Hole-In-The-Wall Computer Experiment

An experiment in minimally directed self-learning has been going fairly well. To test his ideas, Sugata Mitra launched something 13 months ago he calls the hole in the wall experiment. He took a PC connected to a high-speed data connection and imbedded it in a concrete wall next to NIIT’s headquarters in the south end of New Delhi. The wall separates the company’s grounds from a garbage-strewn empty lot used by the poor as a public bathroom. Mitra simply left the computer on, connected to the Internet, and allowed any passer-by to play with it… he discovered was that the most avid users of the machine were ghetto kids aged 6 to 12, most of whom have only the most rudimentary education and little knowledge of English. Yet within days, the kids had taught themselves to draw on the computer and to browse the Net