Turning Kids from India's Slums into Autodidacts

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704584804575645070639938954.html?mod=WSJ_LifeStyle_Lifestyle_11_1

by grellas • 16 years ago

70 18 16 years ago

online.wsj.com

kiba• 16 years ago

Anybody who is an autodidact in this day and age automatically have the upper hand even if they do little bit of it everyday. I think that little bit of 30 minutes learning something everyday eventually adds up into something huge.

For example, I am getting my first web service running though without a payment processor. Eventually, I'll figure out billing.

I learned how speculation works, how to short sell, and learn technical trading terms like resistances, supports, amongst other things through osmosis learning. I spent 6 dollars and learned how markets really work.

Through debate attrition and conceding every single time that I was wrong, I learned tremendously about economics.

I learned about the concept of open source, the hackerdom subculture, was an early adopter of Mozilla Firefox before I started programming.

Now, I am an early adopter and experimenter with cryptocurrency, something that come right out of a Neal Stephenson novel. I don't know if it succeed, but it's going to be a crazy ride.

I am experimenting with microtransaction business models via selling my own artworks. On top of it, do it copyfree.

Of course, I am 19, a typical youngster hacker-wannabe.

smokinn• 16 years ago

Billing these days is very easy if you're willing to pay a little more to outsource all the hard parts.

If you can code just download the paypal nvp sample code for something like website payments pro and you can easily have a clean, professional looking (no handing off to a third party site) billing system in a couple of hours.

sliverstorm2• 16 years ago

a clean, professional looking (no handing off to a third party site) billing system

Strangely enough, I really appreciate paying with paypal sometimes because of the hand-off.

maheshs• 16 years ago

His TED Talks

1. http://www.ted.com/talks/sugata_mitra_shows_how_kids_teach_t...

2. http://www.ted.com/talks/sugata_mitra_the_child_driven_educa...

stretchwithme2• 16 years ago

Great article. The greatest thing you can do is give someone the desire and the means to find their own answers.

Of course, we are born with exactly that anyway, so maybe we just need to answer every question, help when it is asked, and avoid messing them up.

MarinaMartin• 16 years ago

Anyone know how to sign up as a SOLE volunteer? Ironically, I cannot seem to find the answer via a web search.

stretchwithme2• 16 years ago

Maybe someone at Mitra's Hole in the Wall education project can help. Here's the contact info:

http://www.hole-in-the-wall.com/contactus.aspx

ajays2• 16 years ago

FTA: "In 2006, Dr. Mitra moved to England, became a professor of educational technology at Newcastle University,. . . "

This saddened me. Now, don't get me wrong: he's free to move whereever he feels like; I'm not upset at him. But it would nice if the smartest people in developing countries didn't move to cushy western universities/think-tanks, and stayed where they grew up to enrich everyone around them.

sliverstorm2• 16 years ago

People climb up the ladder because they want to get out of where they are. It's not very often that someone climbs out and elects to go back down to help others.

It also doesn't make sense to stay. If you're an autodidact, you almost certainly really enjoy learning. Where better to do that than a University/think tank?

JonnieCache• 16 years ago

What better way to learn through osmosis than immersing yourself in a foreign (in terms of familiarity not nationality) cultural environment? Then youre learning every second of every day, if youre trying to or not.

tomjen32• 16 years ago

Why should he stay behind? What does he owe to the people of the state of India? If already gave them far more than they would get from most of the poor people.

deepu_256• 16 years ago

It is not about owing anything to the people of India. It is about owing himself the pleasure and satisfaction of making his homeland - the place where he was born and the place where he grew up - a better place.

shareme• 16 years ago

It saddened me as well,

..the environment he moved form was the set of tools that provided the ways to find the solution in that if you constrict free money and other overwhelming free resources you get someone hungry to make changes..

sandGorgon• 16 years ago

Somehow it reminds me of Neal Stephenson's Diamond Age (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Diamond_Age).

The Primer is intended to intellectually steer its reader toward a more interesting life, and grow up to be an effective member of society. The Primer also reacts to its owners' environment and teaches them what they need to know to survive and grow.

jdietrich• 16 years ago

I met Dr Mitra a couple of years ago, in relation to the first Hole in the Wall experiments.

What struck me at the time was that he seemed to be quite mad. He seemed effervescent with novelty, full of grand and strange ideas about the future of education. At the time, he was working on a 'robot teacher' platform based around a radio-controlled model, a webcam and an IP control interface. He seemed quite confident that the next big thing in his work would be some sort of robotic telepresence, capable of moving around the classroom and performing simple tasks to completely supplant the need for a local teacher. The 'granny cloud' is the product of a long succession of very odd experiments.

It got me thinking about the so-called 'Nobel syndrome' - the tendency for newly appointed Nobel laureates to make controversial statements about fields unrelated to their own. Perhaps a certain detachment from reality is necessary to make real progress. Perhaps academia needs to be an ivory tower, perhaps it's for the best that scientists often have little sense of the practical applications of their work. Thinking about my own work, I'm considering instituting my own Googleesque 20% time and allocating a specific part of my working hours to a project that I believe has no commercial relevance whatsoever.

bh23ha• 16 years ago

Some times when I think about what it would be like to be stupefyingly rich, I think about all the money super rich people have given universities. And then I think the real way to make a HUGE difference would be to start a huge self-learning thing.

It would be like a university except it would really be up to the students to learn what ever and how much ever of it they wanted, and the autodidact-versity would just provide the venue and the books and the internet connection.

I also think that any certification that comes out of this process would be there only if a student wants it. And the student would decide what level of certification they care to try and get. And much like a Ph.D. thesis defence, a committee would take an adversarial position to the student and if the student successfully defends what they've learned, they would get a shiny certificate of some kind.

Or maybe all will just hinge on a student contributing something to human knowledge by publishing a scientific paper which gets cited by someone. Only if your paper got cited do get the right to call yourself a... something what ever.

Something like that.

Turning Kids from India's Slums into Autodidacts

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