The Mt Kenya Times 
By: Wanjohi. P. Mugambi
Worth Noting:
- For the moment, the results have been encouraging although success has not been complete. The encouraging, even incredible, findings are that some of the children, who prior to the introduction of the tablet had never seen a pencil, could sight-read some words. What is sight-reading?
- You may have noticed this with your toddler children or grandchildren. They can recognize their name. My name is Sidney and when I was age 3, I could recognize it, and I also knew that others’ written names weren’t mine. I sight-read.
- I recognized my name as a whole. What I hadn’t yet known was that each of the letters represented a sound and that combinations of symbols created combinations of sounds that were a word.
One central question regarding illiteracy and innumeracy in remote areas concerns how education for these basic cultural tools can be made available to them. The question, as posed here, is about delivery. How can we get education to somany children who are not in schools or whose schools are inadequate and are scattered over vast distances in sometimes remote areas with little access? A lever regarding rampant illiteracy and innumeracy among large swaths of our world’s children is the use of digital technology. The idea is that through laptops, tablets, smart phones and more, we can democratize education by giving those devices to disenfranchised children across the globe and teaching them, through appropriate applications, to be literate about the written word and numeracy. This has already been underway in several locations around the world. One example is One Laptop per Child (OLPC) which originated in the Media Lab at MIT. This non-profit organization has supplied inexpensive laptops to children around the world.
The most striking example of this is Uruguay which is saturated with laptops. All school-age children and their teachers have laptops. And that is currently being extended to Uruguay’s elder citizens. For the first time in human history, a government decided to provide digital communication to all its youth. Some of these children live in remote parts of Uruguay where there is no electricity. Yet children from there now have the possibility of being connected to other children and their teachers. This social experiment, on a large scale, cans be envisioned for neglected school-age children around the world. It is with this in mind that another attempt is being made to bring literacy to disenfranchised children via digital technology comes from Maryanne Wolfe’s work in Ethiopia as part of the Global Literacy Project (Wolf, this volume; Wolf, Gottwald, Galyean, Morris & Breazeal,2013; Wolf, Gottwaldov, Galyean & Morris,2013). She chose to work in two villages there in order to help foster literacy. In one of the villages, in a remote part of Ethiopia, none of its citizens is literate.
This means, of course, that there is no school there. Digital technology was brought to the village in the form of a tablet to see if the village’s children could become literate when interacting with the technology Wolf and her colleagues introduced. The situation was set up so that every key stroke on the tablet was recorded and video cameras were set up to tape all events where the tablet was located. The tablet, placed in a strategic location in the village, had apps that were especially built to take into account, as much 4 as possible, children’s exposure to written language for the first time. For many important reasons, the written language was English. The thinking behind this ambitious project was that if illiterate children in a village of non-readers could become literate through the use of digital technology, a case could be made for bringing such technology to other remote villages and towns around the globe with similar or less severe literacy problems.
For the moment, the results have been encouraging although success has not been complete. The encouraging, even incredible, findings are that some of the children, who prior to the introduction of the tablet had never seen a pencil, could sight-read some words. What is sight-reading? You may have noticed this with your toddler children or grandchildren. They can recognize their name. My name is Sidney and when I was age 3, I could recognize it, and I also knew that others’ written names weren’t mine. I sight-read. I recognized my name as a whole. What I hadn’t yet known was that each of the letters represented a sound and that combinations of symbols created combinations of sounds that were a word. This leap, what Wolf calls the Helen Keller leap, is the one that has not yet happened for the Ethiopian children, and it is the one that is necessary for these village children to enter the world of print as literate people. Being literate goes beyond this, of course. We have to learn to decipher meanings, authors’ intents, and much more
.Even graduate students at the Ph.D. level are still learning to decipher written texts. But the more advanced aspects of reading will be denied if the basic aspect of connecting symbols to sounds is unavailable. As mentioned, at present, the Helen Keller leap has not yet happened with these children. That is where things stand now regarding the heroic project to foster literacy without teachers among children who live in places where there are no schools or where there are schools but they are woefully overcrowded and understaffed. In an attempt to find a digital solution to this leap, the X-Prize is holding an international competition to encourage teams to build apps that will enable these village children and eventually hundreds of millions of children to enter the world of literacy. Underlying these efforts is the understanding, based on research and plain observation, that someone who has deciphered the symbol-sound code by her/himself is a rarity. A teacher is needed for that to happen. In lieu of situations where there are no schools or overcrowded classes, digital technology is being developed to do the teaching. The jury is out about whether or not it can be done. If it can, all of us gain.
I suggest that there is another lever that can bring teaching to disenfranchised and neglected children: children. No, this is not a typographical error. Children can teach children. Indeed, they do that naturally and spontaneously all the time from an early age. They are natural-born teachers. They do not need teacher training courses nor do they need to be licensed to be teachers. They teach, and do so at a remarkably early age. They have learned how to teach as part of their cognitive, emotional.
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