PILOTed

Minimally Invasive Education

Let's say you had a group of impoverished kids, living on about $1.00 (US) per day, and barely literate. Could they teach themselves how to operate a computer?

In 1999, Dr. Sugata Mitra placed a computer with a high speed Internet connection in a hole in a slum wall and left it there to be used, unsupervised, by children. What do you think happened?

20,000 school principals had told Dr. Mitra that this type of experiment would yield nothing. Yet, after replicating the experiment in slums throughout India and Cambodia, reaching over 40,000 children by 2004, in 2005, Dr. Mitra received India's highest award for Innovation in Information Technology, the Dewang Mehta Award.

Yes, the children taught themselves how to use a mouse, how to click on a link, how to find web sites:

We were watching on the surveillance camera. We noticed that one child would experiment with the mouse and by trial and error discover that by pressing down on a folder, a new icon would come up. He would then tell his friends of his discovery. They would then try it out. Another one would discover something else and pass on that information, and very soon the whole group knew how it worked. The best part of this experiment was that, despite the fact that the games and links on our computer were all in English, the children figured it out. It took them a little time to grasp the links between the icons and what they could do with it. We then tried out the same experiment in Shivpuri (MP) and Madantusi (UP) to see whether the same premise held for different geographical locations and cultural backgrounds.

We underestimate kids' abilities and desire to learn. We don't necessarily have to break down lesson plans, schedule every minute, assess, and remediate. Sometimes, all we need to do is give them the opportunity to unleash their curiosity.

You can read more about the "Hole in the Wall Experiment" here. To find out the results of the study, click here.

This experiment was initially brought to my attention by the Guy Kawasaki's Signal Without Noise Blog.

Technology, kids, and teaching

Shouldn’t we know how kids are using technology if we want to reach them? If we can understand how they interact with and learn from technology, couldn’t we design better ways to teach them?

We’re not training kids to work in a factory, we’re educating them to be citizens of the 21^st century. For a 2 ½ minute, entertaining illustration, see Education Today and Tomorrow. That's also to show that Youtube does have educational value. In fact there is a group just for educators: http://www.youtube.com/group/K12.

With prepping kids for the 21st century in mind, this newsletter is focusing on three aspects of kids using technology.

First, Guy Kawasaki (venture capitalist and former “Chief Evangelist” at Apple Computer) interviewed 6 kids/young adults between 15 and 24 years old. Some interesting take-aways from the panel:

• The cell phone is king. Panelists send over 1,000 text messages a month (one sent 4,000 in one month). They rarely use land lines. They’d ideally like to use their phones for music      and the Internet as well if the cost could come down. While they all have cameras on their phones, the cameras are not used. They use messaging to communicate with friends,      email to communicate with adults.
• A prime use of the computer is social networking. They all have either MySpace or Facebook pages, or both. Rivalries are not over who has the most “friends” on the sites, but whether they are listed as one of the top 8 friends.
• None of the females do gaming. Two of the three guys play games, but they are not      interested in individual games, they find the multi-user games much more interesting, chatting with other players while playing. While they have Xbox 360’s (not Playstations), they rarely use them.
• They discount any information people tell them about predators online. It's not a concern.
• They mostly purchase online, especially for items over $20. They believe they can find better deals online and it’s more convenient. If they are not sure what to buy, they might go to a      store to look over models, but they’ll usually end up buying online.
• They all have iPods, and said that they see no reason to change, unless a device could include music, phone, messaging, and Internet. They buy 5 to 40 songs a month from iTunes, but have thousands of songs, presumably by “sharing” CD’s among friends. in fact, they've figured out how to get songs from Yahoo music onto their iPods, bypassing digital rights management.
• They only watch between 2 and 5 hours of television a week. What they watch, they watch on TIVO so they do not have to watch commercials and so they can watch on their schedule. In fact, one of the features they like best about Firefox over Internet Explorer is the ease of blocking popups and banner ads.
• They do read magazines (us, People, Wired) and they do look at advertisements      sometimes in magazines.
• When they have a research assignment for school, their first stop is Wikipedia. They are aware that Wikipedia has errors, but that does not deter them from using it as a major source. Unless a teacher tells them it cannot be used for an assigment (something regarded as grossly unfair).

The interview is an hour. You can view it at videotag or you can view Kawasaki’s summary at his blog.

Second, at Simba Information’s Voyage to Achievement conference in New York on October 19, Farimah Schuerman will host a panel of high school students discussing how they use technology for learning, both in and out of school. For more information on the conference, visit the web site at: http://www.simbanet.com/conferences/index.htm. I'll be at the conference as well, hosting a panel of school technologists on how they are using technology to improve their districts' annual yearly progress.

Third, Computers for Youth is having it’s annual Family Software Award contest. CFY is a great organization that provides computers, Internet access, training, and support to at-risk kids and their families. The software award features middle school children using the software and then teaching a panel of educators how to use and learn from the programs. It's great to see kids that feel the education system passed them gaining confidence by having the teachers and software developers listen to their feedback. The contest is a great way for startups to user-test their software.