Teaching XML to the hill tribes

I was staying Luang Prabang, a city in the mountains of Northern Lao, and after a delicious meal at a restaurant called Tamarind, I wandered into what I thought was a simple photo gallery next door displaying the work of Lao adolescent and teen photographers (another Kids With Cameras-type project). Though the place does indeed display the work of budding Lao photographers, its primary function is to serve as a library and free computer center for Lao kids who normally wouldn't have access to computers or books. The place is called @MyLibrary, and I had a really interesting conversation with the founder about teaching kids who have absolutely no context for what you're trying to teach them. Everything you might take for granted when teaching Western kids has to be thought through again.

For example, @MyLibrary is creating some tutorials in Lao made by kids for kids. One of the first videos is intended to teach how to format a list in Microsoft Word. Turns out teaching the formatting part is easy. Teaching kids what a list is and why you'd want to make one is the hard part. These people, many of whom are hill-tribe people like the Hmong, have never needed to make a list before, have never thought about it. So well over half the video is a brilliant little animated story showing someone going through a very inefficient shopping trip, and then showing how the trip could be made much easier with the use of a list. Only after they've established that do they go into the details of how to create and format a list using Word.

I'm faced with similar issues right now developing training materials for DDD. Except instead of having to teach folks about lists, I have to teach them about XML, Unicode, and binary numbering systems. Finding stories anad metaphors to explain these concepts to hill tribe villagers is going to be an interesting challenge.