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Most of these kids had never seen a camera before, let alone handle one. However, they were off to a flying start within minutes of being handed over a digital camera.

You can see the photo-documentary produced by kids in rural Karnataka, however the kids in remote Ladakh or Arunachal Pradesh had equally fascinating stories to tell.

[If you are on a slow connection the movie may take time, consider downloading the movie to your computer and viewing it after the download completes. Right click here to download the movie to your computer]

Rural kids in Karnataka working on their photo-documentary

According to study presented to the American College of Sports Medicine (ACSM) “students benefit both physically and academically from time devoted during the school day to physical activity”. Read this story…

Need more evidence? See this video by Stuart Brown at TED.  His research shows that “play is not just joyful and energizing — it’s deeply involved with human development and intelligence”.

Recommendation: Let them play! Influence schools and public policy (private colonizers?) to recognize this and create facilities for play in schools and in localities.

Read the New York Times article… 

The other question is what motivates people like Professor R. Preston McAfee to make their books available for free, when they could have earned a fair bit from it — $100,000 advance and more, according to a New York Times article (Don’t Buy That Textbook, Download It Free)

Some sources for free textbooks:

Free Learning  http://freelearning.bccampus.ca/
MIT OpenCourseWare http://ocw.mit.edu/
Open Textbook  http://opentextbook.org/
WikiBooks  http://en.wikibooks.org/
Google’s Free Textbook Search http://www.freetextbooks.eu/

Please feel free to add to the list if you know of any more.

Since recordings will anyway be done, visually disabled students could be offered these “textbooks” as CDs or audio cassettes. Magazine articles and newspaper features could lead to on-air discussions and round-tables.

The question that’s been turning in my mind is: would publishers be open to sharing their content on-air without any charge? Would they be willing if we gave them back that content as audio files (a kind of barter arrangement?). Or, in the spirit of the enterprise, will they truly believe, that a good idea (or book) gets better when it is spread around?

In classes as high as 8, in children as old as 14, we’re encountering a frightening lapse of reading skills. If we make them sit in a line, it almost always seems to be the children towards the back (they seem to gravitate there), always the quietest (you’ll almost miss seeing them, and will certainly miss hearing them), yet always with that curious, desperate shine in their eyes, wishing and hoping that they could cut through the fog of their illiteracy.

One of the early partnerships we had explored for our community radio station was with Pratham, especially Pratham Books. I’d met them off and on at assorted meetings and book fairs, and their work, and their books had been sitting at the back of my mind as something exceptional. On a whim, I wrote on their website. Within a day, I had an answer. Actually, I had several. All of them positive, energetic, and gung-ho.

Now, all these weeks later, we’re looking at a concrete plan to air a regular slot, at least twice a day, that takes Pratham’s reading pedagogy to a wider audience through the radio. To those children left behind. To those children left at home.

As we hammer out the programming, train the volunteers, and learn from the process about what works and what doesn’t, I’m hoping that the content we create in this process can be used by community radios and Pratham across India. To start with, in the Hindi speaking states, since that is the language in which we are working, and later, as regional language adaptations in other states.

I just read a wonderful story about how it is being done in Bihar, through the radio (AIR), for primary school children throughout the state. Read the full story here.