Beyond the Hole in the Wall: Discover the Power of Self-Organized Learning (Kindle Single) (TED Books) by Sugata Mitra

Author:Sugata Mitra [Mitra, Sugata]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
ISBN: 9781937382087
Publisher: TED Books
Published: 2012-01-24T08:00:00+00:00

Rise of the SOLE

Throughout our discoveries, a nagging question still remained: Is this learning?

Emma Crawley is a primary school teacher working at St. Aidan’s Church of England Primary School in the underprivileged town of Gateshead, England. She took me to her school in June 2009, and we began a set of experiments that would lead us toward a strange understanding of children’s learning in a self-organized, connected world.

Emma and I created a Self-Organized Learning Environment (SOLE) in a regular classroom. The children worked in groups of three, four or five, and each group had a computer connected to the Internet. They were allowed to talk with one another and to move around and see what other groups were doing. (Remember, we saw in the Hole in the Wall experiment that clustering around a computer is an effective learning strategy for children.) The children were given selected GCSE questions to work on, and they answered most of them correctly. We then waited two months and tested them again, this time without a computer and with each student taking the test alone — just like a regular examination.

The children’s scores never dropped. Strangely, some children scored higher on certain questions after the two-month break than they had on the day of the SOLE. We suspect this was because the children continued researching on their own. They had near perfect recall of the answers.

But again, was this learning?

The problem is that there appears to be no test of “deep” learning, that I know of, in which the learner analyzes new information and links it to what he or she already knows with the goal of long-term retention and understanding. Everyone seems to know what deep learning means, but I can’t find a test for it. Governments define learning as the ability to answer questions on tests such as the GCSE (General Certificate of Secondary Education). By that criterion, children seem to be able to “learn” using SOLEs alone.

I had a new hypothesis: Given the appropriate digital infrastructure, a safe and free environment, and a friendly but unknowledgeable mediator, groups of children can pass their school-leaving tests (such as the GCSE in the U.K. and the Central Board of Secondary Education, or CBSE, exam in India) on their own.

By 2010, schools all over the world were beginning to show interest in SOLEs. Two school principals from Melbourne, Australia — Brett Millott and Paul McKenna — have picked up the method and have taken the idea of the SOLE far beyond what I was doing. Instead of making a SOLE an alternative to schools, they have found ways to integrate the new methodology into regular schooling, something I could never have done.

It’s not all good news everywhere, though. A SOLE will work in a school if a principal wants it to. Ravi Bisht and Vikram Kumar built beautiful SOLEs in slum schools of Hyderabad. Many are now used for storing old files or are used by teachers and other adults. There is pornography on the system logs.

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