teaching or learning
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Teaching or Learning?
The first computer kiosk was set up in 1999 in Kalkaji slum in New Delhi, India. For a number
of years Dr Gupta then Director of research at the Centre for Research in Cognitive Systems, had
been thinking about how computer-based education could serve Indias poor. He had a hunch
that poor children with little education could teach themselves the basics of computer literacy
and in doing so open a window to knowledge about the world. To test his idea he embedded a
computer with a high-speed internet connection into a wall (hence, often referred to as hole in
the wall) that divided the Institute where he and his team worked from a slum area, strewn with
rubbish and used by local street kids. He left the computer on, monitored its use remotely and
installed a video camera in a nearby tree to watch what happened. What he watched was the
ways in which the slum children who hung around in car park intuitively picked up the skills
they needed to use the machine. They self-organised and began teaching themselves what they
needed to know with unending curiosity and thirst for knowledge. The fact that the programmes
they discovered were all in English was not a problem: they learned the English they needed and
even substituted their own words for icons (such as the hourglass that indicates some kind of
loading process is taking place) when no words were indicated. Within a few days the children
who were mostly aged 6-10 and who did not attend school, had learned how to browse the Web,
play games, create documents and paint pictures See
http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2000/oct/17/itforschools.Schools5;
http://www.greenstar.org/butterflies/Hole-in-the-Wall.htm
http://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/stories/india/kids.Html;. For any parent with children of the
same age this would not now appear such a surprising result. Children seem to take to
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computers in ways that continue to surprise older generations. However the implications of this
social experiment are much more suggestive given its context.
I'm saying that, in situations where we cannot intervene very frequently, you can multiply the
effectiveness of 10 teachers by 100 - or 1,000 - fold if you give children access to the Internet....
This is a system of education where you assume that children know how to put two and two
together on their own. So you stand aside and intervene only if you see them going in a direction
that might lead into a blind alley. That's just so that you don't waste time... (Mitra, Businessweek
Online 2000)
This concept of minimal intervention suggests that children can actually teach themselves
many of the things that teachers normally assume is their job to teach. Self-directed learning
replaces teacher-centric education and frees a teachers time to support pupils in more individual,
personalised ways. The social implications of this are staggering in a world where, despite
commitments to universal primary education, some 68 million primary-school-age children are
currently not enrolled http://www.uis.unesco.Org/ . Guptas Hole in the Wall is suggestive of
the kind of radical transformation that the use of technology could bring to education. That
education can improve where there are fewer teachers, not more, is a powerful message. It is not
surprising that he was awarded the Best Social Innovation of 2000 by the British Institute for
Social Inventions nor that the ideas behind his experiment have spread. Research into hole-in-
the-wall computers, now referred to as Minimally Invasive Education Learning Stations has
continued throughout the past ten years and now centres on the ways in which the emergence and
development of group social processes aids individual learning. Much of it shows that children
learn more through interaction with others, particularly their peers, than in the more passive,
receptive activities that dominate formal schooling (Dangwal & Kapur, 2009).
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On one trip to a hole in the wall computer in India, Mitra took the experiment a step further by
asking a young girl to stand behind a group working on the computer and praise what they were
doing. He calculated that they achieved 25% more with this positive praise/feedback. The idea of
showing off your abilities to an empathetic other, Mitra suggested, was like demonstrating your
skills to your Grannie and your Grannie responding, 'that's amazing. I couldn't have done that at
your age'.
That insight led to the recruitment of over 200 volunteers in the UK who connect once a week to
schools in India via Skype. Their task is to encourage and praise the achievements of the
youngsters they interact with. It's a coaching and feedback mechanism that integrates with the
youngster's schooling and which is designed to provide a boost to learning. Whilst not all of the
volunteers are grannies, the initiative is known after its method 'The Granny Cloud'.
Mitra further fine-tuned his experiments in Gateshead where he worked with 32 children and
asked them to work in groups of four using one computer per group. They could change groups,
wander between groups and even peer over the shoulder at a groups work and take it back to
their group and claim it as theirs. He then gave the groups six GCSE questions to answer. They
used everything they could including Google, Newsgroups, Wikipedia, and Ask Jeeves. The
quickest group answered the questions in twenty minutes and the slowest in forty-five. The
average score achieved was 76%. The classroom teacher of the groups Mitra was working with
was suspicious that what the children had achieved was fingertip knowledge, discovering
information which would subsequently be lost. In order to test the hypothesis that no deep
learning had taken place during the task, Mitra tested the students with an paper-based exam two
months later in which no computers nor collaboration was allowed. They scored 76%.