Computers and Education

My recent post, Home Computers: Help or hindrance in education, focused on research that shows the detrimental effect of home computers on academic performance.

Now compare that to this TED presentation. Incredible research. Here's a brief description, but I highly recommend watching the presentation. Wow! Homeschoolers, especially of the unschooler variety, would definitely agree with his premise of "minimally invasion education."

In 1999, Sugata Mitra and his colleagues dug a hole in a wall bordering an urban slum in New Delhi, installed an Internet-connected PC, and left it there (with a hidden camera filming the area). What they saw was kids from the slum playing around with the computer and in the process learning how to use it and how to go online, and then teaching each other.

In the following years they replicated the experiment in other parts of India, urban and rural, with similar results, challenging some of the key assumptions of formal education. The "Hole in the Wall" project demonstrates that, even in the absence of any direct input from a teacher, an environment that stimulates curiosity can cause learning through self-instruction and peer-shared knowledge. Mitra, who's now a professor of educational technology at Newcastle University (UK), calls it "minimally invasive education."

So why was there such a big difference in the two studies on the influence of technology? The first thing that pops into my head is the social aspect. Use of a computer for solitary entertainment has a far different effect than computer use in a social context working on a joint endeavor.