Next time you sit in Mad Rona’s, I bet you’ll spot several coffee-drinkers using tablet computers. Do you suppose they learned to use those devices as quickly as Ethiopian kids who had no computer instruction? Mashable reports: Given Tablets But No Teachers, Ethiopian Kids Teach Themselves.

Earlier this year, OLPC workers dropped off closed boxes containing the tablets, taped shut, with no instruction. I thought the kids would play with the boxes. Within four minutes, one kid not only opened the box, found the on-off switch … powered it up. Within five days, they were using 47 apps per child, per day. Within two weeks, they were singing ABC songs in the village, and within five months, they had hacked Android, Negroponte said. Some idiot in our organization or in the Media Lab had disabled the camera, and they figured out the camera, and had hacked Android. [continue]

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