Dr Nic

I’ve lived in India and one thing is immediately apparent: they’ve got more people than you do. And most of them are poor, by our standards. Poor people don’t get to use computers, do they?

One very interesting experiment showed what happens when you install computers connected to the Internet in “holes in the wall”, and observed what they did. The article is an interview with the man who setup the experiment, and covers subsequent experiments he ran, such as “Can year 9 students answer questions from the year 10 exam if you give them 2 hours and the internet?”

It leads the introduction of the term “minimally invasive education”. For the most part, this is just how you learnt Ruby, Javascript or anything else since you left school. I bet you are a better student now than you were then too. That’s not the case for most adults – see the last quote below.

It is a fascinating article on learning, on how children learn, and on the consequences of 1.2 billions Indians “going online”.

Interesting quotes

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.

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?”

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.” … They answered all five questions in two hours.

What is important is infrastructure and access … The teacher’s job is very simple. It’s to help the children ask the right questions.

you can multiply the effectiveness of 10 teachers by 100 – or 1,000 – fold if you give children access to the Internet.

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.

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.