Kajal Madeka's Digital Portfolio

​The artifact for this competency is a reflection-essay using the ‘Hole-in-the-Wall’ experiment carried out in India as the backdrop for raising questions about equity in learning and teaching with technology – the knowledge divide. There has been criticism of the Hole-in-the-Wall approach as being a pedagogy for the poorer and underprivileged sections of society and that the knowledge these children gain from it is not of the higher order thinking that is desired when learning with technology. My reflections put these criticisms in a different light by raising ‘questions about the questions’ and examining them from the perspective of my own experiences of technology access in India and the realities of the digital and knowledge divide and opportunities for emancipation available to the poor in a developing country. The reflection is also a cautionary tale about how we, as students of instructional technology in a developed country, exposed daily to such rich possibilities in enhancing learning, tend to get ensconced in the rather false sense that this is how it should be everywhere instead of meeting people at the level they are and gradually moving them forward. 

This was a class presentation I had made for CI 610, the central idea of which has served as the framework for writing this reflection with the incorporation of new thoughts. The video I used for the presentation may be viewed above as also the PowerPoint I presented with. The criticism paper on the hole-in-the-wall that served as fodder for the presentation may help set the context for the stance I took in this presentation as well as this reflection paper and can be accessed here.