The parable of Abdul:

Notice:

The parable of Abdul is an excerpt from the book Connectivity written by Judy Breck and published recently by Scarecrow Education.

 In this book Judy Breck describes a dawning golden age of learning in which the digital divide has closed because everyone is studying common subjects like math, geography, sciences, technology and health literally on the same webpage. She explains how a small-world network theory provides new perspectives for education and human affairs.

 The parable of Abdul is the story of an Afghan school age boy named Abdul; it describes the arrival of handheld computers with Internet access into his family living in the high Hindu Kush Mountains of Afghanistan

 Thanks to Judy Breck and  publisher of Connectivity for given us the permission to present Abdul story here in HASCO web site.

                                      Sincerely

                                      H.Khaled

 THE PRABLE OF ABDUL:

Abdul Khaled was seven-years-old in 2001, living in the high Hindu Kush mountains of Afghanistan, when the first donkeys carrying humanitarian relief arrived through the snow-filled pass from the valley far below his home village. As the fifty or so people who lived in his little town crowded around, a man pulling items out of one of the little donkeys’ packs called Abdul over and gave him a book. He hurried back to his family’s house and sat at the small table near the kitchen fire. He turned the pages of his new treasure to find pictures of animals, some of which were familiar, like the cows and horses. Others were new and exciting like the monkeys and dolphins. Four years later Abdul still has the book. It is, he figures, probably the only one he will ever own. He does not imagine a need for books for himself or, when he has them in the future, for his children. He can read any book that ever existed on the book-size handheld that he has carried with him since 2004. He can also travel virtually to husbandry sources for cows and horses and to the jungle and undersea habitats of monkeys and dolphins, learning far about the animals than books could convey.

   We look in on Abdul at age eleven as he sits by the fire at the kitchen table in his village home. He has deployed a dynamic net to study chemistry. The net includes his own mind, a table of periodic elements at Los Alamos, an virtual experiment at MIT and a whiteboard link to a mentor teacher in Kabul. He has also booted and keeps handy, as an icon on his handheld’s screen, a collection of dictionaries from several Internet sources, which he does not need as often as he used to, but dips into now and then to verify the meaning of a word. Abdul’s goal with his current work on chemistry is to take the online certification exam for the equivalent of college freshman chemistry before his twelfth birthday. That certification will qualify him to apply for a virtual apprenticeship in a project sponsored by Qatar’s largest petroleum facility. Abdul is eager to become a chemist and belongs to a Chemwiz net group with members from 27 countries. In the group there are budding chemists, chemistry professors and practicing chemists in industry all of whom activate dynamic nets to exchange ideas and enthusiasm online.

   Abdul received his first handheld in the spring of 2004. He was among 30 Afghan children who were provided with the handhelds by a cooperative project between the Qatar petroleum company now sponsoring apprenticeships and an American mobile device manufacturer. The original handheld was replaced a year later with a new model that had a larger screen for interfacing the Internet and which was by then being mass produced at a wholesale price of under $200. When Abdul received his second handheld, it was part of the delivery of 50, which provided every person in his village with his or her personal handheld. The $10,000 that paid for the 50 handhelds came from an international literacy foundation which had recently switched all of its resources to the Global Handheld movement.

   When the donkey delivered the book to Abdul, there was no Internet access through the valleys of the Hindu Kush. WI-FI was still a trendy and spotty access method in the United States, Japan and parts of Europe. The Internet was accessible everywhere on earth by the end of 2005. The United States and other nations with significant satellite coverage collaborated to bathe the surface of the planet with the Internet. At the same time the lily pads of WI-FI popped up in place after place until they reached a tipping point a started to multiply geometrically. Wireless phone transmitters approached ubiquity. Abdul’s village was so many miles distant from other human habitation that it had a dish of its own that received a satellite feed into a transmitter that provided hook-up in the village’s valley for all the features of the residents’ handhelds, including phone, radio, Internet, GPS and other services. At the table by the kitchen fire in his high mountain home, Abdul surfed in broadband and cast his dynamic nets wherever he chose within the global meshed nets.

   Does it seem odd to you that every person in the village received a handheld? Sure, the kids need to get educated and seem without much effort to become whizzes with electronics. But what about Abdul’s sixty-year-old grandmother, Bebe? She cannot even read and has never traveled farther than a hundred miles from the village. Like a high percentage of grandmas the world over, Abdul’s Bebe is conservative in her tribal and religious views. Why waste a handheld on her? She would not know what to do with it. The digital age will revolutionize the young generation but it will be decades before they are running the world.

   When Abdul’s Bebe received her handheld she was enormously pleased. In the first place, it was a telephone. Up until she got her handheld her use of a phone had been limited to once or twice a month when the family traveled the 20 miles to the town in the valley below her home village. She would use a pay phone in the town to call her sisters who lived in a small city at the base of the mountain range. During the winter, the family could seldom get through the pass to the lower town so Bebe could make no phone calls at all. Since her handheld streamed video, it was also virtually a television. It would have given her newspapers too, but they did not mean much to her since she could not read. Bebe’s fourteen-year-old granddaughter Ramsia considered her own handheld as the key to her future. Ramsia was not allowed to go to school, which was limited in her valley to boys, but she was determined to get an education. She tutored herself with the reading programs provided by her handheld, sometimes getting some help from Abdul. Ramsia was soon showing off to Bebe, stirring a long dormant determination in the older woman to learn to read. With Ramsia’s help Bebe began using the reading and other 3Rs tutorials interfaced with her handheld. Dynamic nets cast from the Hindu Kush village soon flowed about the macro nets at the will of Khaled, Ramsia and Bebe.

   For Khaled, Sr., Bebe’s son and the father of Abdul and Ramsia, the handheld quickly became an instrument of independence from the village leader of his tribe. Now that most of the men in his region had the handhelds the devices became their means of communication and coordination. Information services from various agencies and private companies on the handhelds informed the men of agricultural conditions and marketing matters. Individual interests were fed by the handhelds. Khaled, Sr. could follow political news on a Kabul Web site, forming opinions independently of the tribal chieftain’s input. He also enjoyed checking soccer scores and avidly followed the Afghan team in the Asian games. Abdul did too. Father and son often discussed plans to attend the games when Abdul was older.

   My Hindu Kush model in this parable is very small scale. There is no scale from small to large for individual humans because each is a separate, sovereign soul and sentient mind. Therefore, to increase the scale of the changes in the lives of the Khaled family what we need to do is to give a handheld to every living human. Does that strike you as impossible? Not only could it happen, but the process underway. It has become quite conceivable that everyone will soon have a cell phone and the cell phone is becoming the handheld I have been describing. The development of the mobile Internet is a big movement in technology, software and content creation. The convergence of all of the features in the handhelds described for the Khaled family is well underway.

  A parable about a family named Oko in Nigeria would have the same characters using their handhelds in the same ways. So would one about a Chen family on a farm above the Yellow River in the interior of China. And it would be the same for a Jones family in a project in south Chicago. Any members of any of these actual families could exchange emails with counterparts across the world or talk with them on the phone, and while they were talking they could literally be on the same virtual page on the Internet comparing their thoughts or to see each other in real time. In fact, in our parable, Abdul’s Chem Whiz net group includes in its membership a teenage member of each family, the Okos the Chens and the Jones. Far fetched? Not at all, as the placement by MIT of its course materials online is showing already. It is daily included in dynamic nets that engage students across the world, as this comment from India describes, "I'm a chemical engineer in India who cannot afford the dream about coming to MIT for further studies, but now I can learn about the state—of—art in chemical engineering, thanks to MIT." MIT’s Open Courseware illustrates a future that has arrived for the Indian engineer. It arrived for the families in this parable when they received their handhelds.

   As the final chapter explains, the parable of Abdul can quickly come true. That will probably happen without any central planning. The dimensions of the meshed nets themselves have long since passed the tipping point toward universal hooking up of virtually all the enterprise and knowledge content on earth. People will come next. Every project small and large toward achieving a handheld for any person is helpful and will speed the day when the planet tips into a rapid cascade that will hook up everyone.

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