The metal sphere comes with $1 million of TED Prize funds to pursue his dream of a self-organizing School in the Cloud.
Dr. Sugata Mitra’s “Hole in the Wall” experiments have shown that, in the absence of supervision or formal teaching, children can teach themselves and each other, if they’re motivated by curiosity and peer interest, and ideally with a grandmother-like figure giving generic positive feedback and marvel over the shoulder. Mitra dug a hole in a wall bordering an urban slum in New Delhi, installed an Internet-connected PC, and left it there (with a hidden camera filming the area). What they saw was kids from the slum playing around with the computer and in the process learning how to use it and how to go online, learn English, and then teach each other.
Quotes from his TED Talk, accepting this prize:
“Education is a self-organizing system, where learning is an emergent phenomenon.”
“The Victorians were great engineers. They engineered a [schooling] system that was so robust that it’s still with us today, continuously producing identical people for a machine that no longer exists.”
“It’s quite fashionable to say that the education system’s broken — it’s not broken, it’s wonderfully constructed. It’s just that we don’t need it anymore. It’s outdated.”
“In nine months, a group of children left alone with a computer in any language will reach the same standard as an office secretary in the West.”
“It took nature 100 million years to make the ape stand up and become Homo sapiens. It took us only 10,000 to make knowing obsolete.”
“My wish is that we design the future of learning. We don’t want to be spare parts for a great human computer.”
And if you want to try to replicate his experiments, here is his SOLE toolkit to bring self-organized learning to your community.
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