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Prof Embeds PCs in Walls to Educate Delhi Street Kids

by Amar Toor on July 20, 2010 at 11:05 AM

children in slum using a computerIn 1999, Professor Sugata Mitra was working for a software company in Delhi, at an office building surrounded by one of India's infamous slums. The children populating the slum, needless to say, were mired in poverty, and hardly spent any time in school, much less in front of a computer. That didn't stop Mitra, though, from embedding computers on the walls of his office building, and exposing Delhi's poorest children to the wonders of technology. Much to his delight, the kids quickly learned how to navigate their way around the computers and the Internet, often by teaching each other. Inspired, Mitra embarked on a decade-long, global experiment that may end up revolutionizing the way officials approach education -- in developing and developed countries, alike.

As the BBC reports, Mitra soon expanded his research to different regions of India and, eventually, to entirely different countries. In the Indian state of Rajasthan, a group of children taught themselves how to record and play music on a computer within just four hours of its arrival at their village. The professor found similar results in disparate social contexts like Cambodia, the U.K. and Italy. "At the end of it we concluded that groups of children can learn to use computers on their own irrespective of who or where they are," Mitra explained at a recent TED conference.

The researcher's findings, however, don't render classroom authority completely obsolete. Over the course of his experiments, Mitra discovered that students tend to perform better when supervised by older authority -- known as the "granny figure" -- who stands behind them and provides encouragement. Upon returning to the U.K., Mitra designed a conceptual learning space known as a Self Organised Learning Environment (SOLE), in which students are clustered into groups of four, and work together around a large computer. He explains, "It doesn't work if you give them each a computer individually."

Initiatives aimed at using technology to educate students in developing countries aren't exactly new; the non-profit organization One Laptop Per Child (OLPC), for example, has been pursuing this kind of global agenda for years. What makes Mitra's work unique, though, is that it provides a clear framework by which policymakers and educators can maximize new technology. Technological capital is certainly critical to any developing country's system of education, but with blueprints from innovative thinkers like Sugata Mitra, capital can come to life, and the globe's achievement gap can begin to narrow. [From: BBC]

Tags: cambodia, classroom, computer, computers, DevelopingCountries, DevelopingWorld, development, education, India, study, SugataMitra, teachers, teaching, top

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