What rules you need to follow to create a MIE?

These are excerpts from i4donline.net Centre for Science, Development & Media Studies

A set of guidelines have been developed that enables educators to set up their own MIE kiosk facilities. These include:

General instructions

• Site selection
• Architectural plans
• Purchases required including proprietary pointing and remote sensing hardware and software
• Electrical installation
• A portal to help children navigate to sites and applications
• Downloadable utilities
• Downloadable games
• Educational tests and remote sensing data analysis tools
• Legal and safety related issues

Based on the experience and data gathered over the last four years, it can be argued that such “playground” access points should be a part of every primary school. Where primary schools are not available, such facilities could provide even more vital “emergency” educational inputs. MIE for children through public Internet kiosks should form an integral part of primary education in the 21st century. It has the potential to not only close the “digital divide” rapidly, but also to unlock the creative potential for self-development of children that eminent educationists have sought to do for over a century.

How does Minimally Invasive Education work?

These are excerpts from i4donline.org....

How does it work?Learning process in a Minimally Invasive Environment (MIE)Certain common observations from the experiments reported above, suggest the following learning process when children self-instruct each other in computer usage:

• One child explores randomly in the user interface, others watch until an accidental discovery is made. For example, when they find that the cursor changes to a hand shape at certain places on the screen.
• Several children repeat the discovery for themselves by requesting the first child to let them do so.
• While in step 2, one or more children make more accidental or incidental discoveries.
  All the children repeat all the discoveries made and, in the process, make more discoveries and start to create a vocabulary to describe their experience.
• The vocabulary encourages them to perceive generalisations (“when you right click on a hand shaped cursor, it changes to the hourglass shape for a while and a new page comes up”).
• They memorise entire procedures for doing something, for example, how to open a painting program and retrieve a saved picture. They teach each other shorter procedures for doing the same thing, whenever one of them finds a new, shorter, procedure.
• The group divides itself into the “knows” and the “know nots”, much as they did into “haves” and “have nots” in the past. However, they realise that a child that knows will part with that knowledge in return for friendship and exchange as opposed to ownership of physical things where they could use force to get what they did not have.
• A stage is reached when no further discoveries are made and the children occupy themselves with practising what they have already learned. At this point intervention is required to introduce a new “seed” discovery (“did you know that computers can play music? Here let me play a song for you”). Usually, a spiral of discoveries follow and another self-instructional cycle begins.

What do kids learn from HiWEL experiment ?

Following are the excerpts from a research finding published in i4donline.org (Centre for Science, Development & Media Studies). Read this impressive list of learnings from MIE. Specially the behavioural changes in kids ( i am more excited about these behavioral changes that enable kids to learn well in school)..

• An estimated 100 children can learn to do most or all of the following tasks in approximately three months, using the “hole-in-wall” arrangement with a single PC:
• All windows operational functions, such as click, drag, open, close, resize, minimize, menus, navigation etc.
• Draw and paint pictures on the computer
• Load and save files
• Play games
• Run educational and other programs
• Play music and video, view photos and pictures
• Browse and surf the Internet, if a connection is available
• Set up e-mail accounts
• Send and receive e-mail
• Chat on the Internet
• Do simple troubleshooting, for example, if the speakers are not working
• Download and play streaming media
• Download games

In addition to the above task achievement, local teachers and field observers often note that the children demonstrate improvements in:

• School examinations, particularly in subjects that deal with computing skills
• English vocabulary and usage
• Concentration, attention span and problem solving
• Working together and self-regulation

Few Projects undertaken by HiWEL till date

Am posting this stale data since it contains projects undertaken untill 2004. Several projects have been initiated since then and are not included in the following list:

• The Shivpuri (1999) experiment- one computer in the state of Madhya Pradesh, funded by NIIT Limited
• The Madantusi experiment (2000)- one computer in the state of Uttar Pradesh, funded by Dr. Urvashi Sahni and NIIT Limited.
• The Madangir project (2000)- 30 computers in six locations in Delhi funded by the Government of Delhi and NIIT Limited.
• The Sindhudurg project (2001- 10 computers in five locations in the state of Maharashtra, funded by the ICICI bank and NIIT Limited.
• The IFC project (2002)- a plan for 66 computers in 22 locations spread throughout India, of which 33 computers in 11 locations are currently functional, funded by the IFC and NIIT Limited.
• The Alexandria project (2003)- a plan for 90 computers in 30 locations spread throughout Alexandria, Egypt. The first kiosk is scheduled to be opened on October 12, 2003. The project is funded by the Bibliotheca Alexandrina.
• The Cambodia project (2003)- a plan for 10 computers in 5 locations in Cambodia. A gift from the Prime Minister of India to the Cambodian government. The project is funded by the Indian Council for Cultural Relations (ICCR), Government of India

10 line limit....

I pledge not to go beyond 10 lines in one post.....
and a beginning with two liner is as good as it gets

How is Hole-in-the-wall different from Computer aided learning(CAL) efforts of Gov,NGOs & private sector

As usual, unless i get a hang of basic questions, i feel uncomfortable about the thing.

and this is one of those basic questions buzzing in my mind now. Not that i have no idea about it but need to crystalize my thoughts a lot on it. I guess understanding CAL more would certainly help.

for one, CAL is a teacher-assisted learning program which precludes some of the basic outcomes of HITW like self learning, fun, working in team, leadership traits, invoking the curiosity of children etc. So although CAL and HITW both in the end train kids in using computers and internet, the means of doing that are quite different. I think, the HITW doesnot really aim at computer training. Computer training is just incidental outcome. The gains from HITW interventions actually happen in the overall development and accelerated learning capacity of kids.
Secondly, carrying on from first argument, since CAL requires teaching computers in a controlled and teacher assisted environment, given that teachers are reulctant to move in to rural areasm I am not sure about its scalability into deep rural pockets. HITW on the other hand, can reach the deepmost area since it is minimally invasive and completely unassisted program.