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.
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