Earlier work, often referred to as the "hole in the wall" experiments, has shown that groups of children can learn to use public computers on their own. This paper presents the method and results of an experiment conducted to investigate whether such unsupervised group learning in shared public spaces is universal. The experiment was conducted with "hole in the wall" (minimally invasive education, or MIE) computers in 17 locations in rural India. Focus groups in each location were tested for computer literacy for 9 months.Results, which are discussed in the paper, show that groups of children can learn to use computers and the Internet on their own, irrespective of who or where they are. Furthermore, such group self instruction is as effective as traditional classroom instruction, whilst this learning is considerably less expensive and is independent of teachers and schools. The results point to a new pedagogy for children's education in those circumstances where schools and teachers are either absent or not effective due to any reason.

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This paper explores the possibility of constructing a "minimally invasive" learning model from the results of a Graphical User Interface (GUI) Icon Association Inventory (devised by Dangwal and Inamdar [Mitra 2003]). We discuss the results obtained from four playground (hole-in-the-wall) computer kiosk sites in southern India, made freely available to children, without supervision, for nine months. Computing skills acquisition, as measured by the Icon Association Inventory, was plotted for each month and the learning curves are reported in the paper. The observed curves were fitted to predicted curves to understand the rates and stages of learning. Results indicate uniform improvement in the computing skills of the children who used these kiosks. Copyright (c) 2005 Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

This paper examines how concept maps can be used to facilitate learning in a flipped classroom. Concept maps are a method for visual knowledge representation. In a flipped classroom, learning materials are made available to students for self-learning before class starts, while in-class time is used for student-teacher interaction. In this paper, we consider the role of concept maps created by the teacher in three different ways: a) as learning materials for students in a flipped classroom, b) as an organizational tool for the knowledge representation, and c) as an assessment method in which the questions are created for each concept so that the teacher is able to identify which concept the student has not grasped properly. This methodology was implemented in a pilot study with final year MCA students. The preliminary findings are extremely positive; further research work is in progress and large-scale experimentation is planned.

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