By JACOB TEMPCHIN Source: ReadWrite
A couple of summers ago I spent time working with schoolchildren in a township in the suburbs of Cape Town, South Africa. This township is known as Vrygrond, which translates from Afrikaans as “Free Land.” The children were quite poor; none of them had more than one pair of shoes, and as the name of their township suggests, none of their families had any legal claim of ownership over their patchwork homes.
Incredibly, roughly a third of these children carried with them a Nokia feature phone that provided them wide-ranging access to the Internet. They used these phones to show me videos of the South African standup comedian Trevor Noah and clips of Jon Stewart on The Daily Show (where Noah would later replace Stewart as host). They even pulled up websites on their devices to provide evidence for their claims that Beyoncé and Jay-Z are members of a secret international satanist organization.
I was struck by how connected the children in Vrygrond were with the media and entertainment of the United States while their parents were simultaneously so disconnected from the global economy.
These children, like their peers all over the world, are growing up in a digitally connected world.
Curiosity is Essential for Learning
According to Sandhya Hedge, an investor at Khosla Impact, when people in developing countries first get their hands on mobile devices, they spend a great majority of their time in three ways: social networking, entertainment, and news. That sounds a lot like my own smartphone usage, and probably yours as well. Access to information is not enough to foster education.
People have to be motivated to learn.
The difference between people who learn and those who don’t has much to do with curiosity, and not just because being curious about something motivates us to figure out how it works. According to neuroscience research from the University of California, Davis, when we learn about something that catches our curiosity, our brain releases the neurotransmitter dopamine, which makes us more attentive, and which improves our ability to remember.