A Hole in the Wall

When I watched this video I thanked God that in our country we have a chance to be computer literate and more or less our schools provide all the necessary conditions for the so called “Educational Technology”. The experiments that a group of people conducted in northern India really amazed me. The most interesting thing that I found from the results of their experiments was that over 300 children became computer literate in only 6 months with one computer. The thing that shocked me was that all these children, who were from the most undeveloped rural areas of Northern India, where they have no idea what a computer and Internet explorer are, they were actually browsing without anybody’s help and instructing each other in small groups. Moreover, younger children were teaching the older ones.  

So as Sugata Mitra says “learning is a self-organizing system and an educational technology and pedagogy is digital, automatic, fault-tolerant, minimally invasive, connected and self-organized”. While conducting these experiments Sugata Mitra and his group considered two issues. The first one was “remoteness”, with its two meanings: remote from urban areas, that’s to say far from the center of India, and socially and economically remote. The second issue was the quality of education. The thing that they concluded was that the remoter the school was the worse were the results, and the reason for that was that the schools in remote areas do not have good teachers and infrastructure. I also agree with S. Mitra’s idea that if children are provided with computers and they have free access to the Internet they can teach themselves all the necessary things, such as basic windows functions, browsing, painting, chatting, games, educational materials, music downloads etc.

I’d like to wrap up and say that everybody should watch this video in order to understand that learning computer skills is not a big deal. The only thing that we need to know is that “We learn by doing and not watching”.