sociological fieldwork involving leaving sex dolls in public parks:
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
One big difference between the way kids and adults use computers is that kids are not afraid of breaking them. Adults worry about experimenting too much, because they don’t want to break it. I don’t think it’s so much the money as it is the embarrassment of having everyone find out how ignorant they are.
My parents got a computer about two years ago, and all they have learned to do with it is play solitaire. My 10 and 5 yr old kids, though, will go anywhere and do anything they want on the computer, because the prospect of destroying the hard drive holds no terror for them. They are used to having people know how ignorant they are, and it doesn’t bother them.
It would seem that my definition of fascinating is the polar opposite of yours.
Refrersh my memory. Which of my experiments is this companion to?
‘Cause it wasn’t me that left all those nekkid Barbie dolls next to the state highway. Those belong to the people who own that land.
And they were already nekkid when I got there.
I swear.
DAMN YOU WITHELD!!!1!!1!!!
*lifts eyebrow*
Fascinating.
Oh, what, now evertime you typo its all of sudden its my fault? I don’t think so.
Writing dialogue for you in those fiction posts has warped my internal spellcheck. Possibly forever.
I don’t know about fascinating, but it was interesting.
Well, that’s because of you don’t do it right, numchuks. You have to ease your fat foot off the mispells, and just kind of relax your kundalinies (preferably if you can, vibrating).
If it was all just typo typo typo, any purple-butt macaca can do that. Its more of a freedom state of being/mind (spiritualty).
Aslo, porgessive.
Ardsgaine: Here’s a good Proverb for you:
Proverbs 13:18 (KJV)
Like we had discussed in S.Kaufman’s thread, the rudimentaries of understanding do not require a teacher other than nature. Because, children accept instruction (partly because they may not yet have an understanding of pride or shame) they can be instructed. He who does not accept instruction can’t be instructed.
The most important and basic things are understood not through careful classification and terminology, but through action and the natural response of the system (whether it be the world, or the computer in this case) to the person. Create an evironment that is safe to learn in, and the learning comes of its own. When the student is ready, then the master appears.
Its the same thing that wise people have been saying in basically every successful civilization since the dawn of time.
Its funny, I have heard that the current scheme of learning- the pedagogue with his regiment of well disciplined learners – came out of India. It seems that the thing to undo this madness will come out of India as well (or could, anyway.)
The way I learn a computer program? I just use it. If I can’t figure something out, then I consult the manual or the internet or someone else. If I already have rudimentary knowledge, then I can use the manual to enhance my understanding. The manual itself cannot make you DO, so therefore, in this sense, it cannot make you learn.
The most effective instructions that we give on our websites are instructions that more or less, make the person take actions instead of explaining everything to them before hand.
Woe to he who is swamped in the terminology so much, that he finds the constructs (terms) more important than the actual understandings. Of course, for some it is just a power play.
Our business, the information business, is tailored to the hordes of people who believe they need an instructor for anything and everything. Of course, the business would still exist even without this blindness; it would just look different. Why? Because nothing beats having someone who can tell you an excellent next step, and save you hordes of time and research in going beyond the basics.
He makes a neat point, in my book– you need the proper environment for the learning to occur- one thing parents are supposed to do with their kids is to create a safe environment for them to learn in. You teach the kid the words for things AFTER he knows what they do, more or less; not because the name is more important than the thing, but because without the common name, he can’t communicate information about the thing to someone else. Also, knowing the function and feel of the thing creates a foundation to which the word/meaning of it can stick.
You might know how a ball works, but how can you tell someone to go get the ball if you both don’t share the same word for the object?
Ramblings from the mind of RC…
Feel free to add whatever ya want. Thanks as always, Dan, for the good article linky.
Witheld: All of my posts are freebloggin’… at least at first. I don’t write an outline, and I usually don’t spellcheck. Where it drops from there is, I look over it after having written it. If it is too snarky, I say, “Wow, dude, you’ve got issues.” And rewrite the whole thing.
This post was too! Dunno what I was supposed to be covering, I’m just a good speller and typer (I was top o’ my class!)
TW: physical? What dictionary is this connected to?
From the article:
Wow, open public latrine right next to the headquarters of “a fast-growing software and education company with sales of more than $200 million and a market cap over $2 billion.”
It’s that kind of ambience that makes India such an attractive place to outsource IT jobs.
…kids are not afraid of breaking them.
Kids are also not afraid of spyware, viruses, or accidentally giving their credit card numbers to hotcongressionalpages.com.
[enter recursive mode]
[/recursive mode]
This is part of what he did, I’m sure. He talks about his concern about giving them email.
Thankyou for sharing, RC. It appears we have more in common than I would of thought! Even my secret
nickname for myslef is the same as: “dude.”
Yeah, that just slipped out. I didn’t even realise I wrote it. That’s the beauty of it, ain’ it!?
TW: should91 … what does it meeeeeean!!?
Well, I actually agree with Dan: that is fascinating. However, as a computer professional, I feel obligated to throw somewhat of a damper on the good doctor’s enthusiasm.
What it comes down to is that computers are so amazingly dumbed down nowadays that literally any idiot in the world should be able to figure out what he considers “computer literacy”. The problem is not that it’s hard to learn to use a computer per se, but that, as Ardsgaine says, many adults just plain have a psychological block about trying things on their own, whether that be fear of embarrasment or of breaking something.
I know it’s not intelligence; I have friends and family members who are well to the high end of the academic scale but have taken years just to get comfortable with the concepts of the file system and browsing the web. And even then, they usually understand no more than a very finite set of specific, mechanical steps to get to their favorite web sites or find certain files; it’s definitely not an internalized, second-nature type skill set like it is for people under 35 or so.
All that being said, it doesn’t change the results themselves; I just don’t think they’re anywhere near as surprising as Mitra does. And either way, his broad conclusion that kids can teach themselves computers seems very sound, and I like his idea for distributing computers, at least on paper. Unfortunately, it’s probably not practical for a country like India quite yet, though.
Unless he’s surprised to discover that what is true for US kids is true for kids in India, as well.
It is interesting to see how the learning works though. Not every kid has to discover every function of the computer. They teach each other. They’re like a scientific community in miniature, sharing their discoveries with each other.
Ards: its the method used in old American Schoolhouses… the teacher keeps the place rolling, but the learning is done by the students, teaching each other, particularly the older students teaching the younger.
Back when teachers were little more than servants…
(now they are professionals and we can hardly learn to read… I wonder if there is a connection?
)
Hmm. I dunno, RC. The notion of turning the kids loose to learn on their own is actually popular amongst the porgressives. I see it a lot in homeschooling circles. It’s called unschooling, or no-schooling.
I take a more structured approach, because I think that the important subjects require teacher direction. Students aren’t going to learn grammar on their own. Even assuming they are motivated to write, which my daughter is, how are they going to self-correct? The computer is a physical reality that they can interact with, and it provides the rewards and corrections to channel them in the right direction. The same thing doesn’t exist in grammar.
That’s not saying that grammar is just a bunch of arbitrary rules–I don’t believe it is–but reality doesn’t provide immediate feedback for poor grammar. That comes later when the child’s brain is so crippled by poor grammatical structure that he can’t think logically.
I did not have some teachers for my grammer, its just naturally the way I talk/type.
Hey, Ards. Kinda’ surprised to hear you talking about grammar this way, actually. Given your participation on the agnosticism thread, I figured you for more of a Stephen Pinker type.
In any case, I think you’re way off on grammar. There are two kinds of grammar: One is learned naturally, requires no teacher beyond a community of speakers, and is as logical as it needs to be. Every human being on the planet who does not have some mental handicap is able to use this kind rather expertly well before they reach maturity. Even teenagers. (Disclaimer; just because the grammar is logical does not mean that it will be used logically in all cases.)
The other is nothing but arbitrary bunch of rules, requires many a teacher to drill it into you, is often illogical as hell, won’t help you think any better at all, and may—in fact—confuse the bejeezus out of you. This is the kind required on term papers and taught in schools.