If you look at the current plight of Indian education, it truly sucks and with such state of affairs we can imagine how much of a positive impact that education offers, though few kids especially the ones in metros turn out good either through good parental mentoring or through social environment most of the ones in smaller towns and rural are at a huge disadvantage not due to lack of intellectual capability but solely due to lack awareness and good mentoring. The sorry state of affairs is the amount of emphasis placed on IT careers while ignoring other more fulfilling options like Medicine, Civil, Political and options in Arts etc. I feel if we can positively mentor a school age kid by building a interest in education and showing various exciting options that lay ahead of then, this can be a real positive contribution from us.
The difficulty is how can we actually go about doing this, I was thinking about this for a while and here is my thinking so far. There are two aspects to the issue, first is providing the educational tool and second is building a relationship with a particular child by way of mentoring him. If you guys remember few weeks back I sent out a mail about "One Laptop per child". Personally I feel this is a remarkable self educating tool, don't think of it as a fancy laptop but think of it something which lets a child learn through self-exploration with minimal hand holding, the strenght of XO laptop is its pre-loaded educational Software. The second aspect is mentoring a child, nowadays we have number of social sites like Orkut, myspace, facebook etc, though these are commercially oriented sites, there are few like Ning which let you create a exclusive social networks. With net access available in most of the towns lately, we can mentor each of the adopted kids using these networks. It can be simple things like helping them use the XO laptop or answer their queries or even guide their future, the possibilities are huge.
If you feel these are idealistic or impractical thoughts, with given due attention I feel it is possible. If enough guys are interested this is something that can be worked out.
Some useful links:
Negroponte's speech at TED conference about XO laptop:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o97UD78s6iM
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/41
Bulk Purchases:
http://laptopfoundation.org/participate/givemany.shtml
If sounds plausible drop me a line.
Venkat Reddy
The difficulty is how can we actually go about doing this, I was thinking about this for a while and here is my thinking so far. There are two aspects to the issue, first is providing the educational tool and second is building a relationship with a particular child by way of mentoring him. If you guys remember few weeks back I sent out a mail about "One Laptop per child". Personally I feel this is a remarkable self educating tool, don't think of it as a fancy laptop but think of it something which lets a child learn through self-exploration with minimal hand holding, the strenght of XO laptop is its pre-loaded educational Software. The second aspect is mentoring a child, nowadays we have number of social sites like Orkut, myspace, facebook etc, though these are commercially oriented sites, there are few like Ning which let you create a exclusive social networks. With net access available in most of the towns lately, we can mentor each of the adopted kids using these networks. It can be simple things like helping them use the XO laptop or answer their queries or even guide their future, the possibilities are huge.
If you feel these are idealistic or impractical thoughts, with given due attention I feel it is possible. If enough guys are interested this is something that can be worked out.
Some useful links:
Negroponte's speech at TED conference about XO laptop:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o97UD78s6iM
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/41
Bulk Purchases:
http://laptopfoundation.org/participate/givemany.shtml
If sounds plausible drop me a line.
Venkat Reddy
