Inspiration
Sugata Mitra: Let children use the Internet in groups and answer the question, by themselves. This is SOLE (Self Organised Learning Environment)
Best known for his ‘Hole in the Wall’ experiment, Professor of Educational Technology at the School of Education, Communication and Language Sciences at Newcastle University, England, Sugata Mitra, forges on ahead with his mission of Minimally Invasive Education.
Our series "Teacher Warriors" honours some of the country’s best and bravest teacher warriors, striving to give kids a fighting chance at a better present and a future floating with possibilities. In the Thirteenth episode, Nichola Pais speaks to Prof Sugata Mitra, Professor of Educational Technology at the School of Education, Communication and Language Sciences at Newcastle University:
Best known for his ‘Hole in the Wall’ experiment, Professor of Educational Technology at the School of Education, Communication and Language Sciences at Newcastle University, England, Sugata Mitra, forges on ahead with his mission of Minimally Invasive Education. Since the 1970s, his work has resulted in the training and development of nearly a million young Indians, including some of the poorest children in the world.
Your pet project – Hole in the Wall… How did it come about?
The ‘Hole in the Wall’ experiment of 1999 was done by me simply out of curiosity. To see what children would do with an information environment just by themselves. I had no idea it would lead to self-organised learning, deep learning and, eventually, to change in education worldwide. That experiment gave us a glimpse of the future – one that we could barely comprehend.
Your vision for the education of the disadvantaged children you work with?
I work with children all over the world, disadvantaged or otherwise. I find the same methods working everywhere. Not so much because of my work but because of the information environment we live in.
Over the next decade, it will no longer be possible to tell whether a person is consulting the Internet or not. Access will be through invisible audiovisual technology. When that happens, examinations, as we know them, will have little meaning. Indeed, ‘knowing’ as we use that word today, will become less consequential. If a child and the Internet are considered a composite creature, then how much does that creature know?
In that world, it will not be important what you know (because you can know whenever you want), but it will be important what you look for and what you think of what you find. This is what education must focus on. Comprehension, communication and computing will be the pillars of primary education for all children. Reading, writing and arithmetic will be subsumed into these ‘Three Cs’.
Classrooms with students and teachers are a technology for learning. An old but time-tested technology that has brought up countless generations in the world. That technology is based on the fact that there are things you should know, just in case you ever need them – because, in an age gone by, when you need to know, the means to know may not be available to you.
The Internet and associated devices have changed that premise. You can know at the point of need. You can ‘know before you learn’ (in the words of a 10-year old in England). The ‘classroom-student-teacher’ technology is obsolete under these changed circumstances.
What are the challenges you continue to encounter?
The biggest challenge is the examination system left over from the last century. Learning is equated to the ability to reproduce information and solve problems using no assistive technology. Often, the questions asked have little relevance to life. Can you solve a quadratic equation? Well, so what if you can’t? Can you go through life without knowing how to solve a quadratic equation? The examination system is mostly meaningless today.
The second problem is, often, parents. ‘My child should be educated the way I was educated’ is a mindset that is common and poses a major challenge to change in education and learning. It is hard to accept that knowledge that we held so dear may no longer be needed.
The positive changes you feel happy to have brought about through your work…
There is an awareness of the problems I spoke about earlier, although not everyone agrees. There is general consensus among teachers around the world that groups of children can learn things by themselves, using the Internet.
New skills and new things need to be learned. And they need to be learned differently from the ‘taught’ methods of yesterday.
We need a ‘School in the Cloud’. Many agree.
What, in terms of support and awareness, do you feel the government needs to offer?
Governments need to change assessment methods urgently. The old examination system is near breaking point. The Internet must form an integral part of school – indeed the Internet should be learned as a subject, much like science or mathematics are. Teacher training needs to be revamped. Teachers don’t need to be repositories of knowledge; they need to be able to raise interesting and relevant questions for our times. They don’t need to know the answers.
Can you share any experience which reinforces your belief in your mission?
In a school in Hong Kong, the math teacher was going to start on trigonometry. He was worried the children would show no interest. I suggested they start with a SOLE (Self Organised Learning Environment). So we asked them, ‘How does a smart phone know where it is – how does it know its geographic location?’ We let the children use the Internet in groups and answer the question, by themselves. We, the teacher and I, just sat down. There was a huge amount of noise and commotion after which they said they had found the answer.
‘The phone looks at three towers or three satellites and figures out where it is’
‘Why three?’, I asked.
‘Because they use triangles and something called Trigonometry. Triangles have to have three sides’, they said.
‘Would you like to know what Trigonometry is and how your phone uses it?’, I asked.
‘YES’, they chorused.
We had opened a door…
This article was originally published in the June 2017 issue as a part of our cover story on Teacher Warriors. Subscribe to ScooNews Magazine today to have more such stories delivered to your desk every month.
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Images courtesy – Prof Sugata Mitra