Some of you who knows me personally are aware that I am extremely crazy about bringing basic services to Rural India (I do have a personal blog in this regard). One of such services is Quality Education.
What causes learning?Â
First of all, learning initiation happens through the exposure. For example, if I am watching a movie wherein someone traveling by flight then I may learn about how a flight looks like or even the feeling of journey in a flight. But then I get exposed to a variety of stuff every day. Do I learn all of those? The answer is ‘No’. I learn only few things which I am curious about. Depending on ‘how much curious I am’ about a particular thing, that much I learn about it. So, it is very clear to see that if we are interested in something then we would learn quicker and deeper. Moreover, interest makes our learning much more enjoyable.
How to identify a child’s interest?
How can we understand what the child’s interests are? If we can figure this out then we can encourage the kids in those stuff. We can even personalize the teaching content to each child. For a long time, I have been thinking about this. Recently I could get the answer for this interesting question. If you interact with any child for sometime, whenever he observes some stuff (interesting to him) he starts asking questions. As you answer he would ask more and more. Most parents and/or teachers discourage this process as they get disturbed frequently or if they don’t have answers. Actually asking questions shows his interest on that particular object/thing.
What a child needs to learn at minimum in order to succeed in this digital world?
Atanu has written a detailed post on this topic. Let me reemphasize it. Digital world is full of information (currently it is in the magnitude of petabytes) and it is much much more than any individual can consume. This means, child need not learn whole text-books that are available to him rather he should learn few concepts that are interesting to him. In particular the child must learn how to construct such concepts on his own. Here, technology/schools/parents/friends/etc may help in filtering the petabytes of information and provide qualitative information which suits his requirements. In order to utilize this aid effectively, at the fundamental outset, he must be skilled in “reading, writing, logic or arithmetic and ‘how to learn'”.
 How to train a child to learn on his own?
We have a private school of 700 children (Sarojini Vidyalayam) in a rural village near Guntur (Andhra Pradesh, India) and experimenting this process in the following manner. Every week we have one specific day called “FUN-DAY”. On this day, we conduct some interesting stuff to entertain children. One of such thing is called “Question Hour”. In order to attend this class, each child is expected to bring a note (Doubts book) wherein he mentions his doubts those came into his mind during the week. These doubts could be anything like, why sky is blue? or  why don’t fan falls down? or why is air invisible? etc and need not be specific to their class subjects. Now assuming the classroom containing 50 children, all are divided into 5 batches (10 students per batch). Now batch-wise, that is, 10 children are to clarify their doubts among themselves. When they can’t answer certain questions which will be written on teacher’s notebook along with the names of the students who raised those doubts. Now the class teacher answers whatever she knows and passes unanswered questions to Principal. Question hour ends with this. Then the principal arranges a “Dial an expert” hour on the next FUN-DAY. Wherein, on a speaker phone an expert answers some of those unanswered questions to the children.
The goal of this process is to make sure that children ask right questions (obvious ones are filtered out much before it comes to the expert level). Now the expert is required to give answers filled with many more questions and provide examples/reference books/programs/etc. So that the children get the answer but then they become much more inquisitive to answer those questions (of the expert) on their own by reading the reference materials. We are considering the rewarding program for the children who answers these. Yes, learning happens through practice. So why, we have created this process in order to make the children learn on their own.
Can this process be scaled to the national level?
We are piloting these concepts at our school. Once we have matured processes, we want to use technology in order to automate and scale it to the masses across India (or elsewhere). This is what I am currently working on. If anyone is interested, then write me a mail to my gmail id: malapati.
NOTES:
- Expert could be anyone who is relatively higher educated and regionally known person.
- Children (for that mater, anyone) learn by observing others or things around.
- Before inventing such system, our initial constraint was that not to disturb existing school system procedures.
- I am writing a book on Google tricks in order to help children to filter information on their own.
- Mobile as media for rural India - September 2, 2008
- Bringing constructive changes in education (or the way of learning!) - August 26, 2008
- Opportunities for service providers in education - August 24, 2008
Sugata Mitra: Can kids teach themselves?
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/sugata_mitra_shows_how_kids_teach_themselves.html
Speaking at LIFT 2007, Sugata Mitra talks about his Hole in the Wall project. Young kids in this project figured out how to use a PC on their own — and then taught other kids. He asks, what else can children teach themselves?
In 1999, Sugata Mitra and his colleagues dug a hole in a wall bordering an urban slum in New Delhi, installed an Internet-connected PC, and left it there (with a hidden camera filming the area). What they saw was kids from the slum playing around with the computer and in the process learning how to use it and how to go online, and then teaching each other.
In the following years they replicated the experiment in other parts of India, urban and rural, with similar results, challenging some of the key assumptions of formal education. The “Hole in the Wall” project demonstrates that, even in the absence of any direct input from a teacher, an environment that stimulates curiosity can cause learning through self-instruction and peer-shared knowledge. Mitra, who’s now a professor of educational technology at Newcastle University (UK), calls it “minimally invasive education.”
Great initiative, Raja.
I completely agree that the current educational system needs a revamp and we need to introduce more ‘doing’ than ‘absorbing’. We have been subject to rot learning which made school mundane and didn’t encourage thinking out-of-the-box. May be, we could use examples of teaching styles in Western schools and implement them here.
I’d be glad to help in researching techniques and adopting them to suit Indian schools.
Hi Rajashekhar
I couldn’t get your gmail id right? So writing this personal stuff in this section.
First of all I loved the idea of rural development throuogh schools.
I would like to discuss more on the same. Do mail me at nklm8485@gmail.com so that we can be in touch.
Really a cool concept and fabulous implementation. This would really bring out the interest in rural children and they will force themselves for further studies. Urban children cant dropout even if they find studies boring (thanks to parental pressure) but for rural children unless they find something to cling to studies they will dropout.
Best of luck for future progress!!
Cool idea! I have a hunch that role of videos could explored more in this context. Majority of the learners do better when the content is ‘audio-visual’ (a teacher’s involvement is preferred to mere reading of textbooks). I have found innumerable videos on Youtube, which would have made my school-level learning so much more meaningful, if I had got them then. In your model, I wonder, whether at Principal’s level, Youtube could be introduced. So during the next Question Hour, the Principal could show some short relevant videos after the expert’s talk. (I don’t know about others, but I would have highly excited in my 5-6th standards, if I were told there is going to be video during the Question Hour.) This will ensure greater motivation and enthusiasm from students.
Anyway, if kids have questions on economics (preposterous idea!!), and if better experts aren’t available, I would be very happy to volunteer. I wish you very, very best for this initiative. (I *so* want to be a student there.)