The Hole-in-the-wall experiment

It was a delightful, charming, uplifting, heart-warming experience to listen to Laurie Taylor in Today’s Radio 4 programme Thinking Allowed interviewing Sugata Mitra on the Hole-in-the-wall research project he started in the slums of New Delhi in 1999, which has come to a wider audience , as the notes on todays’ programme mention, because Vikras Swarup, the author of the novel on which the film Slum Dog Millionaire was based, acknowledge the role the hole-in-the-wall research played in the gestation of his story.
Dr. Mitra gives a lecture here at TED, which expands on what he said to Laurie Taylor. He explains how non-English speaking kids used the internet to teach themseves enough English to get round the system!  That the whole learning process was a group acivity and that a young girl were often responsible for organising the the use of the computer.

A 2000 interview with Mitra

There is also a website  Hole-in-the-wall that explains what has been done to continue the experiment in what they are calling minimally invasive education.

In these villages, they computers were not vandalised or stolen. I can’t believe the same would happen here in the UK, though of course, they already know what PCs and the internet are.