SOMEs = Self-Organized Mediation Environments
Last May while participating in a presentation given by Prof. Sugata Mitra, the mentor of the Hole in the Wall project in India, for the WiAOC09 (Webheads in Action Online Convergence), he referrred the SOLE and SOME projects and said that anyone could volunteer to be an online mentor basically for children in rural areas of India. The project seemed so interesting that I volunteered at once. After a couple of email messages between us, I was contacted by Suneeta Kulkarni, Research Manager of the SOLE Project. We arranged a trial session for June 25.
Here's some background about the project taken from the project wiki (A bit about SOLE & SOME).
"We are overwhelmed and grateful that so many of you, all over the world, have offered to help with interacting with children over the Internet! Many of you have also evinced a desire to know a little more about the project as a whole, apart from the story reading and interaction with children. So we’ve put together a little note and look forward to collaborating with you on this project in many different ways. The project keeps evolving in fascinating ways through this collaborative journey. Thank you all!"
"How it all began:
At first it was just a germ of an idea, born of observations way back in the mid 1980’s, at home and around, in conversations with other people interested in how children learn and their education that made Sugata Mitra want to see just how far and where this ‘self-organized’ learning could go."
"And then... SOME!
... It seems, from your response, that there are a very large number of people in the world willing to give a little of their time and be ‘mentors’ for children who need it. Imagine a world where thousands of such mentors / mediators are available to a child over the Internet. Not a typed or texted presence, but a real face-to-face conversational presence. A world where the children interact with who they wish - for entertainment, for help with work, for emotional support, or just for a chat.
This is the group of SOME volunteers that is emerging - a group of people who would make themselves available over Skype for, say, one hour a week. We would then schedule ‘sessions’ with schools in India, to start with, when a ‘mediator’ will interact with a group of children. This could involve reading stories, conversing, singing and all those things friendly people do with children."
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