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I live in India and here are my thoughts: It's not about the price or how cool it is. First things first, it is a nifty achievement that 'can haz' the potentia

by mnazim 15y ago

I live in India and here are my thoughts: It's not about the price or how cool it is. First things first, it is a nifty achievement that 'can haz' the potential. BUT is cheap hardware really the most important thing here? No. Here is why. It is not based on any pedagogical concept at all. Anything targeted at the students in primary schools must be based on some kind of sound pedagogical framework. From software to the user experience. Slapping a stock Andriod OS on a cheap tablet is not going to solve the problems of the primary school system in India. Prerecorded video lectures can never work for school classrooms where teacher-student interactivity is indispensable. Let's stop singing praises of our "Great" "Innovation" for a moment and really think about it for a second. Do primary students really want to listen to someone blabbing on for an hour through a video? NO. It does not work like that. If it worked like that, best schools would have replaced their teachers with tubes and boomboxes. Where is the content delivery infrastructure? I run a small web application development company in the heart of a capital city of a state and heck, internet connectivity gives us headaches every once in a while. You can imagine the scenario in the remotest parts of the country. And how much does internet cost here - $100 for a 4Mbps connection with 35GB/month data limit and it is the home plan not the commercial plan. With so much costly connectivity and abysmal infrastructure, how will the content be delivered. Involved costs are exorbitant. As others have already pointed out, the costs involved are not a trivial amount. Not only the tablet but the delivery network and other necessary infrastructure. Can the state governments bear the such costs. No. Technology is nice; Its not the silver bullet. Let me say this once for all. 99% of Indian school(or college level) teachers are bullshit. They don't know anything about teaching or the subject matter they are "teaching". I did not know this when I went to school. But now I am 28 and I have 9 cousins between the age 7 - 16 in some of the top schools in my city. And what their teachers teach them is bullshit. Example: I found out one of my 5th grade cousin does not know what a number line is. Despite being a part of his maths curriculum, the teacher just skipped over it. So, advice to the government and education departments: FIX THE DAMN SCHOOL FIRST. Finally look at what Indian teachers are teaching in schools http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FViBJg6X_24 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FViBJg6X_24 even if you do not understand Hindi you will still pick a lot of things. There are bigger problems than "lack of a cheap tablet". Children are dying because of malnutrition. Farmers are committing suicides. What Indian government does not want anyone to know is that: - 65 tribal children died of malnutrition in the state of Madhya Pradesh. - 125 farmers committed suicide because huge debts in Deccan states. - Indian security forces butchered 110 peaceful protesters in Kashmir. during the same period when India was busy spending 150 million USD on Commonwealth games. http://southasia.oneworld.net/todaysheadlines/children-dying-of-malnutrition-in-tribal-india http://southasia.oneworld.net/todaysheadlines/children-dying... Finally, in my very very humble and personal opinion, all this tablet is ever going to achieve is become another toy in the closets of children from middle to upper middle class families. PS: Does anyone recall India's own custom built, secure OS? Anyone?

ippisl 15y ago
I think you overestimate the difficulty in "automating" education and providing it in india. children can learn pretty well using online video - khan academy has proven that, and khan academy is even building a complete interactive educational framework. The high cost of bandwidth can be probably solved pretty inexpensively using caching at the village level. caching is a well proven technology and is a big part of the backbone of the internet. When you say "fix the damn schools first" you underestimate the size of the problem. this is a huge huge problem, very difficult one , maybe even unsolvable at the scale and the conditions india has. see , even rich countries that had decades to build an education system are struggling with building a high quality education system using teachers. and mostly they're not doing very well. I think india has no choice. it has to invent a new, high quality and huge scale education system. and giving each student a tablet is a good first step to get there.
- floppydisk 15y ago
  Does Khan Academy have documented instances where they've replaced a teacher in the classroom with videos? From my understanding, KA currently works well as a supplement to traditional classroom education instead of simply replacing it.
  - ippisl 15y ago
    I was talking about khan as an example. if you want totaly automated self learning , look for the "hole in the wall" education experiments. they sucseeded. But i think khan academy can make the teacher job much easier, so maybe even no so good teacher can achieve good results.
- mnazim 15y ago
  I tried showing Khan Academy videos to my cousins going to very expensive private schools where 95% curriculum is in English right from the kindergarten. Here is what I observed. - They understood a lot from it. In some case even more than their classrooms. - They have a lot of questions about the subject matter. Which Mr. Khan could not answer as he was present not here. - Most of their questions were there because of the English vocabulary or the sentences my cousins could not understand. So yes. Khan Academy is doing a great job. I am learning higher maths again now. But videos cannot replace a good teacher and English is not the native language here. Even if we wanted to translated the videos, it would still be a monumental tasks as there are about 6000 spoken languages in India. And yes I agree with you. Not just India, whole world needs a new education system. But the a particular technology should not the foundation of it. What we need is: - a pedagogically sound foundation - teachers trained in the methods of teaching, not just the subject matter - then use the technology to enable this system.

by mnazim 15y ago

ippisl 15y ago

I think you overestimate the difficulty in "automating" education and providing it in india. children can learn pretty well using online video - khan academy has proven that, and khan academy is even building a complete interactive educational framework. The high cost of bandwidth can be probably solved pretty inexpensively using caching at the village level. caching is a well proven technology and is a big part of the backbone of the internet. When you say "fix the damn schools first" you underestimate the size of the problem. this is a huge huge problem, very difficult one , maybe even unsolvable at the scale and the conditions india has. see , even rich countries that had decades to build an education system are struggling with building a high quality education system using teachers. and mostly they're not doing very well. I think india has no choice. it has to invent a new, high quality and huge scale education system. and giving each student a tablet is a good first step to get there.

floppydisk 15y ago
Does Khan Academy have documented instances where they've replaced a teacher in the classroom with videos? From my understanding, KA currently works well as a supplement to traditional classroom education instead of simply replacing it.
- ippisl 15y ago
  I was talking about khan as an example. if you want totaly automated self learning , look for the "hole in the wall" education experiments. they sucseeded. But i think khan academy can make the teacher job much easier, so maybe even no so good teacher can achieve good results.
mnazim 15y ago
I tried showing Khan Academy videos to my cousins going to very expensive private schools where 95% curriculum is in English right from the kindergarten. Here is what I observed. - They understood a lot from it. In some case even more than their classrooms. - They have a lot of questions about the subject matter. Which Mr. Khan could not answer as he was present not here. - Most of their questions were there because of the English vocabulary or the sentences my cousins could not understand. So yes. Khan Academy is doing a great job. I am learning higher maths again now. But videos cannot replace a good teacher and English is not the native language here. Even if we wanted to translated the videos, it would still be a monumental tasks as there are about 6000 spoken languages in India. And yes I agree with you. Not just India, whole world needs a new education system. But the a particular technology should not the foundation of it. What we need is: - a pedagogically sound foundation - teachers trained in the methods of teaching, not just the subject matter - then use the technology to enable this system.