India's Internet Kiosks Pat Orvis | Foreign Policy Association | June 15, 2006
http://www.fpa.org/topics_info2414/topics_info_show.htm?doc_id=377316 Parents and teachers alike who doubt that children can learn on their own might want to take a page from India's Sugata Mitra and his Hole-in-the-Wall Internet education experiment. Dr. Mitra is a physicist and chief scientist with India's international software giant NIIT Limited. Open and accessible, with an inquisitive expression that belies his Ph.D. in the "Theoretical Solid State Physics of Organic Semiconductors," Mitra holds numerous awards for such Internet innovations as creating, in 1996, the first online virtual university (NIITNetVarsity). So it was no surprise in 1999, when, curious about the way children learn and searching for a means, in this country of more than 1 billion, to help bring basic education to all of its 200 million boys and girls under age 15, the physicist tried a characteristically direct approach: he embedded a kiosk housing a high-speed touch-screen computer in the wall that separates NIIT's headquarters here from New Delhi's biggest slum. Yet even Mitra was surprised that, within the first afternoon, these previously nonliterate slum children could navigate the Internet. He now believes that placing free computers where children play could bridge the gap between the 600,000 primary schools India has and the 1 million he says it needs. So he has installed more than 150 computers, with keyboards, touch mouse and web cameras, in some 50 locations from Delhi slums to points in rural India. In each location, he describes, with no supervision or instruction, the participants "play games, play music, paint, look up news sites, do Google searches, download and play audio and video, send and receive e-mail, chat and so on." At the same time, they also pick up some English from the English- language sites. They read Indian newspapers. Find film, TV and sports-related sites and even "look for jobs for their fathers," or "horoscopes for their mothers." Soon, Mitra continues, they are using Google as well to complete school work. He cites an 8-year- old, for example, who conducted research on cancer because his mother is dying from it. Mitra calls it "minimally invasive education" that has already allowed thousands of previously nonliterate boys and girls to teach themselves not only computers but also, in Mitra's words, "several pieces of primary education." From this point, continues Mitra, their teachers report "an increase in confidence and better ability to find answers." Most importantly, perhaps, these young people "are asking questions they would have not asked before they became connected." Connectivity is also a goal of the United Nations Millennium Development Goals. U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan has called for connectivity in every third world village by 2015. "The digital divide is not just digital," Annan has said. "It reflects wide disparities in freedom, in wealth, in power, and ultimately in hope for a better future." Meantime, Sugata Mitra claims that in the past five years, Hole-in- the-Wall participants have been tested in controlled studies and passed the government board examination with no other assistance, with the results documented in scholarly journals like the Australasian Journal of Educational Technology. He also notes that Hole-in-the-Wall has awakened new aspirations in some participants, who have gone on to take computer courses that prepare them for high-tech careers. Many have changed their goals from, say, rickshaw driver to engineer, as the physicist puts it, or from clerk to teacher, and most now want to go to college. He gives the example of one girl (girls being regularly overlooked by education throughout South Asia) who decided, from her experience with Hole-in-the-Wall, to become a nurse instead of a government clerk. Meantime, as a result of its success here in India, Mitra has been asked to bring Hole-in-the-Wall to Cambodia and South Africa, which means, in his words, that, altogether, it has "been verified by 40,000 of the world's poorest children." And, no matter how different the cultures (starting within India's own wide-ranging diversity), the experiment consistently shows that, as the scientist puts it, within nine months, the boys and girls achieve "the proficiency level equivalent to the skills of most modern office workers." He includes himself, the IT expert freely admits, among those critics who say that computers stuck in walls are no substitute for a classroom with a teacher. But where, he asks, are the classrooms with wonderful teachers going to come from? There are just too many people on this planet, he argues, "for the traditional model of primary education to work. We need alternatives." Mitra estimates that the number of "holes" required to serve the planet's some 1 billion children below age 15 would total a modest- sounding 50 million playground computers at a cost of $60 billion. Recurring annual costs would amount to "less than 2 cents per child per day." "We surely can learn from this how children can learn with the support of one another," wrote American Bobbie McGarey of Duncan, Oklahoma, in a letter to the Christian Science Monitor following its recent coverage of Hole-in-the-Wall. "At two cents per child per day we could add that to the cups of fancy coffee or the coke we buy daily and help so many be given the gift of literacy and hope." Pat Orvis has been a United Nations correspondent since 1982, when she first visited India. She can be reached at [EMAIL PROTECTED] ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~--> See what's inside the new Yahoo! Groups email. http://us.click.yahoo.com/si.u7A/bOaOAA/Zx0JAA/uTGrlB/TM --------------------------------------------------------------------~-> -- This is ZESTGlobal. Post articles on international affairs to [email protected] If you got this mail as a forward, subscribe to ZESTGlobal by sending a blank mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] OR, if you have a Yahoo! ID, by visiting http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ZESTGlobal/join/ Yahoo! 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