This post is also available in: Portuguese (Brazil)
“Education as usual assumes that kids are empty vessels who need to be sat down in a room and filled with curricular content. Dr. Mitra’s experiments have proved that wrong.”
About 11 years ago, Dr. Sugata Mitra, cut a “hole in the wall” of the New Delhi office of NIIT, an international IT training company where he headed research and development. The wall separated NIIT premises from the adjoining slum in Kalkaji, New Delhi. In the opening, he put a high speed computer with Internet access and monitored the activities through a camera. Within hours, curious children, aged 6 to 12 with most rudimentary education and little knowledge of English, from the slum began flocking to the machine, exploring it and figuring out which actions yielded results.
Dr. Mitra has demonstrated that if you provide children with an opportunity to learn something, something powerful and relevant and then leave them alone, they learn it. And then, having learnt it, they will own it and share it. He likes to call it Minimally Invasive Education and defines it as a pedagogic method that uses the learning environment to generate an adequate level of motivation to induce learning in groups of children, with minimal, or no intervention by a teacher.
In the days and weeks that followed, the most advanced computer users among the curious kids taught their siblings and friends what they knew, and those children taught more children. The kids had taught themselves how to paint pictures, access the Internet, create documents and play games. They used the computer’s programs to learn words in English and listen to stories aloud. Some of the things that they learned, Dr. Mitra says, astonished him.
He says, the children create their own metaphors. Once when a journalist came up to one of these kids and asked him, “How do you know so much about the computers?” The kid replied, “What’s a Computer”. They call the cursor “sui”, the Hindi equivalent for needle. The fact that the Internet is mostly in English does not stop them from accessing it.
With backing from NIIT, the Indian Government, the ICICI bank and the International Finance Corporation of Delhi, Dr. Mitra and NIIT founded the Hole in the wall Education project and setup 250 computers in 110 locations throughout India and later in Combodia. Research shows that the Hole in the Wall users performed as well on computer skills as children who had learnt the same through a formal class, and their engagement and performance in school improved as well.
Mitra, now NIIT’s chief scientist emeritus and a professor of educational technology at the United Kingdom’s Newcastle University, aims to spread this model around the world to boost the learning and life skills of children, particularly those living in poverty and with few educational resources. Where conventional schools are absent or ineffective, the Hole-in-the-Wall Web site says, the hands-off method could be a solution that uses the power of collaboration and the natural curiosity of children to catalyze learning.
Visit The Hole in the Wall website
Can kids teach themselves? Dr Mitra at TED
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Great work….such ideas with planned execution can lead us far ahead…
@Aishwarya
I completely agree with you. It will not only reduce the burden on the teacher but also allow him to focus on various other areas.
In a country like India, where the computer literacy is just about 6.12% , this method will definitely go a long way in improving it.
For several times I have been writing about the needs of more appropriate educations model for BOP in Brazil. Give poor children books and take them to school is not a solution with impact. They will not have the right motivation.
This work is a good example of what I mean.
Thanks for the case!
Have a nice day!