| This dissertation investigates how and for what purposes do people in Almora, Central Himalayas, India, educate themselves and others about and with computers in informal public venues. This work is deeply influenced by the nature of questioning and work of Herve Varenne (2008; 1992; 1998) and, as such, views education in its broadest sense---that as instruction in the constructing and enabling of the learning event. This is a six-month ethnography of social learning with computers in Almora, a town of 56,000 people in Uttarakhand, Central Himalayas. This study focuses on relations between "old" and "new" technologies, how people harness physical, social, economic and cultural resources to facilitate their learning with these artifacts, the nature and consequences of this learning as well as perceptions and beliefs about the artifacts and its situated spaces and activities within the larger context of development policy and practice. Investigating practices amongst a relatively remote and new group of users of the computer and the Net allows for possible new perspectives to emerge and perhaps old views to be reinforced and revisited; this work contributes to realms of user-interfacing, new media, information consumption and production, social learning with technology, information and communication technology (ICT) and international development, to policy and practice of new technologies for social change. This fieldwork with new technology users has revealed that much of the learning activity with computers are at cybercafes and are mostly non-utilitarian in an economic sense; instead, it is more centered on entertainment and social purposes. When computers do get used for "work," it does not necessarily constitute as "productive" in a conventional and formal education sense. Also, by looking away from schools into informal learning practices and spaces, much is revealed of the schooling process itself. This has led to further my investigation on the historicity and spatiality of relations between labor, leisure and learning within technologically-mediated environments. |
