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The first computer kiosk was set up in 1999 in Kalkaji slum in New Delhi, India. For a number

of years Dr Gupta then Director of research at the Centre for Research in Cognitive Systems, had

been thinking about how computer-based education could serve India¶s poor. He had a hunch

that poor children with little education could teach themselves the basics of computer literacy

and in doing so open a window to knowledge about the world. To test his idea he embedded a

computer with a high-speed internet connection into a wall (hence, often referred to as µhole in

the wall¶) that divided the Institute where he and his team worked from a slum area, strewn with

rubbish and used by local street kids. He left the computer on, monitored its use remotely and

installed a video camera in a nearby tree to watch what happened. What he watched was the

ways in which the slum children who hung around in car park intuitively picked up the skills

they needed to use the machine. They self-organised and began teaching themselves what they

needed to know with unending curiosity and thirst for knowledge. The fact that the programmes

they discovered were all in English was not a problem: they learned the English they needed and

even substituted their own words for icons (such as the hourglass that indicates some kind of

loading process is taking place) when no words were indicated. Within a few days the children

who were mostly aged 6-10 and who did not attend school, had learned how to browse the Web,

play games, create documents and paint pictures See

http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2000/oct/17/itforschools.Schools5;

http://www.greenstar.org/butterflies/Hole-in-the-Wall.htm

http://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/stories/india/kids.Html;. For any parent with children of the

same age this would not now appear such a surprising result. Children seem to µtake to¶
computers in ways that continue to surprise older generations. However the implications of this

social experiment are much more suggestive given its context.

I'm saying that, in situations where we cannot intervene very frequently, you can multiply the

effectiveness of 10 teachers by 100 - or 1,000 - fold if you give children access to the Internet....

This is a system of education where you assume that children know how to put two and two

together on their own. So you stand aside and intervene only if you see them going in a direction

that might lead into a blind alley. That's just so that you don't waste time... (Mitra, :




 2000)

This concept of µminimal intervention¶ suggests that children can actually teach themselves

many of the things that teachers normally assume is their job to teach. Self-directed learning

replaces teacher-centric education and frees a teacher¶s time to support pupils in more individual,

personalised ways. The social implications of this are staggering in a world where, despite

commitments to universal primary education, some 68 million primary-school-age children are

currently not enrolled http://www.uis.unesco.Org/ . Gupta¶s µHole in the Wall¶ is suggestive of

the kind of radical transformation that the use of technology could bring to education. That

education can improve where there are fewer teachers, not more, is a powerful message. It is not

surprising that he was awarded the Best Social Innovation of 2000 by the British Institute for

Social Inventions nor that the ideas behind his experiment have spread. Research into hole-in-

the-wall computers, now referred to as µMinimally Invasive Education Learning Stations¶ has

continued throughout the past ten years and now centres on the ways in which the emergence and

development of group social processes aids individual learning. Much of it shows that children

learn more through interaction with others, particularly their peers, than in the more passive,

receptive activities that dominate formal schooling (Dangwal & Kapur, 2009).
On one trip to a hole in the wall computer in India, Mitra took the experiment a step further by

asking a young girl to stand behind a group working on the computer and praise what they were

doing. He calculated that they achieved 25% more with this positive praise/feedback. The idea of

showing off your abilities to an empathetic other, Mitra suggested, was like demonstrating your

skills to your Grannie and your Grannie responding, 'that's amazing. I couldn't have done that at

your age'.

That insight led to the recruitment of over 200 volunteers in the UK who connect once a week to

schools in India via Skype. Their task is to encourage and praise the achievements of the

youngsters they interact with. It's a coaching and feedback mechanism that integrates with the

youngster's schooling and which is designed to provide a boost to learning. Whilst not all of the

volunteers are grannies, the initiative is known after its method 'The Granny Cloud'.

Mitra further fine-tuned his experiments in Gateshead where he worked with 32 children and

asked them to work in groups of four using one computer per group. They could change groups,

wander between groups and even peer over the shoulder at a group¶s work and take it back to

their group and claim it as theirs. He then gave the groups six GCSE questions to answer. They

used everything they could including Google, Newsgroups, Wikipedia, and Ask Jeeves. The

quickest group answered the questions in twenty minutes and the slowest in forty-five. The

average score achieved was 76%. The classroom teacher of the groups Mitra was working with

was suspicious that what the children had achieved was fingertip knowledge, discovering

information which would subsequently be lost. In order to test the hypothesis that no deep

learning had taken place during the task, Mitra tested the students with an paper-based exam two

months later in which no computers nor collaboration was allowed. They scored 76%.?