of minimally invasive education?
A: Yes. It started out as a joke but I've kept using the term
... This is a system of education where you assume that children know how
to put two and two together on their own. So you stand aside and intervene
only if you see them going in a direction that might lead into a blind
alley. That's just so that you don't waste time ... That would create
teachers who are experts at composing questions.
Q: What are the business applications of all this?
A: I get asked this question all the time. It's kind of
ironic that a company that makes [a big chunk of its sales from running
computer-training institutes] should invent a method where no teacher is
required. The answer is that just because a method is economically viable,
doesn't mean you shouldn't look for alternatives. A good business is one
which provides more and more for less and less. The cost of your goods and
services should spiral downwards.
The second point is that we are going to have an e-commerce
boom. But what happens when an Indian businessman puts his shop up on the
Web? Where's he going to get customers from? If someone lets me do this
experiment for five years, with 100,000 kiosks, I reckon that I could get
500 million children computer-literate. It would cost $2 billion. But if
you had to pay to educate the same children using traditional methods, it
would cost twice as much.
Q: If this were to become a business, would it require
government funding?
A: Advertisers like Coca-Cola might be interested. But it
would absolutely have to have government funding. I can't think of a
company that would put $2 billion into this. The governments will have to
realize that the problem of the haves and have-nots is about to [become]
the problem of the knows and knows-not. Do we want to create another great
big divide where the problem of illiteracy will come back in another
context? In a very short period of time, adults who do not know how to deal
with a [computer] mouse will have a very difficult time dealing with almost
everything in life.
Q: But most of the information on the Internet is in English
and the people you're talking about don't speak English.
A: We had some very surprising results there. We all have
great misconceptions about what these children know and don't know. At
first, I made a Hindi interface for the kids, which gave them links for
hooking up with Web sites in their own language. I thought it would be a
great hit. Guess what they did with it? They shut it down and went back to
Internet Explorer. I realized that they may not understand the dictionary
meaning of [English] words, but they have an operational understanding.
They know what that word does. They don't know how to pronounce F-I-L-E,
but they know that within it are options of saving and opening up files ...
The fact that the Internet is in English will not stop them
from accessing it.
They invent their own terminology for what's going on. For
example, they call the pointer of the mouse sui, which is Hindi for needle.
More interesting is the hourglass that appears when something is happening.
Most Indians have never heard of an hourglass. I asked them, "What does
that mean?" They said, "It's a damru," which is Hindi for Shiva's drum.
[The God] Shiva holds an hourglass - shaped drum in his hand that you can
shake from side to side. So they said the sui became a damru when the
"thing" [the computer] was doing something.
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.
Q: So what you're talking about is a different sort of
literacy, a sort of functional literacy ...
A: Yes, it's functional literacy. There are two examples I'd
like to give you from the recent past. It's already happened in cable TV in
India. There are 50 or 60 million cable-TV connections in India at this
point in time. The guys who set up the meters, splice the coaxial cables,
make the connection to the house, etc., are very similar to these kids.
They don't know what they're doing. They only know that if you do these
things, you'll get the cable channel. And they've managed to [install] 60
million cable connections so far.
Example No. 2 is the bicycle. I think we have the biggest
bicycle-manufacturing industry in the world. The bicycle is ubiquitous
here, and it's much the same in Malaysia, China, Africa. But you don't ask
how the population became bicycle-literate. They just use it. So what I'd
like to see is an India in which a large part [of the population] treats
the computer that way.
The other thing is [how the Internet will change when most
Indians gain access to it]. We have the analogy of cable TV in India.
Originally, it was all in English. It took exactly four years for all the
programming to become Hindi. Star TV is now almost all in Hindi. If you go
to Bangkok, they hate it.
Q: You're saying that a lot of Hindi content will appear as
more Indians surf the Net?
A: Exactly. Let me go on record as saying it's not a question
of what the Internet will do to India. It's a question of what India will
do to the Internet ... If rural India goes onto the Internet, there will be
an absolute flood of Indian-language content from people trying to sell to
them.
Q: Has the Indian or any other government expressed interest
in funding such ain Eng project?
A: Several government agencies, several state governments,
and several world agencies have expressed an interest. Unfortunately, I
don't want to name them because I need to get the funds first.
Q: You say that only the children used the computer, not
adults. What does this mean for adult education?
A: I'm not even going to suggest that we use this [technique]
for adults. The only reaction we got from adults was, "What on earth is
this for? Why is there no one here to teach us something? How are we ever
going to use this?" I contend that by the time we are 16, we are taught to
want teachers, taught that we cannot learn anything without teachers.
There are two points I'd like to make about the adults. One
is that the adults asked the children to do things for them. For example,
to read their horoscopes on the Hindi news sites. The second thing is the
reaction of the women. I would ask them why they didn't use [the computer],
and they would say, "I don't have enough brains to understand all this." I
would say, "What about your daughters?" And the answer was, "They have lots
of brains." So I said, "Do you think I should just remove this thing?" The
answer was always, "No, no, no." I asked why not. And they said, "Because
it's very good for the children."
Now, if the mothers have realized that, I'm happy. I don't
care if they don't come [to use the computer]. Because all we have to do is
wait one generation. Not even that. In five years, a 13-year-old is going
to be 18 and be an adult.
Q: Where do you go from here?
A: There is one experiment that scares me. These children
don't know what e-mail is. If I gave them e-mail, I don't know what would
happen. I'll probably try it anyway. But remember the stories one used to
hear about people finding lost tribes and introducing them to Coca-Cola?
I'm really seriously scared about what would happen if suddenly the whole
wide world had access to these kids. I don't know who would talk to them
for what purpose.
###
...
...
...
tom poe  04/18/2002 10:33 >>>
Hi, Jim:  Why an attachment?  What is it?
Thanks,
Tom Poe
Reno, NV
http://www.studioforrecording.org/
http://www.ibiblio.org/studioforrecording/
http://renotahoe.pm.org/
On Thursday 18 April 2002 07:19, Jim Parkhurst wrote:
...
...
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Jim Parkhurst
Systems Analyst III
Texas Department of Transportation
General Services Division
Automation Support
jparkhur@dot.state.tx.us
Voice : 512-416-3219
FAX : 512-416-2099
Pager : 606-9774
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