Sugata Mitra's Hole In the Wall TED TALK

Sugata Mitra's did a TED TALK about his ' hole in the wall' experiment from the late 90's early 2000's.

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 What is the future of learning? I find myself asking this question all the time as I am sure many educators do. With technology so rapidly advancing and the fast pace of growth in education, it is growing faster than society can even keep up with. Where did the teaching we know come from?

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 The idea of a teacher at the front of the room, teaching students in rows of desk on the board is practically obsolete already. The idea of thinking outside of the box is gone, there is no box anymore because everyone is already well beyond the box. Mitra's experiment is spectacular proof of where the future is headed.  Mitra placed a 'processer' or computer into the walls of random places all over the world, places that most of the children never would of seen such a thing in their entire life time. Places where the children didn't know a bit of English. How could someone possibly teach themselves to use and learn such topics without a teacher that were in a language they couldn't even read or understand?

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 Education should not be about rich or poor, just because a family has money does not mean that their child is 'gifted'. Money can buy a better education, yes but that doesn't mean that a rich child has more potential than anyone else.
The first experiment outside of his office in Delhi was in a remote village 300 miles away. Mitra learned that the children taught themselves how to use the 'processer' without any teacher of instruction what so ever. How is that possible? How effective are teachers? Could we be moving towards a world where teachers aren't even needed? Children taught themselves English and how to work the processer in just a few short months. Mitra repeated this experiment all over the world in poor underprivileged areas and got the same astonishing results. If they could teach themselves how to work the computer what else could they do? Mitra began experimenting with other subjects, he then gave children a speech-to-text machine. He told them to keep repeating themselves until the machine typed out what they said. The machine would say a phrase in English and then the students had to say it back.
the children flourished. 

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If children could do this, Mitra wanted to know how far this could go. He created a crazy hypothesis "Could Tamil speaking 12 year olds in India learn the biotechnology of DNA replication in English from a street side computer?" After two months the children tested from a 0 to a 30 percent. Mitra then asked the children's friend to 'help them' all she had to do was stand behind them and ask them questions. Questions that cause the children to think about what they were doing. How did you do that? What did you just do? How do you know to do that?
A question he asks is if children could do all of this on their own , could it be that in the future we wont even need to go to school at all? Could it be that knowledge and the need to know is becoming or is already absolute?


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Sugata Mitra came up with the idea of SOLE. Self Organized Learning Environments are easy to move towards and it will redefine the entire world of learning.  The idea of this concept is for the teacher to ask questions. Questions like 'if a meteorite was coming to hit the earth, how would you figure out if it was going to hit the earth or if it wasn't?  Tell the children that the idea is called a tangent angle, and then let them figure it out from there. It is done all by the students without any help from a teacher, the teacher only raises the question.  We all need to come together in creating a "school in the clouds". Where students venture on intellectual adventures, driven by the big questions. 

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