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Please click on the following link to view the Frontline/World story about the Hole-in-the-Wall project reported by Rory O'Connor:
http://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/stories/india/
I first found out about the Hole-in-the-Wall project after reading the MacArthur Foundation's Global Competition Selects 10 Innovative Digital Media & Learning Projects to Share $1.7 Million press release and exploring their Digital Media and Learning Competition site. Wanting to find out more about it, I simply Googled 'hole in the wall project' and found a number of links including one to the PBS website listed above. For me, it was easy to find out more. All I had to do was click a few buttons. This however, is not the case for everyone. Internet access is far from universal. Encouragingly, Rory O'Connor's report shows how Dr. Sugata Mitra's Hole-in-the-Wall project is doing something about this.
Some might argue that providing children in a Dehli slum with access to clean water should be more of a priority than providing them with access to the internet through a computer in a hole in the wall. But it could also be argued that it would be elitist not to provide these children with the opportunity to develop computer literacy skills. The story shows that children in poor areas who have never had access to a computer before are capable of learning how to use the internet within hours of use and without any instruction. It also highlights that access is not just economic but cultural by showing footage of families being encouraged to send their daughters who would otherwise remain in the home to Hole-in-the-Wall sites.
The potential of this project is limitless, because as one of the young boys being interviewed in the story said, 'The internet is that with which you can do anything.'
By Shannon
By Shannon
After watching the PBS clip I think that you make some very interesting points. You mention that given the capabilities the children taught themselves to use the computer and the internet. I think that this is an important thing to remember when going into a workplace that requires teaching whether this is a primary school teacher like Shannon or a Librarian (or soon to be) like me. It is important that we provide youth with a space in which they can work on personal learning or learning amongst their peers. By doing this we are promoting the idea of lifelong learning.
ReplyDeleteLiving in a western society in a developed country we often take for granted the fact that we and youth have access to computers and the internet. During this course we have been discussing youth as a ‘digital generation.’ During this time I did not really consider that this applied mainly to youth in developed countries and not for countries like India.
I think that the point you made about access being a cultural thing was interesting. I think that the hole-in-the-wall program is trying to create new culture centred around using computers and trying to incorporate familiar culture and surroundings (eg: placing the computer in the slums in an accessible area). As this documentary was made in 2002 it would be interesting to learn how the program has developed and the successes or failures of the hole-in-the-wall project.
By Nova Watson