One of my friend, who hails from a remote village in Karnataka, was telling about how the school in his village got a computer! We are really in the era of information technology and believe it or not, it is spreading its wings.
But the things are not that rosy! In addition to the usual problems of power and flaky telephone lines, there was one serious problem in his school: Let alone the students, none of the teachers knew how to operate it!
This got me to thinking. Are we blindly copying the ideas from west for our country? It is definitely very good to have targets like 100% computer literacy for the district of Malappuram in Kerala, but what is more useful is to bring the vast amount of content that is available on internet to the rural areas. Now youtube has so many education videos, Wikipedia continues to grow in all possible languages including so called dead languages like Sanskrit, Many universities are putting their courseware out into open, there are countless podcasts on all kinds of topics and also there are so many free books sites. And this list is endless.
Now to me, these are more valuable than the skills of using word processing, excel or evening programming in XYZ language! Yes, live internet will be great, provided the connection stays up and the web page gets rendered by the time you finish your lunch and also dinner!
Now how can rural school and also folks who drive SUVs and can afford computers get access to all this contents without knowledge of ‘operating computers’?
Enter Seagate! Just like we have sumps in Bangalore to store water from twice a week supply from the corporation, these devices can act as ‘content sump’ from the internet. All such content can be downloaded once and made available on large capacity drives in the Freeagent family. These have fasted access speed. For viewing the content we have FreeAgent Theater!. All legally copyable stuff can be easily shared with one another (social networking!). So this Freeagent family has market in the remotest corner on commercial as well as philanthropic basis. And this also opens up a new industry of providing content just like Bangalore has a good market for water tankers!
It does not have to be only education content – even entertainment drives learning! A foreign language movie with subtitles (supported by FreeAgent theatre) can help spreading awareness of different cultures and open the shackles of limited thinking.
The flow of contents need not be unidirectional! The people can generate content – We in cities will be happy to see the innovations that are happening not far from us. And our children can see and understand who gives milk and how farm based industries operate!
Knowledge removes the shackles of narrow minded thinking. I really have great hope on this technology to bring in what Rabindranath Tagore said:
“Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high, ...
where knowledge is free...
Into that heaven of freedom my father let my country awake!”
PS: Of course I the city dweller am dreaming of coveting these devices for the obvious reasons all mentioned at: http://ibnms.com/2009/03/03/seagate-contest/ .
And I have one more reason. I have got sick of searching the movies and CDs I want at my home – they are always hiding into covers of some other CDs and will not be found when I want them. I think this device will solve that problem once and for all.
