"Minimally invasive education"

If he knew anything about homeschooling, he'd call it unschooling. :-)

Interesting article about an experiment here:

http://www.greenstar.org/butterflies/Hole-in-the-Wall.htm

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 imbedded 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.

Fascinating! And just as many of us find with our own children, sometimes they needed a little push in the right direction:

But we also found that they would tend to plateau out. They would surf the Web -- Disney.com is very popular with them because they like games. And they would use [Microsoft] Paint. It's very, very popular with all of them.

Because these are deprived children who do not have easy access to paper and paint. Every child likes to paint, so they would do it with that program. However, that's all they could do. So I intervened, and I played an MP3 [digital-music file] for them. They were astonished to hear music come out of the computer for the first time. They said, "Oh, does it work like a TV or radio?" I said, in keeping with my approach, "Well, I know how to get there but I don't know how it works." Then I [left].

As I would have expected, seven days later they could have taught me a few things about MP3. They had discovered what MP3 was, downloaded free players, and were playing their favorite songs. As usual, they didn't know what any of it was called. But they would say, "if you take this little box, and you drag this file into this box, it plays music." They had found out where all the Hindi music was on the Web and had pulled it out.

I love this idea! And people think kids won't learn anything if we don't make them.....

posted by Homeschool Help Web at 8:36 AM |