Surya, Great links! Thanks a lot for bringing both of those projects to my attention...I had never heard of the first and only vaguely heard of the second as a movie I should see when I have some free time.
While I'm very happy to learn about these projects, I still have a problem with the idea that children can learn to repair these machines themselves. It appears I was wrong, and children *can* figure out trackpads and mice on their own. However, the hole in the wall project is a great example in one regard; an "expert" with technology was responsible for the installation. Presumably, if something goes wrong with the machine, he's the one who make sure it gets fixed. This is infrastructure; the project is being backed by someone local (the computer is in the wall of his office) who has the expertise to both install / setup the project and maintain it as necessary. While I may be wrong about children teaching themselves the technology, I'm not so sure that I'm wrong about the support. How many of the members of this list, right now, are using laptops? I'd guess a fair number of us are. How many of us could take that laptop apart and replace a hard drive? This is a very basic repair, and fairly simple on a desktop, yet I'd guess a very large number of us would not do it for our laptops, preferring instead to send it in for warranty service or have a tech do it. I've been messing around with computers for years...just long enough to know that if my desktop's CRT goes out, I replace it instead of trying to open it, because an unplugged CRT monitor (like a TV) will hold a charge powerful enough to electrocute me several years after being unplugged. Someone I work with recently had the screen go out on his laptop. He's a technologist with many more years of experience than me working as a technology advocate, bridging the digital divide. He sent the laptop in for Dell to repair, since neither he nor I wanted to tackle an LCD screen replacement ourselves. My own laptop has been unusable for several months since the power connector is dead. Even though I *am* able to upgrade my own RAM and processor, change my hard drives, etc...I still can't change that power board myself, because I'd need to solder the power connector onto the power board. I don't have a soldering iron; I'd imagine that the kids using these laptops won't have one either. TVs and cellular phones are also parallel examples; while a great many of the poorest communities now have televisions, and many are coming into contact with cellular phones, I am not under the impression that many of these people are repairing their own hardware. Similarly, the hole in the wall project doesn't tell us what happens if one of the computers gets a virus, or is misconfigured and can no longer access the internet. What we can learn from the small scale hole in the wall project is that, with a technology infrastructure in place, unstructured learning can take place with surprising results. However, this is not an argument for completely unstructured learning, and nor is it a justification for attempting the same thing without that infrastructure in place. Dave. ------------------- Dave A. Chakrabarti Projects Coordinator CTCNet Chicago [EMAIL PROTECTED] (708) 919 1026 ------------------- Surya Ganguly wrote: >> I've never seen a piece >> of hardware so simple that a child in a third world >> nation (who is completely digitally illiterate) >> could intuitively repair. A child who >> has never seen a laptop before cannot intuitively >> use a mouse/trackpad. > > I have! > > http://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/stories/india/ > > Here's another. > > http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0388789/ > > Just two of many examples of well-designed, self-directed learning > environments overcoming the need for structured training, in the > process, defining new learning paradigms. As the teacher of a > technology workforce development program in New York City, I > quickly learned that students learnt faster than I could teach, if > I left them alone and set up interesting problems for them to > solve. > > -SG > > > _______________________________________________ > DIGITALDIVIDE mailing list > DIGITALDIVIDE@mailman.edc.org > http://mailman.edc.org/mailman/listinfo/digitaldivide > To unsubscribe, send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word UNSUBSCRIBE > in the body of the message. > _______________________________________________ DIGITALDIVIDE mailing list DIGITALDIVIDE@mailman.edc.org http://mailman.edc.org/mailman/listinfo/digitaldivide To unsubscribe, send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word UNSUBSCRIBE in the body of the message.
