http://www.cnn.com/2013/02/27/opinion/ted-prize-students-teach-themselves/index.html
A $1 million bet on students without teachers
By Richard Galant, Long Beach, California (CNN)
Education expert Sugata Mitra receives $1 million TED Prize
Mitra says his research shows the learning power of self-organized
student teams. He says instruction need not be top down and the role of
teachers is shifting
TED conference also featured Bono, speaking about dramatic drop in
extreme poverty
What if everything you thought you knew about education was wrong?
What if students learn more quickly on their own, working in teams, than
in a classroom with a teacher?
What if tests and discipline get in the way of the learning process
rather than accelerate it?
Those are the questions Sugata Mitra has been asking since the late
1990s, and for which he was awarded the $1 million TED Prize on Tuesday,
the first day of the TED2013 conference.
Mitra, professor of educational technology at Newcastle University, won
the prize for his concept of "self organizing learning environments," an
alternative to traditional schooling that relies on empowering students
to work together on computers with broadband access to solve their own
problems, with adults intervening to provide encouragement and
admiration, rather than top-down instruction.
Mitra's work with students in India has gained wide attention and was
the focus of a 2010 TED Talk on his "hole in the wall" experiment,
showing the potential of computers to jump-start learning without any
adult intervention.
Coming to education trained as a physicist, Mitra said he was encouraged
by his boss to start teaching people how to write computer programs.
When he bought his first personal computer, he was surprised to find
that his 6-year-old son was able to tell him how to fix problems he had
operating the machine. He thought his son was a genius, but then heard
his friends saying the same thing about their children.
Thinking about children living in slums in New Delhi, he said, "It can't
be possible that our sons are geniuses and they are not." Mitra set up a
publicly accessible computer along the lines of a bank ATM, behind a
glass barrier, and told children they could use it, with no further
guidance.
They soon learned to browse the Web in English, even though they lacked
facility in the language. To prove the experiment would work in an
isolated environment, he set up another "hole in the wall" computer in a
village 300 miles away. After a while, "one of the kids was saying we
need a faster processor and a better mouse."
When the head of the World Bank came to see the experiment, Mitra said
he encouraged him to go to the New Delhi slum and see for himself. After
spending time with the children, bank President James Wolfensohn "came
back and put his hand on my shoulder and said, 'How much?' " Mitra said
he received $1.5 million, which allowed him to press on with experiments
in India, Cambodia and Africa, finding self-organized learning worked to
improve English-language pronunciation, reading comprehension and even
the basics of DNA replication.
Mitra said the traditional system of education is largely based on the
necessities created by Britain's colonial empire in which a vast amount
of territory had to be governed by people writing things on paper and
sending them around the world on ships. Schools turned out clerks who
functioned as interchangeable parts in a vast bureaucracy where the
skills of reading, writing and arithmetic were key.
He argues that today's world needs a new system in which the role of
computers in aiding learning is paramount.
To help speed learning, Mitra has recruited hundreds of "grannies,"
volunteers from the United Kingdom, many of them retired teachers, who
function more in the role of "grandparents" than teachers, skypeing into
learning environments around the world, encouraging students to do their
best and praising their achievements.
With the TED Prize money, Mitra intends to build a laboratory, most
likely in India, where he can test his theories through experiments that
supplement schoolwork. He likens it to a "safe cybercafe for children"
where they can strengthen their English skills, which can be a route to
economic advancement.
Mitra said he doesn't think teachers are obsolete but suggests their
roles may be changing as students increasingly have access to
self-learning through computers. And he argues that his self-organized
teams may be an alternative to regular schools in places where teachers
may not be available.
Traditional education stresses tests and punishments, two things that
Mitra said causes the brain to shut down its rational processes and
surrender to fear. Adopting a method closer to that of grandparents, who
shower children with admiration, is "the opposite of the parent method,"
which relies on threats, Mitra said.
The TED Prize announcement came at the end of an education-oriented
first day of TED2013, a conference attended by 1,400 people from 50
countries that runs through Friday morning.
Started in the 1980s as a conference on technology, entertainment and
design, TED has grown into a far-reaching nonprofit that holds pricy
conferences that draw business, nonprofit and political leaders (the fee
to attend the Long Beach event is $7,500) but also distributes many of
its talks freely on www.TED.com and licenses thousands of independently
organized TEDx events around the world.
Bono, a previous TED Prize winner, gave a talk in the opening session on
the dramatic progress that's been made in fighting diseases such as AIDS
and malaria and in curbing global poverty.
The rock star-turned-crusader for global change said he's become a
"factivist" (an activist who revels in the facts) and sped through a
PowerPoint style presentation showing that the number of people living
in extreme poverty -- surviving on less than $1.25 a day -- has been cut
in half and could plunge to zero by 2028 if dictatorships and corruption
don't stand in the way of further progress. He noted that 2028 is "just
around the corner," joking that it would be enough time for three more
Rolling Stones farewell concerts.
Many of the first-day talks focused on education. Among them were:
- Stuart Firestein, a neuroscientist at Columbia University who
stressed that science isn't about accumulating facts but about learning
enough so that we can expose our ignorance and ask the right questions.
- Freeman Hrabowski, the longtime president of the University of
Maryland, Baltimore County, who has won acclaim for innovative
approaches to education and research and for strengthening scientific
and engineering education for minority students.
- And in perhaps the best example of self-organized learning, Richard
Turere, a 13-year-old from Kenya, who figured out how to save his
family's cows from marauding lions by inventing a system of lights to
ward off the lions.
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Albert Peres
afpe...@3129.ca
416.660.0847
