I have not been more excited than after watching this video. Here is proof of something that I have always known, given the tools and the right questions anyone of us can learn complex, difficult and soul searching answers. Here is my vindication. I have been writing about how kids can learn to code, I am going to say kids can learn anything if we provide them the tools, let them collaborate and give them a lot of love and encouragement, then stand back and watch the magic. They don’t need instructions, they don’t need exams or punishment, all they need is someone encouraging their curiosity. Schools as we know them are obsolete.
Here is a brief description of what Dr.Sugata Mitra has been doing for the past decade.
Source: worldchanging.com
Educational researcher Dr. Sugata Mitra’s “Hole in the Wall” experiments have shown that, in the absence of supervision or formal teaching, children can teach themselves and each other, if they’re motivated by curiosity and peer interest. In 1999, Mitra and his colleagues dug a hole in a wall bordering an urban slum in New Delhi, installed an Internet-connected PC, and left it there (with a hidden camera filming the area). What they saw was kids from the slum playing around with the computer and in the process learning how to use it and how to go online, and then teaching each other.
The “Hole in the Wall” project demonstrates that, even in the absence of any direct input from a teacher, an environment that stimulates curiosity can cause learning through self-instruction and peer-shared knowledge. Mitra, who’s now a professor of educational technology at Newcastle University (UK), calls it “minimally invasive education.”
At TED2013, Sugata Mitra made a bold TED Prize wish: Help me build a place where children can explore and learn on their own — and teach one another — using resouces from the worldwide cloud.
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“Education-as-usual assumes that kids are empty vessels who need to be sat down in a room and filled with curricular content. Dr. Mitra’s experiments prove that wrong.”
Related articles
- School in the cloud: Research on how to get children to teach themselves yields $1-million TED prize for Sugata Mitra (vancouversun.com)
- Computer in Delhi slum wall leads to million dollar TED prize (ndtv.com)
- One on One: Sugata Mitra, 2013 TED Prize Winner (bits.blogs.nytimes.com)
