"I had accidentally stumbled onto something universal" ... TED prize winner Sugata Mitra.

TED prize winner Sugata Mitra. Photo: AFP/TED

When Sugata Mitra installed a computer in a slum wall in India, he had no idea it would later win him $US1 million to build a school on the internet that could spur an education revolution.

Dr Mitra, 61, was last week awarded the top TED Prize to pursue the promise of building virtual schools on the internet, where young minds can learn, unfettered by adult teachers.

An example of the Hole in the Wall computer.

An example of the “Hole in the Wall” computer.

The physicist-turned-educator was the first person to receive a TED Prize since the cash award was increased tenfold to $US1 million ($977,000). The award also comes with the chance to tap into the abilities, insights and influence of the TED community, a gathering of the world’s top thinkers focused on “ideas worth spreading”, and which are streamed online to millions.

 

Dr Mitra’s journey to the prestigious TED gathering in the Southern California city of Long Beach began more than a decade ago in Kalkaji, Delhi, when he stuck a computer in a slum’s wall to see what children would do with it. His work inspired the novel Q&A, which was turned into the Oscar-winning movie Slumdog Millionaire.

“I bumped into this whole thing completely by accident,” Dr Mitra said in February at the TED gathering when pitching for the prize. “I used to teach people how to write computer programs in New Delhi, 14 years ago. And right next to where I used to work, there was a slum. And I used to think, how on Earth are those kids ever going to learn [how] to write computer programs?”

It was then that he decided to make a hole in the boundary wall of the slum next to his office and stick a computer inside it “just to see what would happen if I gave a computer to children who never would have one, didn’t know any English [and] didn’t know what the internet was”.

The “Hole in the Wall” experiment was later made into a documentary, which first aired in 2002.

After deflecting a few questions from children passing by about the introduction of the computer, Dr Mitra returned several hours later to find that they had learnt how to browse the internet on it.

The results shocked him. “We found them browsing and teaching each other how to browse. So I said, ‘Well that’s impossible, because — How is it possible? They don’t know anything.”

It was then suggested by a colleague that perhaps one of Dr Mitra’s computer programming students had taught the children near the slum how to use a keyboard and mouse. It was possible, and so he did the same experiment again in a remote village hundreds of kilometres out of Delhi, where it was unlikely a person with computer knowledge could help children out.

“I repeated the experiment there,” Dr Mitra said. “There was no place to stay, so I stuck my computer in, I went away, came back after a couple of months, and found kids playing games on it.

“When they saw me, they said, ‘We want a faster processor and a better mouse’.”

His experiment has since been reproduced in different communities around the world, including in Australia, with the same conclusion: children can drive their own education if provided access to the internet and if nudged by adults – who also stay out of the way.

“They can cluster around the machine, then you sit back and watch,” Dr Mitra said of self-guided learning.

“The more you ask them to sit quietly in rows and columns, that is when the fights break out,” he said, referring to traditional classrooms.

After realising what he had found, Dr Mitra began publishing the results in scientific journals.

“I published everywhere. I wrote down and measured everything, and I said, 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. I’d seen it happen over and over and over again.”

Dr Mitra reasons that the traditional focus in schools on reading, writing and arithmetic comes from a time when societies were cranking out workers for office jobs, government posts or the like.

“It’s quite fashionable to say that the education system’s broken,” Dr Mitra said. “[But] it’s not broken. It’s wonderfully constructed. It’s just that we don’t need it any more. It’s outdated.”

As technology frees people from offices and creates jobs yet to be imagined, it is time to let children learn in ways that let them pursue and embrace new ideas, Dr Mitra said.

“There may be 10 different ways to produce the next generation,” Dr Mitra said. “I think I have touched the tip of one of those icebergs.”

Dr Mitra, a university professor in Britain, said the TED prize-money would fund a learning lab in India devoted to perfecting a formula for his internet-based school called “School in the Cloud”.

Classes will be overseen by a global network of retired teachers, who connect with classes via online video chats, but an adult will be on-site to keep watch.

“I want to see if this is feasible,” Dr Mitra said. “If it works, it will level the playing field.”

with AFP

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