Tag Archives: Sugata Mitra

#LWF11 – Stephen Heppell – What’s on the horizon?

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Stephen started with a nice anecdote about starting his career asked a tough group of students to help him out by getting teaching tips from other teachers in return from him teaching them the content.

Be Very Afraid programme.  Students taught themselves to play an instrument in a month.

Evolution of tech in our lifetimes: Hardware -> software -> databases -> searching -> socialising -> learning next.

Learning will happen where we least expect it.  e.g. subtitling Bollywood movies in other languages in India; superclasses – 3 teachers, 90 kids, 5 terms learning in 3; Sugata Mitra – hole-in-the-wall.

Spent a few minutes tearing apart teacher training, if you don’t have the very best schools in that area then what right do you have to teach teachers?!

Should be ashamed to be at the top of Gove’s English Bacc league table – child cruelty!  We can do better.

People plus technology breaks cartels – education is a cartel that will be broken by people and technology.

Interesting to hear that Stephen is planning a free school, taking advantage of Gove’s policies to push his own way of doing things Academy!

Pupils need to prepared for the uncertainty.  The reason we are in the vanguard is because we’ve lived through the endless surprise of technological innovation in our lifetime.  We haven’t articulated how good this could be.

The World is broken, learning can heal conflict and suffering.  We have the chance to do so.  Make it loud make it heard!  A proper call to arms.

A captivating talk, Stephen showed how easy it can seem to present when you know your subject matter so well, no notes, just a series of images and a belief in your argument.

Slumdog Pythagoras – Minimally Invasive Education

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Inspired by Sugata Mitra at the SSAT National Conference I decided to try and ape his ‘minimally invasive education‘ within my own Maths classroom.

In a really tough December week this two hours shone out as a great teaching and learning experience.

Before going any further, please head over to my previous post to read about the inspiration for this lesson.

In a nutshell, Sugata discovered that children can teach themselves with the aid of the Internet.  His hole-in-the-wall experiment inspired the book that inspired the film Slumdog Millionaire.  He has since been investigating how to apply these findings in Western school systems.

I followed some basic rules that Sugata has developed.  I split the students into groups, each with a computer and then gave them a problem to solve.

The rules are simple:

  • Students were told to get into groups of their choice of around 4 children.
  • They had one laptop per group.
  • They could walk around and cheat, looking at what the other groups were doing.
  • They could move groups if they wanted to.
  • No input from me other than some encouragement and praise.

My Year 7 class (11-12 year olds) are an able group who I have done a little group work earlier this year.  I gave them a simple question:

Who was Pythagoras?

And with it, the text (but not diagram) of a typical GCSE question:

A ladder is leaning against a wall.  It is 5 meters long, the base of the ladder is 3.5 meters away from the wall.  How far up the wall does it reach? Continue reading →

SSAT #NC10 – Sugata Mitra

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Bio

Sugata Mitra is currently Professor of Educational Technology at the School of Education, Communication and Language Sciences at Newcastle University.  He has spent many years in a huge number of research posts.  With regards to education he is most famous for his Hole In The Wall Experiment whereby he put an Internet enabled PC in the wall of an Indian slum in 1999 and left it there for anyone to use.

You can see the talk here, or watch his similar TED talk here.

Reflections

Sugata was charming and engaging.  The driving message that he had was that given some time and an Internet connection, children are quite proficient at teaching themselves.

He first discovered this in his now famous Hole In The Wall experiment.  I won’t go over the details of that here as you can watch the videos above or read about it in detail on Wikipedia or it’s own dedicated website.  Sugata explained that he did not go looking for this effect, however his experiments demonstrated 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. Sugata calls this minimally invasive education. Continue reading →