科学技术是柄双刃剑，既能造福人类，也能祸害人类。一个好的科技人员会把技术用在解决人们遇到的困难和问题上，微软研究中心印度分部的Randy Wang选择了运用数字化技术来辅助教育，尤其是偏远地区儿童的教育。我大概看了一下他们的网页，他们的想法好像很简单，就是系统地将优秀教师的课程录像，刻录到DVD上再邮寄到各个学校，这样优秀的师资会被最大地利用。但是如果只让学生看电视，没有足够的课堂互动，效果不会太好。他们的解决办法是充分发挥本地老师的作用，通过暂停录像，提问题的办法加强互动。本地老师通过这样的方式也可以提升业务水平。这样的介绍难免过于简单，详情请访问网址：http://dsh.cs.washington.edu/info/overview.html

    Randy Wang曾是普林斯顿大学的助教授，为了这一项目于2005年离开生活安逸的美国，去印度工作。因为他在这一项目中的杰出贡献，ACM于2007年授予他Eugene Lawler奖。(http://awards.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=C101177&srt=all&aw=141&ao=LAWLER)

 ********************************************************************

Digital StudyHall (DSH) is a research project that seeks to improve education for the poor children in slum and rural schools in India. In a nutshell, think of its technical approach as the educational equivalent of Netflix + YouTube + Kazaa.

We digitally record live classes by the best grassroots teachers, transmit them on the "Postmanet" (effected by DVDs sent in the postal system), collect them in a large distributed database, and distribute them on DVDs to poor rural and slum schools. Education experts and teachers use the system to explore pedagogical approaches involving local teachers actively "mediating" the video lessons. By harvesting a "viral phenomenon" of community participation, DSH aims to help train teachers and deliver quality instruction to underprivileged children. The project is a collaboration between computer scientists and education experts. The main aspects of DSH are:

 

• A "people's database of everything"
• A network of hubs and spokes
• Mediation-based pedagogy
• Technology for sharing community-generated video

A live deployment of DSH has been operating in India since the summer of 2005. As of spring of 2007, we run pilot "hubs" in three cities in India (Lucknow, Bangalore, and Pune), covering approximately 30 schools. And during this time, we have accumulated about 550 recordings of lessons in English, math, and science, in Hindi, Kannada, Marathi, Tamil, and English. We have also started applying the same approach to agriculture extension work (Digital Green). Today, DSH is still a young research project, as we continue to work on rigorous evaluations and seek to understand many outstanding questions. We have, however, already seen initial promising signs, and we hope to eventually scale up the system to cover a far greater number of children, contributing toward the Millennium Development Goal of universal primary education.

转载本文请联系原作者获取授权，同时请注明本文来自赵晓亮科学网博客。
链接地址：https://blog.sciencenet.cn/blog-61674-33014.html

上一篇：路由系统简介（1）
下一篇：教授还是程序员？- Donald Knuth访谈录