The Story of Sugata Mitra's Experiments with Self-Teaching

An autodidact is a self-taught person. Something I love about this whole story (or experiment, rather) is that it demonstrates how intelligent kids really are. Being a teacher who has taught second language learners I have first hand experience with young people who have difficulty expressing themselves or demonstrating knowledge in a second language, but are otherwise highly intelligent people. 

Sugata Mitra is an education scientist from India. His TED talk, “New Experiments in Self-Teaching” is something all educators should study. Mitra suggests that good teachers don’t want to go in the places they are most needed (ie) impoverished communities/ countries. I have to agree with this, as a generalization. There are those teachers who love to travel and teach, but the best ones often aim for the elite schools.

The First Experiment

Mitra embedded computer touch screens into the walls of public spaces (slums, in particular) in several countries worldwide and waited for the results. (public "hole in the wall" computers) The conclusion was that children are not only keen to explore, but they also have the ability to teach themselves to use computers without guidance: when are interested, they learn. (he jokes about how an extended version of the experiment, using speech to text software, led to children having changed their accents to be understood by the program) Another interesting observation Mitra had was that over several months children retained more information when they worked at a computer, but collaboratively. One computer for four students is one of Mitra’s criteria – forcing collaboration. He concluded in his experiments that one computer for one child hinders learning. (being at a one-to-one school, I can see this, though it’s a generalization and very much context-based)

Furthering the experiment, Mitra went into classrooms, with 4 students to 1 computer, and would ask them a tough question for them to figure out. Eventually they do. One question I have, though, is what quality the collaboration is. It’s human nature to have a leader and follower, even in situations of good collaboration, and some know more than others. To be fair, I haven’t looked at data from the experiments, but how does Mitra learn about the nature of the collaboration? Was it one student that had the tech skills and / or mind to figure out the answers? When a group solves a problem we have to question how they solved it and what contribution each student made.

Self-Organized Learning Environments

Mitra also discusses SOLE - self organized learning environments. His experiments are the foundation of this idea that we can organize our learning independently. (though I’ve not read Mitra suggest this is the best form of learning, but merely one facet of how we learn) “To go further, Dr. Mitra supplements SOLE with e-mediators, or the "granny cloud" as he calls it: amateur volunteers who use Skype to help kids learn online. (source)” A recent Google Power Searching course I recently took reminds me a little of the skills needed to search effectively for answers. The skills learned are not advanced in the sense that it takes a while to learn, but the search strategies are not always intuitive.

I think I need to lean more about SOLE.

Wall Street Journal Article:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704584804575645070639938954.html

Here is an example school package that outlines a SOLE program based on Mitra’s work:

http://repository.alt.ac.uk/2208/)

Mitra also has a book, Beyond the Hole in the Wall: Discover the Power of Self-Organized Learning.