Here is an interesting talk that might change our assumptions about education. My brother and I went to a "free progress school" called Mirambika as children. This talk is by my brother's best friend's dad...small world...
In 1999, Sugata 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.
In the following years they replicated the experiment in other parts of India, urban and rural, with similar results, challenging some of the key assumptions of formal education. 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."
"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."
Linux Journal
if you can't watch this video on TED - over the net, try to download it first (you will find the download button below the video window on the page at TED)
love/biren
---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: TED <TED@...>Date: Fri, Aug 29, 2008 at 11:31 PM
Subject: This week: How kids teach themselves To: birenshah64@...
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This week on TED.com, Sugata Mitra talks about the "Hole in the Wall" project -- where kids in an Indian neighborhood figured out (on their own) how to use a PC and mouse, and then taught their friends. We've all seen kids do things like this, figuring out a new toy or the universal remote, but Mitra asks the next logical question: How can traditional schools harness the immense power of children to teach one another?
Also this week, watch John Q. Walker "re-perform" great piano pieces, with software that brings greats like Art Tatum back to life. Blogger Ory Okolloh tells the moving, personal story of how she committed herself to making Kenya a better place for her family. From last week, check out physicist Patricia Burchat, who is searching the universe for dark matter and dark energy. It's a mind-expanding topic that she explains clearly. And National Geographic photography director David Griffin talks about the powerful ways that photographs can connect us.
![]() Sugata Mitra: Can kids teach themselves?
Speaking at LIFT 2007, Sugata Mitra talks about his "Hole in the Wall" project. Young kids in this project figured out how to use a PC on their own -- and then taught other kids. Given this, he asks, what else can children teach themselves and each other? Watch this talk >>
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-- ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Mind inclining outwards finds suffering Mind inclining inwards knows peace www.lovingsilence.org
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"Nithya Shanti" <nithyashanti@...>
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