Sugata Mitra has a PhD in physics and heads research at NIIT in New Delhi, but his passion is for “minimally invasive” education for poor children.
To test his ideas, he launched 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.
With access to a computer and the Internet, the children become functionally literate in a subset of English:
At first, I made a Hindi interface for the kids, which gave them links for hooking up with Web sites in their own language. I thought it would be a great hit. Guess what they did with it? They shut it down and went back to Internet Explorer. I realized that they may not understand the dictionary meaning of [English] words, but they have an operational understanding. They know what that word does. They don’t know how to pronounce F-I-L-E, but they know that within it are options of saving and opening up files …The fact that the Internet is in English will not stop them from accessing it.
They invent their own terminology for what’s going on. For example, they call the pointer of the mouse sui, which is Hindi for needle. More interesting is the hourglass that appears when something is happening. Most Indians have never heard of an hourglass. I asked them, “What does that mean?” They said, “It’s a damru,” which is Hindi for Shiva’s drum. [The God] Shiva holds an hourglass-shaped drum in his hand that you can shake from side to side. So they said the sui became a damru when the “thing” [the computer] was doing something.