If our children had our computers, would they need teachers?

The One Laptop Per Child project is not fresh news, by any means. For those who are tuned into the technologist blogosphere, there have been several years of discussion and anticipation about the project, spearheaded most notably by Nicholas Negroponte, most recently of MIT's Media Lab and a noted architect and proponent of the future of computing. OLPC would seek to place a laptop (and more significantly, internet connectivity) into the hands of every child in the world, focusing its efforts, naturally, on the children in developing nations who have little chance of acquiring such advantage without some sort of deliberate framework amongst technologists in the developed world.

There are numerous questions raised about the applicability and efficacy of this program. The first, and perhaps most significant question, is this. ‘Who is going to teach these children to use the computer, and the internet, and even teach them some relevant language for access to the global information store?’ Not only do these kids not speak English, they often do not speak any language which has significant installed base on the network. They don't speak Spanish, or Hindi, or Cantonese, but rather localized indigenous languages with relatively tiny populations and almost no written presence on paper or in digital form. How can they use the Internet, which is primarily English, and otherwise dominated by a few other languages with a large installed base of connected users? Before we can even get to that, who will teach them to use the computer itself, the interface of which is, in any language, much like a language of its own?

Sugata Mitra offers surprising answers to these questions. His talk at TED 2007 was based on a project he called, 'Hole in the Wall.' (Sorry, requires RealPlayer, works on Winders, others unknown.) The genesis of this project was to embed a PC in a wall surrounding an urban slum in India, with a touchpad and a web browser connected to a search engine. Within hours, their group was able to witness children using this machine. An 8 year old boy was teaching a 6 year old girl how to browse the web, despite the fact that this was presumably that boy's first exposure to the internet.

More questions than answers were created by this initial experiment, not least of which was, 'Did anyone teach them?' In search of this answer, Mitra and his group took the basic model of the 'Hole in the Wall' experiment further and further into undeveloped India.' In less than 10 minutes, a 13 year old school dropout in a remote village, of which Mitra says, 'I had been assured that nobody had ever taught anyone anything,' had discovered the hyper linking nature of the web, and by that evening over 70 children were surrounding the machine and exploring the internet.

The next question was about language. At the time, Mr. Mitra describes, people were concerned that the principal language of communication was English, to which he asked, 'What are we to do? Translate the entire internet into some Indian language? That's not possible, it has to be the other way around.'

They then took the Hole in the Wall to the further removed village of Madantusi, which, as of the time of the experiment in 2000, did not have an English teacher. This assured that these children encountering a predominantly English internet, by means of an English computer, were entirely on their own not only regarding the use of the computer but in the discovery of the language by which this technology and it's information were delivered.

He left the computer there, with 'lot's of CDs,' now having moved the project so remotely that delivering Internet was impossible or unfeasible in that year. They returned 3 months later. As he reports, as soon as the children saw him, they said they 'needed a faster processor and a better mouse.' Astonished, he asked, ‘How did you know what was going on there?' Their reply? 'Well, you left this machine which talks only in English, so we had to learn English.’ By his measurement, they were using 200 English words between each other, mispronounced, but used correctly. Unsurprisingly, he lists the words 'File, Stop, Save, etc,' but notes that they were using these words not only in regards the computer but in their daily lives.

The project eventually gained enough funding to be expanded significantly across India, which offers a range of social, linguistic, and economic hurdles to education. In doing so, they faced significant technological problems; many regarding making these comparatively primitive computers withstand climates well outside the operating range, in weather both too cold and dry in the Himalayas and too hot and wet in southern India.

In many cases, they found the younger children teaching the older ones how to use the machine. Often the earliest places the children would seek out would be those sites which explain the Roman alphabet, essentially prerequisite to Western language acquisition.

They found that 6 to 12 year olds could self instruct in a connected environment, 'irrespective of anything they could measure.' Social position, economics, even demonstrable intelligence seemed to be impossible to correlate to the results. The clear factor was that it had to be in groups. The number of children and machines were such that each individual could only have had minutes actually in command of the computer, but great clusters of children gathered around the machines, and together were able to discover how to use it, going so far as to learn the English language to gain access to the web’s vast stores of knowledge.

So, 700 words later, we return to the topic of the OLPC project, in the hopes that Mr. Mitra’s talk will shed some light on questions surrounding OLPC. The primary question seems to be, ‘who will teach the children to use the computers?’ If this project is any indication, the children will teach themselves, and each other, collectivizing and sharing knowledge as it is gained so rapidly that their ability to use the machines may well be more rapidly acquired without instruction than with it. Some of the other questions postulated may well be solved by the answer to the first. Who will maintain and repair these systems? The kids will likely become experts in the care of OLPCs and their supporting technologies at an astonishing rate, much as the generations in the developed world who have grown up around computers display amazing skill in using and manipulating the machines which took generations of adult scientists many years to create.

It seems clear now that these children will learn simply because the information is available, and they will be able to navigate our digital world intuitively if only they have access, overcoming all of the obstacles which seem insurmountable today. If Mr. Mitra’s groups could collectively understand the interface in groups of 70 children to one screen, we can only guess what might happen in the near future amongst those exposed to Mr. Negroponte’s project, in which each child in a village would have their own window into the web of collective information which we in the developed world so have so easily taken for granted.

What the addition of all of these young minds to Kevin Kelly’s one machine might be, I’ll leave to another article.