Speaking through the holes

At the start of Sugata Mitra's keynote today I joked on Twitter that he was about to speak through a hole in the wall. I have seen one of his previous speeches about his famous 'Hole in the Wall' projects and I know how astounding the results are. But my joke turned out to be quite apposite, because in my estimation, Professor Mitra spoke through many holes that are appearing - in the wall that we call formalised, traditional education.

It's important to grasp the significance and impact of Sugata Mitra's ongoing studies on our concept of education and how it should be conducted. Essentially, he has placed computers in the slums of India, and in remote places in other countries, and has made videos of how children interact and learn when they are left alone with the technology. He has discovered that children very quickly learn how to use the computer to search and find content, and learn from it in a self organised way. In one case he cited, he equipped a computer with voice recognition software, but only flat, unaccented English was acceptable to the machine. The children he observed, not only figured out how to learn to speak some rudimentary English using the computer, they also taught themselves how to eliminate their strong Indian accents too. In another experiment, he discovered that children could learn very complex concepts such as scientific principles, without the attentions of any qualified teacher. He warned though, that the best results were always obtained when children were gathered around the computer in groups of 4 to 6. Some of the teachers who worked with the Hole in the Wall children reported that they were increasing their test scores, and also writing in a deeper, more analytical style, as a result of their exposure to self organised learning using the computers.

Teachers were not redundant, Mitra was at pains to stress. They will need to take on different roles, he said, but the truth is this: All the answers are already out there on the Web. What it takes to enliven this is the teacher asking the right questions and the children finding and then making the connections by learning the answers. In a very endearing, humourous, slightly self deprecating style, and with lashings of great story telling, Sugata Mitra restored many delegates faith in the true place of the keynote at a conference - to inspire, provoke and entertain all at the same time. Just looking around the packed auditorium and seeing the smiles on people's faces showed that he had succeeded. Professor Mitra's work can be explored in more detail here - it includes a link to his excellent TED talk.

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