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November 12, 1999: This message was distributed by Papyrus News, a free e-mail distribution list on the global impact of information technology on language, literacy, and education. Feel free to forward this message to others, but please include this introductory paragraph. For information on subscribing or unsubscribing to Papyrus News see http://www.lll.hawaii.edu/web/faculty/markw/papyrus-news.html.
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This article was posted by the author on the GKD (Global Knowledge for Development) listserv. For further information on GKD and its discussion list, see: <http://www.globalknowledge.org>. I'm trying to find the reference for the journal article that reported on this study (see third paragraph), but haven't tracked it down yet. I'll let you know if I find it.
Mark Warschauer
The reference is here: https://members.tripod.com/vstevens/papyrus/99nov27b.htm - Vance, Ed.
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INDIAN EXPERIMENT SHOWS HOW SLUM-KIDS SPEEDILY TAKE TO COMPUTERS
By Frederick Noronha
>From slums to cyberspace? This may seem an impossibly large gap to bridge. But Indian educationists have undertaken an experiment which showed up amazing findings about the potential of even unlettered children to take to computers.
Slum children in New Delhi taught themselves basic computer skills, and even managed to do some surfing on the Internet, after they were given access to a computer without any instructions or even a teacher.
This experiment using a "minimally invasive" approach to education brought in "both strange and wonderful" results. Its findings were recently reported in a technical journal by two educationists of the Cognitive Engineering Research Centre of a prominent Indian computer-education firm, NIIT.
The term "minimally-invasive" is incidentally borrowed from surgery! Under this experiment, a computer was kept next to a Delhi slum colony. It was housed in an outdoor kiosk, constructed in a way that it could be accessed both from the NIIT office as well as from the adjoining slum colony.
Like in any Indian slum, this one too contained a large number of children of all ages, from 0-18. Most do not go to school. None of them are particularly familiar with the English language.
In spite of this, the slum kids took to the computer like a fish to water. They began experimenting with various applications, and switching from one website to another. Children invented their own vocabulary to describe some aspects of the working of the computer. They also formed impromptu classes to teach one another.
Surprised researchers reported back: "Children (who are mostly unlettered) learnt basic operations of the computer for browsing and drawing within a few days...."
They also said that within a month of interaction, children were able to discover and use features such as new-folder creation, cutting and pasting, shortcuts, moving/resizing windows and using MS Word to create short messages even without a keyboard."
Initially, the slumdwellers did not have a clue as to what was the purpose of the computer-kiosk, built into the wall of the NIIT. "I don't think they quite understood what we wanted to do. As long as it did not take up their space, they did not really care," commented the researchers, Sugata Mitra and Vivek Rana.
There was quite a lot of enthusiasm. They wanted to know what it was, why it was being put up there. "Most of the kids thought it was a video game being put up for free," reported the researchers. Some questions they asked included: "Is it a video game? What is a computer? How will we be benefited? But we don't know how to operate the computer!!!"
Elders wanted to know who would take care of the computer.
None of the questions were answered with any instructional sentence. "We gave general answers such as, 'It is a fun machine,'" reported the researchers.
Initially, the computer, which had access to the Internet through a dedicated 2 Mbps connection, was linked to the Altavista (http://www.altavista.com) site on the Internet. At the start, keyboard access was not given. No instructions were given either; the only exception being the final testing of the system with the 'touch pad', or the pointing device provided. This instruction too was not given deliberately.
Early users were the little boys from the slum colony, in the 6- 12 age group. They just fiddled around with the touch pad, and found it interesting.
Next, they perhaps accidentally learnt how to click from the touch pad itself. After that, they found they could relate to the concept of 'channels'. From a video camera spying down on the experiment from a nearby tree, it was found that they children were prompting one another: "Go to channels... there must be TV".
In a few hours, they learnt to manipulate and click the mouse.
Enthusiasm stayed high, and in the next two or three days, the kids were trying to open the 'Start Menu', opening new windows, opening the 'My Computer' from the desktop, opening other applications. From a distance, through the video camera, the educationists kept a close watch on what the children were doing. This project was launched in earlier this year.
Barely a week after launching the experiment in end-January 1999, the slum kids found a teacher of their own! Sanjay Chowdhary is a second year Bachelor of Arts student, who has done a basic course in computer from India's open university, IGNOU.
Reported the researchers: "Since he is the only one who knows computers in the colony, all kids give him great respect. He has been found teaching them how to operate the touch pad (the pointing device). It must be realised that the 'intervention' here is situational. The children found the best resource they could."
Within ten days, the mostly-unlettered kids learnt to shut down the computer. In a fortnight's time, the researchers found themselves removing hundreds of 'shortcuts' from the desktop. "This shows that someone is really finding it interesting to create these shortcuts," said Mitra and Rana, reporting their findings in the journal of the Computer Society of India, a professional body.
The kids started shifting to sites like disneyblast.com and MTVonline. They tried out applications like the calculator, paint and even chat. They could not do much with chat though, since they had not been provided the keyboard.
When the researchers asked the people for their comments on the new addition in the form of the computer, the women were skeptical. "Yeh daal-roti dega kya? (Will this give us food?)" they asked. Attempts to persuade the women to use the computer came up against a wall.
Within a fortnight, the researchers found clock.exe (the clock) running on the desktop. Many new folders were found created on the desktop. "This could be the handywork of a school student, or a group of them,who have learned to create a new folder, and are enjoying it," commented the researchers.
Someone changed the start-up screen for the WinNT computer. In under a month of playing around with the computer, someone actually learnt maximising and minimising windows. They soon figured out how to change the wallpaper sitting, and that one can change the wallpaper to any Internet picture.
One site of a North Indian Hindi newspaper, http://www.naidunia.com, evoked some interest as the 10-12 year old children wanted to see their horoscope for the day. But some others were more keen on using the Paint application.
Lessons learnt from this experiment are interesting. It shows that it is not just middle-class children from urban areas of the Third World who are able to self-instruct and obtain help from the environment when required. So, it might be incorrect for just urban Indian parents to marvel at the speed with which their children are able to master the computer, once given access.
"Once available, the computer-kiosk was used immediately by children, aged about 5 to 16 years old. These children had a very limited understanding of the English alphabet and could not speak the language," noted Mitra and Rana.
These children also 'invented' their own vocabulary to define terms on the computer. For example, they used terms like 'sui' (needle) for the cursor, 'channels' for websites and 'kaam kar raha hai (it's working) for the hourglass or busy symbol.
Soon, the slum kids were strongly opposed to the idea of removing the kiosk. Parents felt that while they could not learn the operation of the kiosk, or did not see its need, they felt it was very good for the children.
"It is imperative to repeat such experiments in other locations before one can generalise from these observations or come to any conclusion regarding the educational benefits of such a non- invasive method," the researchers cautioned.
Steps would be needed to also design PC kiosks that can operate outdoors in tropical countries. Wireless connectivity to the Internet would need to be devised for kiosks in areas not physically close to organisations with Internet access.
But they used this experiment to suggest that it might be possible to question the apprehensions from academicians and others "that the ability to access and the quality of training provided will hinder the use of the Internet in the (Indian) subcontinent".
"We have found people (on the subcontinent) questioning the utility of the schemes that rely on the Internet. (On the grounds that) there are too few people in the region who have access," they point out. In their view, this may not be a good argument.
To stress their point, the researchers point to the widespread impact of films, in a region where most people don't have sufficient resources for their daily meals. Yet they patronise cinema in a big way. India produces the largest number of films in the world.
Mitra and Rana point out that the cost of acquiring a personal computer and an Internet connection at home is around Rs 70,000 (US$ 1600). Recurring yearly phone bills would come to Rs 10,000 (US$235) a year. "In a country where the average annual income is about Rs 6000, these amounts are not small," they point out.
Other experiments in South Asia have also been reported on. One experiment was carried out in unsupervised learning of computers.
In the village of Udang of West Bengal, Mamar Mukhopadhyay and his team placed a few computers in a rural school. Children were allowed to use them after minimal instructions. Word processing, spreadsheets and database management systems were readily learnt by both teachers and students, who then went on to create a rural resources and healthcare database.
They conceded that several more experiments would be needed in different areas to "investigate whether self-learning will occur uniformly among disadvantaged children" before wider conclusions can be reached. But, they said, it was shown to be possible to design PC-kiosks that can operate outdoors in tropical climates. Such kiosks would need to be protected against heat, temperature, dust, humidity and possible vandalism, of course.
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