Children and the "Hole in the Wall"

"The Hole in The Wall"

What can be said about the title? This phrase actually takes its literal meaning. The hole in the wall or another name for it is Minimally Invasive Education (MIE), is an approach that exploits the natural curiosity of children and the concept of collaboration to catalyze learning. Basically, the children are provided with the instruments in kiosks, such as computers with the access to the internet, and they will learn on their own with the only assistance that they receive is from their peers.

This interesting approach has been done in the rural areas in India. The successful rate of this approach is high considering the children do not get any help from adults. Mitra (2004) stated that "in independent studies conducted at Madangir, New Delhi, three organizations concluded that about 6,000 out of a total of 9,000 children in the area were now computer literate."

MIE mainly applies the collaborative constructivism in which the children learn collaboratively and teach one another effectively at the MIE kiosks where the computers and internet access are available. Moreover, the children are also efficient at self-regulating the process. They will try, make mistakes and notice the incidents or accidents that happen when they use the instruments. During the process of discoveries of new things, the children may discuss, hold small conferences with their peers, make their own timetables and research plans. This learning process highly requires the children to collaborate and share their knowledge with each other.

In my opinion, this method could be implemented in Malaysia since Malaysia also has a significant number of rural areas. The government has taken initiatives to build new schools with new and sophisticated facilities including computer facilities. However, the reality is that the new facilities are not often used. This is may be due to the rural area students do not be given opportunity to use the instruments.

Yes, indeed they do not know how to exploit the computers and sometimes, the school is too afraid the instruments might easily broken or damaged. My uncle teaches in a rural school in Gua Musang, Kelantan. The school caters for the rural children including the aborigines with the rate to pass the examination is only 5%. He said that the school is new and has its own computer lab. But, it is not used. Why? Isn't a loss?

Through this approach, the uneducated and disadvantaged children are given a chance to use the computers FREELY. It would give advantages for students who are the economically and academically disadvantaged, especially in rural areas in Malaysia. In certain areas, the students are on and off the school. Some of them do not even realize the importance of schooling. If they are given the same opportunity with a monitoring by certain people, for example teachers, this approach might help the children to learn. Children learn best when they are motivated and their curiosity is high. Hence, the use of the hole in the wall might give positive effects since it can increase the students' curiosity and promote self-learning.

Furthermore, this approach only needs resources and a peer group alone, it could lessen the number of teachers and institutional time to other parts of curriculum. The children would learn the computer little by little through discoveries by themselves and their peers, and they would use their own mother tongue to describe what they have noticed and learned. For instant, in certain part of India, a cursor is called 'teer' in Hindi which means 'arrow.' Here we can see that the children give their own terms to the things they observe and use which are familiar with them. Besides that,

Mitra (2004) stated four recommendations to make this approach a success. This is basically based on the research done in India. Therefore, a research is needed to see whether this approach is suitable or not in the Malaysian context. The recommendations are:

1. The computer should be in an outdoor, public, and safe location
2. Children should use the computer in heterogeneous groups
3. There should be no adult intervention or supervision
4. PC functioning and Internet connectivity should be reliable

It would be great if the technologies are utilized to the fullest. Actually Malaysia has the opportunity and capability to apply a more effective approach in enhancing learning, like MIE. Nevertheless, it should be further researched and explored the usefulness of this method, before it really be utilized in Malaysia.