This is a 20 minute presentation, which you may not have the time to jump into now, so let me summarize some of the highlights for you. As the winner of the 2013 TED Prize, he received one million dollars to implement his theories as outlined in this presentation.
His topic in this video presentation is the Future of Education. Sugata suggests that the current system evolved about 300 years ago in Victorian England. The British were able to manage one of the largest Empires in history without computers, telephones or airplanes with hand written data on pieces of paper. What they did have was a bureaucratic administrative machine. They created schools to generate the manpower to run this bureaucratic administrative machine. The students needed to become identical. They needed to write alike because the data was hand written. They needed to be able to read and do math in their heads. They needed to be identical so they could be moved from New Zealand to Canada and be instantly functional.
The world of Victorian England does not exist anymore. What does that mean for education? What's next? It's not even that the schools are broken, they were actually very well designed and are working as designed. The problem is that they are outdated.
Mitra's research began while he was teaching programming in New Delhi. He wanted to find out how slum children, who played beside the school where he taught, would interact with a computer. He sealed a computer and mouse in a wall of the slums beside his office and left it there for the children. Only instructing them that they could play with it if they wanted and that he was going away. When he came back 8 hours later, they were browsing the internet.
Concerned that someone had shown the kids (some as young as 6 years old) how to use the mouse, Mitra moved his experiments to much more remote villages in India to remove the possibility of the kids getting help from computer savvy adults. One group of children after a couple of months complained that they wanted a better mouse and a faster processor. They lamented that they had had to teach themselves English in order to play the games.
Mitra's attention is captured by this idea that they had taught themselves. Their progress was clearly based on motivation and sharing information. He wanted to settle this question of the children teaching themselves with an absurd proposition. He put a computer in a Tamil speaking community and loaded it with information in English about DNA replication. He assumed he would leave the computer after a baseline test of the children's knowledge of DNA, come back for additional testing that would just replicate the initial scores of 0%. However that's not what happened. Eventually with only passive assistance the scores reached 50%.
Among his conclusions is that knowing is obsolete. If you need to know, you find out. Encouragement is the key to learning. The new role of the teacher is to ask the big questions and provide encouragement. This shifts the focus of education away from the threat of punishment/exams which have a tendency to shut down the brain.
Mitra's wish for the future is SOLEs, self organized learning environments. The teacher poses the questions and admires the answers. He has documented in his research how he has seen this process work. He challenges us is to set up these kinds of learning environments and share the results with others. He was awarded one million dollars from TED to implement his wish. You can get the SOLE Toolkit here.
Sugata Mitra's studies revolved around kids much younger than college students but these findings are certainly relevant for all levels of education. How can we use this information in our classrooms? What are you already doing that supports his theories?
Please watch the TED presentation above and hear him present his ideas. He is much more articulate than my paraphrasing.
Here are some websites with information about his work.
http://www.ncl.ac.uk/ecls/staff/profile/sugata.mitra
http://www.hole-in-the-wall.com/
http://sugatam.blogspot.com/
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