:O

One year ago, I wrote a nonsensical entry for the school magazine, that was convoluted and not quite upto the point I wanted it to be. Atanu Dey got it all right when he wrote a piece on laptops and learning. He says:

Would we have become better educated if we had access to laptops and the internet? Arguably yes. At least some of us would have had a richer educational experience. Strictly speaking for myself, I would have probably flunked. I would have surfed the web for god alone knows what, I would have played computer games (I once spent an entire year playing Solitaire on my laptop), I would have wasted all my time socializing on the web. In short, I am grateful that I got access to the internet only after my basic education was complete. Even now, as a grown up and presumed responsible person, I find that my work suffers when I start surfing the web. I am sure that if my internet privileges are not restricted, I will probably never finish the work I am supposed to do and I fear that I will get fired.

So when I wrote that piece, critics led by the venerable Gowda told me that technology and internet is admissible to a certain extent only. I too had thought like them, but had failed to get the flow right back then in my article. I didn’t want to submit the crap that I had assembled in less than an hour. But the magazine badly needed an alumnus to write a piece and given the paucity of other alumni to write an article, my article was published. My piece was to be concerned regarding internet and technology in the life of the hearing impaired children, and how I benefited from it. However I ended up bragging about my life there. And more importantly, I forgot to put the point that the technology and internet cannot be differentiators un-till the basic primary enlightenment stage is reached and there lies the flaw in that article. Let us forget that article for now.

However if I were to go back and write the piece wrt todays children and their learning, I think I would have struggled to write it the exactly the way Atanu has written. Atanu points out how schemes like OLPC are superficial and in reality such stuffs do not work. You go to some village in India and give them a laptop and come back after a year – nothing will have changed. The reality of the education is grossly divided these days between urban kids and the rural kids. While the urban kids get significantly greater resources for their perusal, my experiences have led me to note that they almost end up not utilising most of stuffs. Rural kids in contrast tend to grab even tiniest chances offered to them and end up being successful if provided with proper guidance.

However coming to the point, I feel that the provision of internet and laptops to the kids today needs to be allowable to a certain stage. How to enforce this strategy ? Let us take the schools. Most of the schools in India do not even have a decent library. Try doing a quiz and you will know how much is the lack of the current affairs. Having dedicated internet centers for fixed hours daily along with a resource person who can guide how exactly to use the internet and the laptop can be extremely beneficial in these cases. In urban areas I do not think implementing this will be much of a problem depending on the schools managements. Coming to the rural areas, all of us are from one or the other village. Each one of us can go to our villages monthly and try spending some time with the kids to guide them, brush up their knowledge and guide their careers. Once you are assured they do not go to the way that they end up mis-managing the resources provided to them, you can ask the kid’s parents to go for internet at their house. A problem with this proposal is I’m not sure how feasible is affordability of the internet. The rates for broadband are costly, forget dialup. The emergence of telecommunication in India is sort of promising and I hope that it will alleviate the affordability issues as it reaches the aam-aadmi in coming months. Another issue is I do not know if the kids can stay focused as they plunge them into the information highway.

I will stop here now, and try to pen more thoughts on this. But for now, I think the OLPC India wiki has deep fundas and insights on the problems of technology deployment in India. Think about it.