The Whole in the Wall Experiment

You might have heard of song -"Brick in the Wall" by Pink Floyd that eventually become anthem for children (kinda paranoia though) now here is another Experiment in contrast to this.

Do read carefully -

An Indian physicist puts a PC with a high speed internet connection in a wall in
the slums and watches what happens. Based on the results, he talks about issues
of digital divide, computer education and kids, the dynamics of the third world
getting online.
New Delhi physicist Sugata Mitra has a radical proposal for
bringing his country's next generation into the Info Age

from a Businessweek Online Daily Briefing,March 2, 2000.
Edited by Paul Judge

[Source Via - http://www.greenstar.org/butterflies/Hole-in-the-Wall.htm]

Lets get into detail -

Sugata Mitra has a PhD in physics and heads research efforts at New Delhi's NIIT, who has a passion for computer-based education, specifically for India's poor. He believes that children, even terribly poor kids with little education, can quickly teach themselves the rudiments of computer literacy. The key, he contends, is for teachers and other adults to give them free rein, so their natural curiosity takes over and they teach themselves. He calls the concept "minimally invasive education."

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.

The physicist has since installed a computer in a rural neighborhood with similar results. He's convinced that 500 million children could achieve basic computer literacy over the next five years, if the Indian government put 100,000 Net-connected PCs in schools and trained teachers in some basic "noninvasive" teaching techniques for guiding children in using them. Total investment required, he figures: Around $2 billion

On Feb. 25, BW Online Contributing Editor Thane Peterson sat down with Mitra, at NIIT's R&D center on the campus of the Indian Institute of Technology, New Delhi. Here are edited excerpts of their conversation - Read at -http://www.greenstar.org/butterflies/Hole-in-the-Wall.htm