Tuesday, October 03, 2006
Hole in the wall experiment
This is one of the most fascinating experiments I have ever come across.
[..]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.[..]
The results are astounding. He contends that by the age of 16 we, as humans, have been "conditioned" to ask teachers for help in learning. Before this age we are not "conditioned" to need such teachers so we take it upon ourselves to learn and interact with our environment.
The experiment was placing an internet connected computer in a poor area of India and monitoring what the slums children with the computer. Mind you, these kids do not speak English and have NEVER seen a computer before.
So the result were a bunch of kids interacting with their new environment and discovering the outside world through the internet. The most popular application on the pc was [Microsoft] Paint, for obvious reasons. Which kid doesn't like painting??
Through further research and the employment of the professor's "noninvasive" teaching method he, Sugata Mitra, is hoping to expand the scope to include hundreds of kiosks all exposing these young internet virgins to a computer.
http://www.asiaweek.com/asiaweek/technology/article/0,8707,171453,00.html
[..]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.[..]
The results are astounding. He contends that by the age of 16 we, as humans, have been "conditioned" to ask teachers for help in learning. Before this age we are not "conditioned" to need such teachers so we take it upon ourselves to learn and interact with our environment.
The experiment was placing an internet connected computer in a poor area of India and monitoring what the slums children with the computer. Mind you, these kids do not speak English and have NEVER seen a computer before.
So the result were a bunch of kids interacting with their new environment and discovering the outside world through the internet. The most popular application on the pc was [Microsoft] Paint, for obvious reasons. Which kid doesn't like painting??
Through further research and the employment of the professor's "noninvasive" teaching method he, Sugata Mitra, is hoping to expand the scope to include hundreds of kiosks all exposing these young internet virgins to a computer.
http://www.asiaweek.com/asiaweek/technology/article/0,8707,171453,00.html
