Technology is the Answer: What was the Question? Daniel, J. (2002).

I want to share with you Suga Mitra's TED talk about the 'Hole in the Wall' project mentioned in Professor Daniel's inspiring speech. 

Sugata Mitra: The child-driven education:

"Education scientist Sugata Mitra tackles one of the greatest problems of education -- the best teachers and schools don't exist where they're needed most. In a series of real-life experiments from New Delhi to South Africa to Italy, he gave kids self-supervised access to the web and saw results that could revolutionize how we think about teaching."
http://www.hole-in-the-wall.com/

Amara Video Link 42 Subtitles

Another beautiful and more recent project by 'One Laptop per Child' in the same spirit:

Given Tablets but No Teachers, Ethiopian Children Teach Themselves 

"Earlier this year, OLPC workers dropped off closed boxes containing the tablets, taped shut, with no instruction. “I thought the kids would play with the boxes. Within four minutes, 
one kid not only opened the box, found the on-off switch … powered it up. Within five days, 
they were using 47 apps per child, per day. Within two weeks, they were singing ABC songs in the village, and within five months, they had hacked Android,” Negroponte said. “Some idiot in our organization or in the Media Lab had disabled the camera, and they figured out the camera, 
and had hacked Android.”
http://www.technologyreview.com/news/506466/given-tablets-but-no-teachers-ethiopian-children-teach-themselves/

I enjoyed reading this speech very much and in my opinion it is as relevant as it was 10 years ago.

My favorite part was the one about the donkeys:

"Another example of the need for broad thinking about technology comes from Latin America.
How do you get children to school in a rural, mountainous region when they live a good way away
and you don't want them to arrive at school already tired out? The answer was that you get hold of some donkeys. The problem is that it is difficult to buy donkeys under the United Nations procurement guidelines. These guidelines require performance specifications, tendering and suchlike.
The solution is to hire the donkeys as consultants, which is fine under the UN rules.
Donkeys also have one great advantage compared to human consultants - they do not write reports."



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