[OLPC India] Beginning a rural school experiment inspired by OLPC

[Saurabh Adhikari]

Great idea.
 
But let us think about this. Would you like to ask a patient how their disease be treated? Physicians developed their understanding by having that unique capability to understand disease and what may cure it. Today they do not discover cure. They are at best a part of a large process that cures a disease. Similarly, would you like the one left behind in education to tell us how they should be educated? If that were the case, we will have no OLPC. So may be we need to look at your idea a little differently.

Sincerely,
S Adhikari

Date: Sat, 1 Nov 2008 15:38:49 +0530From: rakesh7biswas at gmail.comTo: subbukk at gmail.comCC: india at lists.laptop.orgSubject: [OLPC India] Beginning a rural school experiment inspired by OLPC
If we can create threads around specific issues faced by village schools,school committees and NGOs and how ICT solved them, then we could make somereal progress towards building world-class learning environment for everychild.
Thanks Subbu for raising this. 
 
I am not sure if this is the issue you had in mind but I would just like to mention how I was inspired by the OLPC idea to try out a rural school experiment.
 
I am a physician teacher presently involved in trying to create a system of "User driven health care" in rural India by utilizing rural school children to interview their parents and create their basic electronic health records ( to start with in the form of a story of their parent's lives) as a part of their co curricular activity.
 
At present although the rural school where I visit doesn't have a single computer I feel if we just made a beginning using paper and then follow up these parents/patients utilizing a weekly evaluation of the data the students gather from their parents (again on paper to begin with) we could eventually create a record base that would definitely create patient awareness and improve health care outcomes (particularly as at present we have very little foreground information on the patients we get to interview only for a few minutes in a busy outpatient department). It would off course be also useful for health education at a primary school level (where students learn from their parents experiences on health).
 
I have been lucky in finding a rural school principal who has been giving full support to the idea and we soon hope to see how it develops. 
 
Hope to hear from others who may be interested to see if it can be developed in their own schools for which I would be glad to provide details on operational strategies.
 
rakesh
 
Rakesh Biswas MDProfessor,Department of Medicine,People's college of medical sciences,Bhanpur, Bypass road,Bhopal-462010 (M.P.) IndiaOffice Tel: +91 - 755 - 4005210Office Fax: 91 - 755 - 4005112Residence:+91-755-2682502Mob:9755619861email:rakesh7biswas at gmail.com 
On 11/1/08, K. K. Subramaniam <subbukk at gmail.com> wrote: 
On Saturday 01 Nov 2008 10:38:34 am Satish Jha wrote:> How do banks finance education? It did not exist in the country just a few> years ago.. Now the banks finance @$50,000 per year for students who can> get admission overseas.. How did that happen??Not a good example because it deals with students who have completed basiceducation. Even assuming they did, this scheme will not scale to hundreds ofmillions of children.> Rs 15,000 can be a huge thing and can be a small thing..It is way beyond affordability by rural communities. The current per-capitaincome of land-holding farmers in Karnataka is about INR 10,500 [1]. TheEducation Department in Karnataka allocates INR 7,500 per child with INR 450going towards learning environment.[1] http://www.hindu.com/2008/02/01/stories/2008020154340600.htm> I spoke to the IT minister of another country and suggested they should go> to IDA and raise funds at low interest rates with a 12 year moratorium.> They are moving in that direction. Will the Indian education minister or IT> minister think along those lines?Primary education interventions are best done at state level due to the largevariations in language, culture and education infrastructure.BTW, I would prefer if we can get back to discussing possible deploymentscenarios rather than broad economics. Because of the huge variations ineducational infrastructure, aggregation tends to gloss over show stoppers atcommunity level.If we can create threads around specific issues faced by village schools,school committees and NGOs and how ICT solved them, then we could make somereal progress towards building world-class learning environment for everychild.Subbu_______________________________________________India mailing listIndia at lists.laptop.orghttp://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/india
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