Vol. II: Shaping Information and Communication ... - IMA,ZLW & IfU

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Project Description
The project was started in 1999, on the outskirts of a sprawling slum that borders the
commercial complex where NIIT’s offices are located, at Kalkaji in the extreme south of New
Delhi. The slum is home to a large number of children, the majority of whom do not go to
school, except a few who are enrolled in government run schools.
The project objective was to find out:
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“Whether potential users from the Indian public will use an PC-based Internet kiosk
without prior instruction”, and
“How an unsupervised PC-based Internet kiosk would be used in an outdoor location in
India”.
The researchers, borrowing terminology from medical surgery, preferred to call their project
“an experiment in minimally invasive education”. The experiment basically consisted of
placing a PC kiosk on the fringes of a typical late twentieth century shantytown, where living
conditions are poor and primary school education is almost non-existent, and waiting to see
what happens.
So twenty-five feet away from the slum colony’s first house, a small brick kiosk housing a
true colour monitor, a touch pad for operation [note please, no keyboard], a Pentium PC et al
was constructed outside the boundary wall of the company’s corporate headquarters. The PC,
visible through a glass plate, was connected to NIIT's internal network using the Windows NT
operating system and to the Internet through a dedicated 2 Mbps connection to a service
provider.
While community representatives were assured that the PC kiosk was for their benefit, and its
situation and design certainly indicated so, no one in the host community was given any
instructions on how to use the facility. During the construction of the kiosk the immediate
reaction of local children was a lot of excitement: “Is this a video game being put up for
free?” The many queries of the children yielded no responses from the people putting up the
kiosk, except for the statement that “It is a fun machine”.
A video camera was mounted and concealed in a nearby tree to record activity in and around
the kiosk. Use of the PC’s environment and software was monitored, and when it was felt
necessary, controlled from another PC on NIIT’s internal network.