In 1999, Sugata Mitra, Professor of Education Technology at Newcastle University, England, and his colleagues tried a dipstick experiment in teaching. They installed a computer in a wall in a busy slum in New Delhi. Next thing they knew, the computer with online access was being mobbed by neighbourhood children tapping away at it. In no time, the children had learnt how to use it and surf the internet, and their lack of familiarity with the language or the interface did not stand in the way of their learning.
In another incident, Prof. Mitra asked some children if was possible for one thing to be present in two places. The nine-year-olds sat on the computers in groups and threw back the phrase ‘quantum entanglement’ at him. When asked what that meant, the children explained the process to him, using threads.
On the basis of his assorted case studies, Prof. Mitra concluded: “If given access to public computing, children in groups could go from zero computer literacy to that of an officer or secretary in the West in nine months.” This self-learning model, which came to be popularly known as ‘holes in the wall’, intrigued Prof. Mitra enough to develop innovative teaching methodologies.
At an IIT Bombay institute colloquium talk on ‘Future of Learning’ on Thursday, he said it was possible to achieve an objective without leadership, but with desire that’s common to a group. From this insight, he developed SOLE, or Self-Organising Learning Environment, which works on three premises: take whatever you are going to teach and convert it into a big question, pose it to a group of children in a setting that has fewer internet-enabled computers than children. No method is prescribed or proscribed.
The idea behind having much fewer computers is to encourage children to work and learn together. “The level of achievement of a group is higher than the highest level of achievement of an individual,” he observed.
In Prof. Mitra’s view, the three Rs of reading, writing and arithmetic can be productively subsumed by the three bigger areas of comprehension, communication and computation (in the wider sense of problem solving) respectively. Conceding it was difficult to work around strait-jacketed systems of learning, he said, “We need a curriculum of questions, not facts.”
SOLE soon grew into an attractive teaching option internationally, starting with Newcastle. Countries like Australia, Argentina, Spain and Portugal were among the first to try it. By 2016, SOLE had gone viral, with educational institutions from all over the world adopting it.
An allied discovery along the way was that admiration fuels a child’s interest. Unlike parents, who prefer the discipline approach to teach their children, grandparents usually pamper children with praise. Thus evolved the ‘Granny Cloud’ in 2009, in which Prof. Mitra enrolled grandmothers in a virtual chat with children, resulting in a remarkable growth in learning.
With the $1-million TED prize money that he received in 2013, Prof. Mitra started an experiment that blended SOLE with Granny Cloud to form the School in the Cloud. It reaffirmed the positives of his learning model, and he found that “reading, comprehension, communication, internet searching skills and self-confidence go up with this way of learning”. The method, of course, poses a challenge to the conventional system of individual assessment through the examination-interview structure.
The writer is a freelance journalist
