4 ms·

My wife started a school/community center is Africa and we are one of the only places in town with computers and internet you can use for free. It was a rare oc

by mruts 7y ago

My wife started a school/community center is Africa and we are one of the only places in town with computers and internet you can use for free. It was a rare occasion indeed that anyone wanted to do anything except watch youtube videos. Now that we banned youtube, people honestly aren't really that interested. I'm not saying internet is bad or whatever, it's just that it's not going to change people's lives without a lot of groundwork first. Educating people so they have questions to ask, or things to produce, or knowledge to acquire. We both really thought having free internet access was going to be a paradigm shift for these kids, but unfortunately, it doesn't seem to be making much of a tangible difference at all. You could make the argument (I personally don't), that it has actually made things worse.

qwerty456127 7y ago
> Now that we banned youtube That's a pity. YouTube is a treasure of awesome educational videos, better than any school can be. If only I had YouTube when I was a schoolboy... Cool people explain math (and other subjects) I could never understand but grok instantly this way. I can also hardly imagine a better media spreading cultural progress. It also promotes artistic expression, incl in poor people - have you seen the post about african teens making short scifi movies? If I had to choose just one website to give everybody on Earth access to that would be YouTube. Nevertheless narrow content kind focus can be a problem - if somebody watches nothing but stupid/weird stuff (it may be good to have this kind of fun occasionally but one should not focus on this too much) and is suggested more and more videos of the same kind this can hardly be beneficial. Perhaps Google should invent a solution to this problem. E.g. showing some educational videos among recommendations regardless to what kind of videos you watch.
- jibla 7y ago
  You are right Youtube is a real gem, but only if used in a proper way. One of the challenges we have, that right after internet installation students check youtube and for the first-time users, it shows only the most popular content which unfortunately is far from the educational one. That's why we try to navigate students via our online mentorship program (described above) and guide them on how to use the internet (and btw youtube)for education
- erklik 7y ago
  > if somebody watches nothing but stupid/weird stuff the issue with that, is what counts as stupid/weird? Is watching vlogs stupid/weird? Is watching people like Logan Paul, weird or stupid? One could argue that you could actually learn alot from people like Logan Paul, about what to do and what not to do. Also, people can learn things from the unlikeliest of sources.
jibla 7y ago
Besides connecting students, we run an online mentorship program via Chat, online groups, sometimes phone/ video calls. First Students receive a link with a "welcome package"-list of most popular and relevant educational platforms which are available in the local language. We also partner with the local EdTech partners who provide their services for free for our students, so if anyone is interested in any platform we teach them how to use it and provide free access. We are also long term partners with Khan Academy and Code.org and actively promote these platforms to the students. On a weekly basis, we post in an online group different educational content, free offers from our partners and education organizations who provide their courses for free (both online and offline), we post different scholarship opportunities, fellowships, programs, etc. We plan to provide tailor-made educational content separately to each student according to their interests and challenges. Also thinking to test different models.
erklik 7y ago
> Now that we banned youtube, people honestly aren't really that interested. I recently saw some Sci-Fi shorts made by some Nigerian kids using some really interesting hacks to work around their economic and resource constraints. They were primarily inspired by watching other shorts, and learnt how to do video-editing etc from Youtube videos. I think banning anything that you consider "wasteful" isn't productive. > Educating people so they have questions to ask, or things to produce, or knowledge to acquire. Maybe you didn't mean to but this sounds rather patronising. Also, they were acquiring knowledge, just not knowledge that you wanted them to acquire.

by mruts 7y ago

qwerty456127 7y ago

> Now that we banned youtube That's a pity. YouTube is a treasure of awesome educational videos, better than any school can be. If only I had YouTube when I was a schoolboy... Cool people explain math (and other subjects) I could never understand but grok instantly this way. I can also hardly imagine a better media spreading cultural progress. It also promotes artistic expression, incl in poor people - have you seen the post about african teens making short scifi movies? If I had to choose just one website to give everybody on Earth access to that would be YouTube. Nevertheless narrow content kind focus can be a problem - if somebody watches nothing but stupid/weird stuff (it may be good to have this kind of fun occasionally but one should not focus on this too much) and is suggested more and more videos of the same kind this can hardly be beneficial. Perhaps Google should invent a solution to this problem. E.g. showing some educational videos among recommendations regardless to what kind of videos you watch.

jibla 7y ago
You are right Youtube is a real gem, but only if used in a proper way. One of the challenges we have, that right after internet installation students check youtube and for the first-time users, it shows only the most popular content which unfortunately is far from the educational one. That's why we try to navigate students via our online mentorship program (described above) and guide them on how to use the internet (and btw youtube)for education
erklik 7y ago
> if somebody watches nothing but stupid/weird stuff the issue with that, is what counts as stupid/weird? Is watching vlogs stupid/weird? Is watching people like Logan Paul, weird or stupid? One could argue that you could actually learn alot from people like Logan Paul, about what to do and what not to do. Also, people can learn things from the unlikeliest of sources.

jibla 7y ago

Besides connecting students, we run an online mentorship program via Chat, online groups, sometimes phone/ video calls. First Students receive a link with a "welcome package"-list of most popular and relevant educational platforms which are available in the local language. We also partner with the local EdTech partners who provide their services for free for our students, so if anyone is interested in any platform we teach them how to use it and provide free access. We are also long term partners with Khan Academy and Code.org and actively promote these platforms to the students. On a weekly basis, we post in an online group different educational content, free offers from our partners and education organizations who provide their courses for free (both online and offline), we post different scholarship opportunities, fellowships, programs, etc. We plan to provide tailor-made educational content separately to each student according to their interests and challenges. Also thinking to test different models.

erklik 7y ago

> Now that we banned youtube, people honestly aren't really that interested. I recently saw some Sci-Fi shorts made by some Nigerian kids using some really interesting hacks to work around their economic and resource constraints. They were primarily inspired by watching other shorts, and learnt how to do video-editing etc from Youtube videos. I think banning anything that you consider "wasteful" isn't productive. > Educating people so they have questions to ask, or things to produce, or knowledge to acquire. Maybe you didn't mean to but this sounds rather patronising. Also, they were acquiring knowledge, just not knowledge that you wanted them to acquire.