Tips for educators on accepting, employing and enjoying digital learning from Prof. Sugata Mitra

Books as Technology

If you look at the way the education system has evolved, there is a rationale. The rationale is that for the first 16 to 17 years of your life, you learn a whole lot of things. You are taught by people who know it. Why do you have to be taught? Because you don’t have access to that information easily. This was the case, for example, in the 15^th century, where if you wanted to learn something, you had to find an expert and ask him or her to please explain it to you. So that’s where the teaching bit comes. When books came, which was the first sort of impact of technology, suddenly the teacher’s knowledge could be tapped into a non-human form – the book. And there was equal controversy, I believe, at that time about the fact that books were going to ruin the education system! ‘What will teachers now do? Children will just pick up the book and they will figure it out!’ Then the teachers said, ‘No, that’s not going to happen because how do you know which book you have to read? The teacher will tell you!’ So, the curriculum, the library, the books, that kind of system came in…

The Big Shift

This happens for the first 17 years because after that, once you get into your job, you don’t have access to all those books. You can’t carry your library on your head – you have to have it inside your head! So if you are lost, you are stuck, you are on a ship going somewhere and you want to know where you are, you use your sextant, point to a star, you use your knowledge of trigonometry, you look at your watch and you figure it out. All this you learnt in the first 17 years. But what happens when you can carry the library with you? That’s the shift that we are going through. Not just the library, you can carry everything with you! So, if you’re now stuck on a ship, the new generation looks at a sextant and says, ‘What is this?’ Then you say ‘Well, trigonometry…’ and he says, ‘What is that?’ And you say, ‘But how will you find out where you are?’ And the new generation will say, ‘Here’s my phone’.

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We have to make that shift. We still believe that there is something very deep and important about using a sextant and trigonometrical knowledge and so on to figure out things. And we find it very bad that you just look at your phone and it tells you where you are! Fifty years from now there will be teachers who will say, ‘What is trigonometry? I don’t know’. Teachers will not think that the internet is such a big thing. So the SGEF conference you are having today, where we are talking about the internet and technology all the time, if there was a 10-year-old here – and this has happened to me in England – he would ask, ‘This conference is about the internet? But why are you having a conference about the internet? It’s everywhere!’ He has never known a world where the internet never existed.

‘Just In Time’ Learning

The first thing we must remember is that packing your head for the first 17 years of your life, like a suitcase for a journey, is no longer required. The stuff is available everywhere – whenever you need it, you can have it. You don’t need a ‘just-in-case’ education. Why were you taught trigonometry? Just in case you were stuck on a ship going nowhere. First of all, you know you’re never going to be stuck on a ship going nowhere. And secondly, even if you were, you could figure it out. You can type into your phone ‘Teach me some Trigonometry’ and it will teach you in 10 minutes. So the shift is from ‘just in case’ to ‘just in time’.
So what do we have to do? Are we teachers not needed? It’s not true. We have to enable children to do ‘Just In Time’ learning. How to learn quickly, how to learn accurately, how to search for the right thing – this is our job! So the job is changing. If teachers could realise that, then they wouldn’t have this attitude of ‘Technology is evil, technology will take away my job!’ We have to understand, technology doesn’t remain technology. You don’t think my clothes are technology, do you? It was once upon a time huge technology! My watch, my shoes, they used to be technology – they are not technology any more.  To the generation that is growing up, the internet and smartphones are not technology; they are things that you live with.

Teaching Using Tech

One of the topmost things to do, is instead of saying ‘I will teach you’, you shift to, ‘Can you learn this?’ It becomes a question. Instead of saying ‘I’m going to teach you about volcanoes’, you could say, ‘You know, it’s important to know certain things about volcanoes, so I’ll give you 20 minutes, can you figure it out and tell me?’ So you are reversing the process – the student is telling you, and not the other way around. It’s not a hard change to make once you are sensitive to it.

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This generation doesn’t take to orders, not because they are indisciplined – we often think they are indisciplined but every generation says about the next, ‘Oh they are all going to the dogs!’ Nobody is indisciplined, we are just adjusting and living with our time. So you must understand that with this generation you cannot tell them something like, ‘Don’t slouch, walk properly’. Now you will wonder why you shouldn’t tell someone this, it’s a nice thing to tell somebody. Well, it isn’t. This generation needs a reason. So they will come back with, ‘Why can’t I slouch? I want to slouch’. So then you reply, ‘You know, there are three muscles here which get weakened periodically if you slouch…’ something like that! They will understand that language. If you don’t know, you say something like, ‘I think it does something to your skeletal-muscular system. We are bipeds, we are meant to walk in a certain way. Just google it…’ If he googles it, he won’t slouch after that because he knows the reason. In a way, I welcome that quality in this generation because it’s the generation of reason, not orders.

I often hear teachers say, ‘My role has changed, from a teacher to that of a guide’. That’s not true anymore. You cannot guide people inside the internet; it’s too big to guide. Guide means you know where you are going – you often don’t anymore. So what is your role? The role of a teacher, I think, is of a friend. What you are saying to your class is, ‘You go there, I don’t know where you will land up, but I’ll be with you’. …From the back, instead of from the front. And children love it if they can go home and say, ‘My teacher is my friend’.

Reading vs. Internet

I am often told that reading a book helps you go deeper into the topic while the internet gives quick, superficial answers to questions. But I think it goes both ways. It’s true what you’re saying – if you read a book you can sometimes go deeper inside but I could take another example of where reading is not as good as speaking. The context would be poetry. To speak out a poem has a different, deeper connect than to read it. It’s the argument turned backwards where reading isn’t as good as it seems! On the internet what happens is that yes, you don’t get the depth of the book but you get the width that the book could never offer. Books don’t point to other books; the internet is all about pointing. So it’s a different medium. Should we not read books? I’m not sure. I’m from a different generation where I am horrified by the idea that we won’t read books! I think we should read books but then maybe I’m old-fashioned, maybe the day of the book is over…

The Lazy Issue

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Does the internet make children lazy? Again, just for the sake of being argumentative, I could apply that to history. Don’t you think that a farmer from 1500 BC would have looked at you and said, ‘They are terribly lazy! Look at the way they look, they have no muscles, they can’t stand up properly, they can’t work in the field etc’. We were very active but that’s because of anthropological reasons – we got down from the trees, we got up on our feet, we had to run for our food, we had to protect our families, shield ourselves from the weather, the works! We were a lot hardier… but we used to die at 30. Now, we are soft, we are lazy by those standards, we are like a sack of potatoes sitting there, every one of us eats too much, we probably sleep too much, we don’t bother about anything… we live to be 75! So, to me, it’s an achievement. It’s the achievement of homo sapiens. So, yes we are lazier – thank god!

Lines that find resonance…

Oh poetry on order! Why not? You know, teachers sometimes ask, ‘What should I look for in my job, in my career?’ Here’s what you should look for…

‘…to see the bright eyes of the dear one discover

She thought that I was not unworthy to love her. 

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There chiefly I sought thee, there only I found thee;        

Her glance was the best of the rays that surround thee;   

When it sparkled o'er aught that was bright in my story,

I knew it was love, and I felt it was glory.’

Byron

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This interview appeared in the September 2017 issue of ScooNews magazine.