Education as a Digital Product
These days digital technologies are permeating through different aspects of our life. It is not uncommon to have 2 or 3 people of a family sitting in the same room and communicating over smartphone using messengers to people outside the house.
Talking to relatives and friends across the globe is as seamless as talking to a neighbour. In fact calling a person from adjoining room takes physical effort while to talking to a friend 10,000 miles away is just a few clicks away.
Google and YouTube have changed the way we can access information. A song like Gangnam style became famous around the world because it was accessible to all on YouTube. Twenty years ago I could not have thought of accessing a Korean song without much effort in my home in India.
If you have seen the view counter on YouTube for English nursery rhymes you will find that most famous nursery rhymes have more than 100 million views. Some individual nursery rhyme videos have more than 1 billion views. Kids world over are fond of nursery rhymes.
Success of Khan Academy also shows us the power of digital education. It takes money to create digital content but once you make something distributing it worldwide is now child’s play. In fact my 7 year old son made his own YouTube video explaining 3D printing software. He took a mobile phone and recorded the screen while parallely narrating the use of drawing tools for creating 3D drawings. He made his own YouTube channel and uploaded the video. He showed me the video after uploading. No adult was involved in this process.
This brings us to the dangers of digital technologies. My son has unlimited access to YouTube so theoretically he can see all the bad stuff. The interesting thing is that he is so busy in maker activities and YouTube videos involving maker activities that he seldom sees something other.
As parents we need to be careful and we should try to see what a child is watching. I am against stopping access to internet for kids. Many parents limit the access of kids to internet due to its harmful uses. I think guiding kids with some basic precautions is better. Anyway it is impossible to stop kids from accessing content. The advent of technologies like internet, smartphone, smart TV boxes etc make it impossible for parents to stop kids. Also if you stop kids then they will become rebels since most other kids will be seeing the stuff.
Guidance and mentoring is a better way out. Some protection may be necessary to save kids from online frauds etc but that should be the limit of parents involvement.
Education should be looked as digital product more and more. In digital form education can be made nearly free. Khan academy and other online stuff shows us the way. Every year physical world is getting expensive. The schools and colleges are getting more and more expensive. Accessibility to digital content on the other hand is becoming easier and cheaper every year. Thus governments and philanthropic funds should focus more on digital ways of delivering education.
Many people believe that online videos are the only way of delivering education. This is wrong. Even Salman Khan of Khan Academy in his book — The One World Schoolhouse: Education Reimagined — talks about multiple ways of educating kids. He does not believe that online videos are the only form of education which kids can have.
Digital education can have many forms besides videos. We can use mobile games, interactive apps, messengers, devices like Amazon’s Alexa, electronic devices for maker activities etc.
My son is fond of typing spellings in WhatsApp messenger. He wants to practice spellings that way. Sometimes we have to tell him to write using a pencil since school involves pencil not the smartphone but overall typing has helped him learn the spellings. I have also used Arduino for teaching spellings. Arduino is a single board microcontroller which can be used for controlling electronics.
Thus only limit to use digital technology in education is our imagination.
I have founded an open education project called Fun2Do Labs. To know more about it visit : http://fun2dolabs.org . Subscribe to me on Medium to read my posts on education and technology.
