Wiring the World: Kids
Using a policy of what he terms 'minimally invasive education', Sugata Mitra, the head of the Research and Development wing of NIIT, India's premier software and education company, has opened up the astounding prospect of making 500 million Indian children achieve basic computer literacy over the next five years. Mitra's 'hole-in-the-wall' experiment consisted of plugging a high-powered Pentium PC with a high-speed data connection into a wall which separates his company's grounds from waste land which poor people use as their toilet. He connected the PC to the internet, left it on and allowed any passer-by to tinker around with it. The activity on the PC was monitored by him using a remote computer and a video camera mounted in an adjacent tree. 'Within a matter of a few days, slum children had learnt how to browse the internet' [Smart Mobs]