Have you ever put a computer into a hole in a wall in a remote village in India and watched what happened?

Me neither. But Sugata Mitra has.

He’s showing us a video of what happened. A 13-year-old school dropout was the first to discover the computer. He later told Sugata “this is the first television I’ve seen that I can do something on.” By the end of the first evening this 13-year-old had not only learned how to browse the Internet (without any help) but he had taught 70 others how to do it as well.

This one talk alone was worth coming to LIFT.

Organizer Laurent Haig says they are recording all the talks and will put the talks up online soon. I’ll definitely link to this talk when it’s up.

UPDATE: Stephanie Booth has a writeup/photo of this and many other sessions.

It’s always interesting to see which videos of mine get people to comment in the first 24 hours. I’m shocked, though, that the only thing I can find that my videos at Stanford Linear Accelerator caused is this comment on a blog by Christopher Leonard who lives in London. Here’s what he says:

“The conversations with the team at SLAC are interesting and diverse and cover not only the birth of the web (both at SLAC ande CERN), but also much about particle physics too.”

Of all the videos I’ve put up lately, these conversations were among the most interesting. At least to me. I wonder why some videos generate tons of comments and others generate nearly none?

Florence Devourad, chairwoman of the Wikipedia Foundation, warned the audience this morning at LIFT that they need more funds to keep servers up and running.