2011/7/2 Rony gnulinuxist@gmail.com:
That is precisely what you dont want to do - buying someone else's idea of an idea. Content creation must be part of the students work, whereby they can directly feel the original idea. Amit Dhakulkar's use of a gps to teach physics, maths and geography is one such. Kids in Khalapur recording tales told by their grandparents is another. Many such absolutely interesting stuff in Khalapur.
[Apologies for the attribution error. I did not receive the email with this original text]
The teachers have to tread a middle path here. Significant deviations from the syllabi prescribed by the powers to be leads to the wrath of the parents/guardians who dream of their wards acing the class XII exam and getting into a good professional college. Thus they, in the current Indian milieu, cannot allow the students unrestricted content creation access. So, what happens (again, I am recalling from the market research I did for Next back in November 2009) is that the schools get the hardware and software aligned to the syllabi from the company, and then encourage the students to explore while staying aligned with the pedagogical requirements.
If a subject / topic is to be understood for the first time by a student, how will the discovering method work unless he has some clue of what he needs to discover.
This is a very naive view of the world. How did stalwarts like Newton, Darwin or anyone else ever discover anything? Nobody pointed Einstein that there is something called the General Theory of Relativity that is waiting to be discovered.
Binand