What would happen if you gave a computer to a group of under-educated kids who had never seen one before? Answer: they would figure out how to use it, all by themselves. Immediately. This is the surprising result of what has come to be known as “the hole in the wall experiment,” conducted by computer scientist, Dr. Sugata Mitra. Dr. Mitra put a computer with internet access in a hole in the wall outside his New Dehli office. According to an article in FRONTLINE/World, “He wanted to see who, if anyone, might use it. To his delight, curious children were immediately attracted to the strange new machine.” All of these children lived in the surrounding slum and had never seen a computer before. However, “Within minutes, children figured out how to point and click. By the end of the day they were browsing. “Given access and opportunity,” observes O’Connor, “the children quickly taught themselves the rudiments of computer literacy.”
The children even developed their own names and associations for the computer icons “They don’t call a cursor a cursor, they call it a sui, which is Hindi for needle. And they don’t call the hourglass symbol the hourglass because they’ve never seen an hourglass before. They call it the damru, which is Shiva’s drum, and it does look a bit like that.”
But the slums of New Dehli are not unique, priviledged kids are also enthusiastic about computers. According to a recent report called “Born to Be Wired”. teens and young adults spend more time using interactive technology than they do watching television. This could mean that are ready for a more interactive and self-guided experience in the classroom. Wise use of media in the curriculum should find ways to exploit this new hunger and allow kids to participate in ways we couldn’t imagine in the past. Jonathan Schwartz, CEO of Sun Microsystems, is calling this “The Participation Age,” a new paradigm for collaborative content creation that seems destined to influence our top-down educational system. The question of how to teach media literacy to kids who seem to grasp these principles intuitively and instantaneously, seems answerable only with a paradigm shift in educational models. Perhaps educators should become more like guides or support persons, providing educational resources and mentor-like advice, empowering kids to engage in self-motivated learning experiences.