Recently, I had the pleasure of watching the following TED Talk, which provided a wealth of unique insight into the basis of "social learning" on a global level.
Delivered by Sugata Mitra, a professor of Education Technology at Newcastle University in the UK, Mitra described the approach and findings of his "Hole in the Wall" experiments, which 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."
After viewing the video, do you think Mitra's findings--collected after embedding single computers with high speed internet connections in places of the world in great need of quality teachers--make a case for the merit of collaborative education technology?
Tell us what you think in the comments below.
TED Talks: The Child-Driven Education
Monday, January 24, 2011
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
I find the talk very interesting as well as surprising; my only point would be in regards to what Mitra said about "children learning what they're interested in", which is magnificent (after all, usually we all try to end up doing things that we like and are interested in) however, the next question would be how to channel the interest in order to fulfill certain objectives? unless this method of doing education completely revamps the current curricular, concept.
ReplyDeleteJR