Sugata+Mitra

media type="custom" key="25019358" Education scientist Sugata Mitra tackles one of the greatest problems of education -- the best teachers and schools don't exist where they're needed most. In a series of real-life experiments from New Delhi to South Africa to Italy, he gave kids self-supervised access to the web and saw results that could revolutionize how we think about teaching. Educational researcher Sugata Mitra is the winner of the 2013 TED Prize. His wish: Build a School in the Cloud, where children can explore and learn from one another.

Sugata Mitra: Education researcher Educational researcher Sugata Mitra is the winner of the 2013 TED Prize. His wish: Build a School in the Cloud, where children can explore and learn from one another.

Why you should listen to him:
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. Download the Self Organized Learning Environment (SOLE) Toolkit >> > "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[| Read more about Sugata Mitra on the TED Blog] [|»] #|Email to a friend #|»

Quotes by Sugata Mitra
> [] More TEDQuotes… Sugata Mitra/ Kids can teach themselves // 20:59 Posted: Aug 2008// Sugata Mitra/ The child-driven education // 17:13 Posted: Sep 2010// Sugata Mitra/ Build a School in the Cloud // 22:31 Posted: Feb 2013//
 * “Education is a self-organizing system, where learning is an emergent phenomenon.” Play video from this quote »[]
 * “The Victorians were great engineers. They engineered a [schooling] system that was so robust that it's still with us today, continuously producing identical people for a machine that no longer exists.” Play video from this quote »[]
 * “It's quite fashionable to say that the education system's broken — it's not broken, it's wonderfully constructed. It's just that we don't need it anymore. It's outdated.” Play video from this quote »[]
 * “In nine months, a group of children left alone with a computer in any language will reach the same standard as an office secretary in the West.” Play video from this quote »[]
 * “It took nature 100 million years to make the ape stand up and become Homo sapiens. It took us only 10,000 to make knowing obsolete.” Play video from this quote »[]
 * “My wish is that we design the future of learning. We don't want to be spare parts for a great human computer.”Play video from this quote »

Sugata Mitra on the Web

 * [|**TED Prize:** ted.com/sugata]
 * [|**Home:** sugatam.blogspot.com]
 * [|**Home:** Hole in the Wall]
 * [|**Essay:** "The Hole in the Wall Project"]
 * [|**TED Book**: //Beyond the Hole in the Wall//]
 * [|**TED Blog:** Q&A]

Speaker playlist

 * Sugata Mitra's 5 favorite education talks