Early in January, Prof. Sugata Mitra visited India for the opening of Area Zero, a solar powered glass building in Gocharan, West Bengal. A School in the Cloud Self-Organised Learning Environment (SOLE) facility, it is the seventh of its kind —five of which are in India and the remaining in the United Kingdom.
SOLEs stem from the understanding that when children try and answer a big question in a self-organised group, with minimal rules and sharing computers, they tend to maximise meaning out of the material they are researching, often way beyond their age group. Mitra believes that the science of emergence, common in many natural phenomena, enables children to perform as a group way beyond their individual capabilities.
SOLEs thrive because of these big questions — questions that challenge the children, kindling their curiosity and urging them to look for answers together. “The actual complexity of the questions varies depending on the competencies and interests of the children, but they are encouraged to ask the question — ‘I wonder why….?’” Suneeta Kulkarni, Research Director with the School in the Cloud, said in an email interview. “Their exploration goes deeper and covers a wider scope as they become more familiar with the idea of searching on the web,” she added.
The beginning of SOLEs goes back to the Hole in the Wall experiments that Prof. Mitra performed in the slums of Delhi, way back in 1999. By putting a computer on the wall he could observe that children, with no previous experience with computers, organised themselves into groups, taught each other and understood content that was initially beyond their grasp.
In order to test the limits of learning in this way, Prof. Mitra experimented further, urging Tamil-speaking children from the village of Kallikuppam to learn about DNA replication in English. To his astonishment, their scores improved with time, and they never gave up. With a little encouragement, the way a grandmother does to children, their scores were on par with Prof. Mitra’s control school in New Delhi, a private school with a trained biotechnology teacher. This led to the creation of Granny Cloud, which enables e-mediators from around the world to interact with children on a daily basis.
Unlike many of his peers, Prof. Mitra does not believe that the current education system is a failure. On the contrary, he quips that it is out of date. “They [Victorians] engineered a system that was so robust that it's still with us today, continuously producing identical people for a [bureaucratic administrative] machine that no longer exists,” Prof. Mitra said in his TED talk in February 2013. He went on to win the 2013 TED Prize — $1 million that has gone on to create the School in the Cloud with the backing of Microsoft and Newcastle University — that has allowed him to take baby steps towards a future we can barely imagine.
Professor of Educational Technology in Newcastle University, Prof. Mitra’s journey from the Hole in the Wall to the School in the Cloud has taken him further along the road concerning the future of learning. In a paper published late in October 2014, he notes some of his observations.
He states that throughout history, education and examinations have kept pace with emerging technologies — be it pen and paper, logarithmic tables, protractors, etc. In order to make learning for today’s children more relevant, he therefore demands that we embrace the Internet — the dominant assistive technology of our age.
“The current examination system focuses on memorisation of facts. The focus in the SOLEs is on children being able to search for the information they need, when they need it,” Kulkarni said. “If examinations [and the educators who create them] were to introduce the Internet into the examination hall it could change the very core of how we create learning environments and bring in a great deal of relevance to life outside the school walls,” she added.
Prof. Mitra compares the behaviour of children in SOLE sessions to that of a self-organising system, wherein local interactions without centralised control leads to a global system behaviour.
He also draws an analogy between the way children learn, creating and maximising available information in a SOLE, and Edge of Chaos, defined as ‘the tendency of dynamic systems to self-organise to a state roughly midway between globally static (unchanging) and chaotic (random) states’.
While SOLEs maybe cause for optimism, it is important to mix it with caution. ASER reports published in January suggest that even though enrolment is high in India these days, reading levels are low, and worse, unchanged over the years. Considering SOLEs hinge around reading, there is reason to believe this could be a major stumbling block at the start.
“Reading comprehension is indeed a major competency required in the SOLEs and ASER reports continue to be alarming. Yet, the fact that children are unable to read fluently at the beginning of their exposure to the SOLEs is not a block,” Kulkarni observes. “The challenge of taking on a hard reading task becomes possible because it is being taken on as a group. Gradually, that understanding filters through to the individual level as well.”
If SOLEs do succeed in the large scale, the future of schooling could literally be at the edge of chaos.
