Minimally Invasive Education

The story starts like this:

"Sugata Mitra has a PhD in physics and heads research efforts at New Delhi's NIIT, a fast-growing software and education company with sales of more than $200 million... But Mitra's passion is computer-based education, specifically for India's poor. He believes that children, even terribly poor kids with little education, can quickly teach themselves the rudiments of computer literacy. The key, he contends, is for teachers and other adults to give them free rein, so their natural curiosity takes over and they teach themselves. He calls the concept "minimally invasive education."

To test his ideas, Mitra 13 months ago launched something he calls 'the hole in the wall experiment.' He took a PC connected to a high-speed data connection and embedded it in a concrete wall next to NIIT's headquarters in the south end of New Delhi. The wall separates the company's grounds from a garbage-strewn empty lot used by the poor as a public bathroom. Mitra simply left the computer on, connected to the Internet, and allowed any passerby to play with it. He monitored activity on the PC using a remote computer and a video camera mounted in a nearby tree.

What he discovered was that 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. Some of the other things they learned, Mitra says, astonished him.

So we gather further evidence of the play-learning connection. Hopefully, conclusive enough evidence, at last, to help teachers brave the inevitable disapproval that comes from trying things like this, for real. Play and learning, as we so well know, are synergistic forces, and they meet evermore gracefully on today's Internet. We follow no particular texts, take no tests, get no report cards, and yet learn, by ourselves, from each other, simply by playing. Simply because it's fun.

This is hard to fit into a curriculum.

via Chris Saeger

from Bernie DeKoven, funsmith