Lessons from an Indian village

Lessons from an Indian village

INTERVIEW SUGATA MITRA: The advocate of computer-based education believes computer skills can be picked up by anyone, anywhere, writes Fiona Harvey

Financial Times (July 13, 2001)
By FIONA HARVEY

Agroup of children crowd around a small, dusty concrete structure in a village in the heart of rural India. They chatter and gesticulate, pointing to the screen embedded in the wall and the keyboard and mouse below. They probably do not know it but they are part of a wide-reaching experiment into education, computers and development.

Dr Sugata Mitra put up his first kiosk, containing a personal computer with an internet connection, in the middle of Delhi 2 1/2 years ago. Street children immediately took to the machines and, through their own curiousity and intelligence, learnt to become proficient. Since then, he has put up 29 more in various locations.

Dr Mitra is as much a proselytiser as a researcher. He would like to think that his experiments hold lessons for technology evangelists who want to spread PC usage and for governments that want to train their workforces in essential skills. Perhaps they also hold lessons for developing countries.

Because he is using computers, Dr Mitra can gather his data direct. While the children play with their new toy, their activities are monitored (unbeknown to them) from Dr Mitra's New Delhi office, where he works as vice-president of the Centre for Research in Cognitive Systems at NIIT, one of India's biggest information technology companies, specialising in training systems.

"Children are able to teach themselves computing on their own," says Dr Mitra with enthusiasm. Astonishingly, although the child-ren at that first kiosk had never seen a computer in their lives, they started surfing the internet within only eight minutes.

Children's natural curiosity and eagerness serve them well when confronted with an unfamiliar object such as a PC. All Dr Mitra's kiosks have proved popular and children who may not have been able to read or write managed to grasp the techniques of web surfing. They even coped with a foreign language: all the PCs Dr Mitra has erected use Windows in English but most of the children speak nothing but Hindi.

Learning in this way is also a social experience for children that creates a virtuous circle. Children learn much faster in groups, Dr Mitra believes, because they mimic one another, spur one another on and pool their learning. As soon as one child has discovered something new, that knowledge spreads to the rest and the enjoyment is enhanced.

He explains: "When you observe a single child, that child may repeatedly do the same task, such as playing a game, until they get bored and go away and say they're not into computing. But when you have a group of people, they change - and one says: 'let's play a different game' and so they do, and so on."

And the acquisition of knowledge provides a framework for a healthy pattern of social inter-action. Dr Mitra goes on: "Knowledge can be shared: if I have it, you can have it too - but you can't get it from me by bullying me. You have to make friends with me, ask me please to tell you and I will share it with you."

Shy children who were reluctant to put themselves forward were not left out. Girls, Dr Mitra notes, took on an organising role, throwing off children who had been playing with the machine for a long time and replacing them with quieter ones who had not yet had a turn.

The children who gathered round the machines showed how potent this kind of unstructured learning can be. Perhaps the greatest feat came from the group at one kiosk who discovered and disabled the piece of software that Dr Mitra had installed on the machine so as to monitor their activity and relay it back to him. They sent him a message (in Hindi) that read: "We have found and closed the thing you watch us with."

Dr Mitra beams. "It made me so happy! I don't think (as a teacher) you can have a greater reward than to have a child beat you at your own game."

Another group managed to find and download from the internet a graphic equaliser program that they used to improve the quality of the sound of music files that they also found and played over the PC's little speakers. "That was very non-intuitive," says Dr Mitra.

That children can so quickly pick up the basics of computer literacy belies the fear that many people feel towards PCs. Computer companies themselves do little to dispel the anxiety: the latest user manual for Windows, for instance, runs to well over a hundred pages, enough to put most people off. But Dr Mitra's children managed without any outside instruction.

Dr Mitra thinks this has implications for teaching. "There is a global shortage of teachers. For developing countries, it is very important to increase the productivity of the teachers that we have," he explains. The current method of education, in which a teacher stands at the top of a classroom and instructs a group of pupils, has been the norm since the days of Plato, he says. But with new technology, it need not be so.

"I would guess that children could have acquired up to 30 per cent of the curriculum on their own if they were motivated to do so," Dr Mitra contends. He calls his ideas "minimally invasive education". Perhaps, if communities in developing nations were given computers and internet connections, they might be left to cultivate computer literacy for themselves. Having acquired these skills, they could look for a way to use them to emerge from poverty.

It may come as a surprise to cynics that in every case where a computer has been supplied by Dr Mitra, it has remained safe from vandalism or theft. The only damage has been from the normal wear and tear of many people using the equipment.

Dr Mitra's experiment continues. He hopes to have 100 machines in use around India by the end of the year. Some of these will be funded by NIIT, which has already put up some Pounds 500,000 towards the project. For the rest, he is seeking sponsorship. But this is just the beginning.

Dr Mitra's ambition is to find a "self-organising" mechanism whereby a network of such machines will grow by itself, as people become interested in the idea, and that a way will be found to use such a network to teach not just computer basics but also other forms of education that will benefit the world's poorest people, who have so far been left on the wrong side of the "digital divide".