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Sugata Mitra: Can kids teach themselves?

Category: Technology
Posted on: September 2, 2008 3:14 PM, by Greg Laden

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. He asks, what else can children teach themselves?
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."

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Comments

This is nothing new. In our schools, when the teacher introduces something and then leaves the kids to try doing the new thing, the kids look around for someone who got it, then they learn from those, and teach others in turn. This is how things are taught in, for example, summer camp.

But of course that only works when kids are allowed to look around and talk and question.

In authoritarian teaching, it's feet flat on the floor, backs straight, eyes forward, and dead silence: any disruption is disobedience and must be punished. The nail that sticks up gets pounded down.

Posted by: 6EQUJ5 | September 2, 2008 4:46 PM

Hey, I actually think this is an awesome post, and I'd love to see more of this from you.

However, I lack impulse control. So please take this as the absurd joke it was intended as:

Now now, do you really want to propogate that subversive nonsense? If students don't need teachers, people might think schools are more needed for babysitting functions than for facilitating learning. And we couldn't have that, because it will further the PsychoAbusive-CreationistConservativeChristians-WhoWantToEatTehKiddiezBrainz-HomeschoolerAgenda!Eleventy!

Posted by: Becca | September 2, 2008 4:58 PM

Well maybe, but we do have to recognize that in a world where people responsibly have fewer children and lead productive professional lives, the schools ARE babysitting services, as well as educational institutions. If the schools owned up to this fact, and embraced it, and explained to the average taxpayer that if they don't get suffucient funding they'll be letting the kids out at noon and running the shcool year from Nov1 to May 1, there would be a very different attitude about educational funding!

Posted by: Greg Laden | September 2, 2008 5:26 PM

Right. This is a technique that good teachers, especially good science teachers use... "the teacher introduces something and then leaves the kids to try doing the new thing, the kids look around for someone who got it, then they learn from those, and teach others in turn. This is how things are taught in, for example," ...science lab! Where the kids are (should be) encouraged to talk and look around while the teacher runs around and gives help and pointers (but not answers) as needed. Oh, a teacher as a learning facilitator. New concept? Nope, it's been around a long time.

Good point on funding. And teachers as babysitters? How about pay teachers as babysitters. Who remembers the math that showed that if a teacher was paid per kid per hour, at the local babysitting rate, the teacher would make close to what they deserve. (Figure 30 kids, each times the babysitting rate per hour, times 6 hrs a day, for 180 days. Try it at $5 an hour. It comes to over $150,000 per year. Sounds about right.)

Posted by: Vince | September 2, 2008 8:28 PM

Yay Vince! I agree with that calculation!

Posted by: Serena | September 2, 2008 10:27 PM

Serena, you don't mind if we carve some small bit of that out for the paraprofessionals, do you? I have a friend who helps kids with ASD and EBD. If she could stop working her second job, I might see her more often.

Posted by: Stephanie Z | September 2, 2008 10:35 PM

Stephanie, There is an entire network of people who assist in the "babysitting" of students, paraprofessionals being a very important aspect of it. I don't think that money needs to be carved out for support personnel, though. Rather, they require a formula of their own. If it takes more people to babysit the kids you have, you must pay those people accordingly.

Posted by: Serena | September 2, 2008 10:48 PM

I visited a school board meeting once where the para's union rep was reading the boad the riot act ... they were prepared to go on strike. The school board sat somewhat chagrined but mostly just waiting for the para to shut up and go away.

In the mean time we got to hear from each school board member what they had done since the last meeting a few weeks earlier. One had gone to a baseball game. One had gone to the church breakfast. One had gone to a basketball game linked to a pancake breakfast. Another had gone to a banquet.

Meanwhile, you know what the paras are doing all week.

Posted by: greg laden | September 2, 2008 10:50 PM