Narendra Sisodiya of the Linux User Group at Indian Institute of Technology Delhi has an interesting idea that he proposes after visiting OLPC pilot schools in India: One Wikipedia Per School:
I have a active participation in OLPC project in India. While visiting to village I felt that:While visiting a new idea clicked in my mind. -- "We first need Knowledge equality then the Computing equality". I think we should first concentrate on Interactive kiosk for Offline Wikipedia .
- It is difficult to deploy OLPC because of high cost in India.
- Govt is relativity immune and unable to find money for large scale deployments.
- Even if someone deploy OLPC in a classroom, unavailability of "class teacher" who can teach OLPC.
- In the village "Kikarwali" almost No OLPC Laptop were used. They were use only for the time of inspection of school.
Now he talks about a Wikipedia kiosk, but I think that's too much infrastructure. With the size and scale of India, any ICT solution must be dirt cheap and dead simple to use. So rather than encasing an electronic Wikipedia in a big metal kiosk, let's just give each school teacher a WikiReader:
No kiosk needed - just a $100 handheld reference tool to drastically increase teacher knowledge, which they can pass onto the students as needed.
Recent Comments
http://twitter.com/nsisodiya/status/10692517322293248