by In 2004, I had the great privilege of being hired to consult and lead professional development in India. One of the highlights of the trip was being on a panel discussion with Dr. Sugata Mitra and a billionaire high-tech exec. The purpose of the day was a school convening it’s community and experts to discuss the future of education. (How many of your schools have that sort of event on its calendar?)
Dr. Mitra and his work were damn impressive. Upon returning home I wrote the following article: Let Them Eat Tech Standards – A hole in the wall as science and public policy
The “Hole in the Wall” project is a testament to the competency and capacity of children to construct their own knowledge in a community of practice. Internet access can connect children to each other and the 21st century.
The fabulous TED Conference has just posted a new TED Talk by Dr. Sugata Mitra. It is worthy of the attention of every teacher concerned about learning and every coordinator with “technology” in their job description.
Note: The TED Talk site has better video quality, but Blogger would not allow the Embed to work properly.
Also read Sylvia Martinez’s blog about Dr. Mitra’s work, Hole in the Wall – Can kids learn computer literacy by themselves?
Veteran educator Gary Stager, Ph.D. is the author of Twenty Things to Do with a Computer – Forward 50, co-author of Invent To Learn — Making, Tinkering, and Engineering in the Classroom, publisher at Constructing Modern Knowledge Press, and the founder of the Constructing Modern Knowledge summer institute. He led professional development in the world’s first 1:1 laptop schools thirty years ago and designed one of the oldest online graduate school programs. Gary is also the curator of The Seymour Papert archives at DailyPapert.com. Learn more about Gary here.
Here’s what’s wrong and how to fix it:
TED video on my Blogger blog.
Hi, I’m a teacher from Norway. I saw Dr. Sugata Mitra last Spring and was really impressed by his work, too. When I returned to my students I told them about the Hole in the Wall-project, and they became really interested. All my students have their own laptops. A bit later we had a project where we decided that they should work in groups of four, but only have access to one computer in each group. It turned out to be one of our more successful projects that year. They collaborated more and learned much more than they normally did. Amazing! It is really quite simple – two brains think a lot better than one. You are very privileged to have seen Dr. Mitra’s work at first hand. I wrote a blog post about it – the student’s comments are in English. They were 16 at the time.