Sayamindu’s Ramblings

Last month, the New York Times pub­lished a blog post titled “The Aakash Project’s Bit­ter Fin­ish”, out­lin­ing a num­ber of prob­lems that led to a very prob­lem­atic state of affair with the ambi­tious project. While some of them seem to be clas­sic exam­ples of bureau­cratic botch-ups (test­ing cri­te­ria lifted directly from specs of ruggedi­zed HP lap­tops, etc), there also seems to be deeper issues at hand. Unless I’m miss­ing some­thing, it was never clear at any point what the ped­a­gog­i­cal goal or method­ol­ogy of the project was — the only thing I could glean from infor­ma­tion from var­i­ous news out­lets is the fact that Aakash was pri­mar­ily des­tined to be a con­tent con­sump­tion device, enabling lit­tle beyond the rote-learning model we are so accus­tomed to. A com­put­ing device has incred­i­ble poten­tial to be an object to think with, rather than an object to con­sume with, and it is ter­ri­bly frus­trat­ing to see sig­nif­i­cant of effort and money going into a half-baked idea that merely scratches the sur­face of the pos­si­bile oppurtunities.

The National Cur­ricu­lum Frame­work (2005), released by the Indian National Coun­cil of Edu­ca­tion Research and Train­ing (NCERT) states:

If ET (edu­ca­tional tech­nol­ogy) is to become a means of enhanc­ing cur­ric­u­lar reform, it must treat the major­ity of teach­ers and chil­dren not merely as con­sumers but also as active producers.

A com­put­ing device can be an ideal medium for learn­ers to con­struct and explore knowl­edge, through the active manip­u­la­tion and pro­duc­tion of dig­i­tal arti­facts, and I sin­cerely hope that the next set of ideas that come up around Aakash (or a sim­i­lar pro­gram) take this into account.

Rel­e­vant dis­clo­sure: I have been in the past, involved with the One Lap­top Per Child project. My cur­rent research involves explor­ing com­pu­ta­tion as a medium for expres­sion and creativity.