Veena Thoopkrajae has an article on The Nation criticizing a plan to give all Thai grade 1 students a free tablet PC. Thoopkrajae claims that there are more pressing issues in Thai education and that the tablet PC program is simply a political ploy by the Prime Minister, Yingluck Shinawatra. That may be the case, but what concerns me are questions that Thoopkrajae raises about the usefulness of the tablet PC program in Thai education, stating that the tablet PCs “could be an additional useless weight in a kid’s schoolbag.” She justifies this statement with a number of assumptions about how young people interact with information and communication technology (ICT), ex. that they naturally gravitate toward games and entertainment “rather than … anything educational.” Her assumptions are highly questionable, at the least, and not consistent with research on young people’s interaction with ICTs.
One of the most dramatic examples of evidence that goes against Thoopkrajae’s assumptions is the “Hole-in-the-Wall” experiment launched by Dr. Sugata Mitra in India in the late 1990s. Dr. Mitra set up a computer facing inwards toward the walled in slum of Kalkaji, New Delhi and then observed how children living in the slum interacted with it. He found that the children quickly learned to use the computer for a variety of uses through play and socialization. Within days, the children were looking up information on the web and were even developing a rudimentary understanding of english. The project has since been expanded to several locations throughout India. Dr. Mitra has developed an effective pedagogic method based on his experiences with the Hole-in-the-Wall project called “minimally invasive education”.
It has long been recognized that youth pick up meaningful skills through playful exploration that they later apply to more complex problem-solving situations. Furthermore, it has been found that youth’s ability to rapidly integrate new methods and technologies into their learning can eventually result in a transfer of skills and knowledge to their parents. The 4-H program was launched in the US in the early 20th century on precisely this basis. Researchers discovered that adults in rural farming communities were reluctant to adopt new, efficient farming practices. Educators in these same communities had, however, noted that youth were very willing to experiment with new techniques and that their experiences tended to have an impact on parents, raising the likelihood that the new techniques were adopted in farming practices.
The well-known “One Laptop Per Child” (OLPC) project was originally based on Seymour Papert’s research on youth’s interaction with ICTs that justified similar reasoning, i.e. youths’ play and experimentation with ICTs could lead to increased acceptance among adults. The idea was to introduce ICTs into developing societies through children with the expectation that they would eventually have a broad impact on teachers and adults in general. Evaluations of early OLPC implementations have shown some positive results.
Low cost ICTs can’t solve all of the problems that afflict educational systems. However, it has been shown that they can be a very effective addition to young peoples’ learning environments. What’s more, youth’s integration of technology into their play and learning can have a marked effect on broader society. Thoopkrajae may have some valid criticisms of the Thai educational system, but her criticism of youths’ use of ICTs for play and learning is unfounded. Depending on how the Thai tablet PC program is implemented, there is no reason not to expect positive results.
