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In about eight hours, the children began to surf and teach each other to surf. There was nobody to show them anything. They learnt how to play games, paint and finally, how to look for information. They learnt some crude but workable English to enable them to do all this.
Children, given access to the Internet in groups, can learn anything by themselves. Indeed, ‘learning’ itself may no longer be as important as it used to be. I knew nothing of this when I did an experiment with children and computers in the slums of New Delhi. It was January 1999, and all I wanted to find out was whether these children who knew nothing of computers or the Internet (and, indeed, knew almost no English) would make any sense of a digital environment. The computer was embedded in a wall of the slum, like a crude, ‘do it yourself’ ATM.
In about eight hours, the children began to surf and teach each other to surf. There was nobody to show them anything. They learnt how to play games, paint and finally, how to look for information. They learnt some crude but workable English to enable them to do all this.
“How can they do all this, with nobody to tell them anything?” we wondered. It was because there was no one to teach them. We repeated the experiment many times over in the slums and villages of India and the results were always the same — digital literacy out of nowhere. Children began to use the Internet for their homework. They copied down things from websites and took them to their astounded teachers. The press called it ‘Hole in the Wall’.
But many complained that this was not real learning. And it turns out that we had missed a vital point. Almost always, the children were copying the right things down. So, how did they find the websites that were relevant? How did they find the right answers? We continued with several years of experiments until it was clear that children in groups do have an understanding that is much greater than that of each individual. It was this collective ‘hive’ mind that was working like an efficient teacher. It was the perfect example of a self-organising system, where spontaneous order appears out of nowhere.
I brought the results to England in 2006 and created the ‘Hole in the Wall’ inside the classroom, calling it Self Organised Learning Environment (SOLE). It consisted of a mildly chaotic situation caused by a few Internet connections, with about a quarter of the number of children present. The children formed groups and milled around, much as they did in the Indian experiments and began to answer questions years beyond their time. For children in India, a ‘Granny Cloud’ consisting of people who had the time and inclination to talk to children over Skype was created. Children, who are in places where good teachers aren’t, could utilise these setups.
Of a different kind
When TED awarded me with a prize of one million dollars, I used it to build ‘Schools in the Cloud’ — spaces where SOLEs and the Granny Cloud come together. In a few years, we will see what that does to education, not just in remote places, but everywhere. We built seven such experimental schools with the idea of encouraging children to explore and learn from one another. Five of them are in India ranging from the remote Sunderbans to urban, middle-class Maharashtra. Two are in England’s urban, middle-class schools. The results have not yet been fully analysed, but we do find significant improvements in English reading, comprehension, conversation, self-confidence and, of course, Internet usage and searching skills. A ‘School in the Cloud’ is easier to make and maintain inside a regular school, rather than a standalone facility in the community.
So, does this mean that the teaching profession is headed for obsolescence? Maybe. The teaching profession, as we know it, caters to an examination system that was created to serve the needs of another time. Most of the national curricula for children consist of outdated norms from the last century. These include excessive emphasis on spelling, grammar, cursive writing, multiplication tables and mental arithmetic. These skills were needed and valued in the last century, mostly for clerical work. Today, the proponents of these subjects claim that they improve mental capabilities of children, which is not entirely true. The examination system requires learners to answer questions on paper, using handwriting. The learner must be alone and not in any communication with anyone. The learner must not use any assistive technology other than a pencil, and perhaps a ruler, which is basically technology from the 18th century. In order to cater to the needs of such examination systems, teachers, good or bad, use teaching methods from 18th century consisting of rote learning, drill and practice and negative reinforcement.
After the school years, when the erstwhile learner enters the real world, he is expected to solve problems using the Internet, to collaborate with others while solving problems, to type rather than write, to use calculators and not their minds to calculate, to use spell checkers and grammar checkers while typing and so on. In other words, the learner is asked to do the opposite of what he did in school.
To avoid this conflict, the examination system needs to be changed to include collaborative problem solving using assistive technology. If this is done, teachers will be free to enable learning in newer ways. This is a generation that uses assistive technology, particularly the smartphone and laptop all the time, except when they are in school. They learn continuously from these devices, but there is a powerful resistance to these ideas. The resistance comes from an older generation with a subconscious desire to return to the 1920s, a time that they believe was the best the world ever had.
Younger people are uniformly
appreciative of these ideas. “U R cool,” texted one. Now that is poor grammar. He should have texted, “I appreciate your point of view and consider it refreshing.” That would be the ‘right’ grammar, the grammar of the early 20th century. Anything older would also not be right.
When the Internet takes over from ‘taught’ schools, the learners become their own teachers. But only for a while, until the immense network drives all learning and makes ‘learning’ itself obsolete. A child, 20 years from now, may very well ask ‘what does ‘learning’ mean?’
(The author is professor of educational technology, Newcastle University, UK)
In about eight hours, the children began to surf and teach each other to surf. There was nobody to show them anything. They learnt how to play games, paint and finally, how to look for information. They learnt some crude but workable English to enable them to do all this.
“How can they do all this, with nobody to tell them anything?” we wondered. It was because there was no one to teach them. We repeated the experiment many times over in the slums and villages of India and the results were always the same — digital literacy out of nowhere. Children began to use the Internet for their homework. They copied down things from websites and took them to their astounded teachers. The press called it ‘Hole in the Wall’.
But many complained that this was not real learning. And it turns out that we had missed a vital point. Almost always, the children were copying the right things down. So, how did they find the websites that were relevant? How did they find the right answers? We continued with several years of experiments until it was clear that children in groups do have an understanding that is much greater than that of each individual. It was this collective ‘hive’ mind that was working like an efficient teacher. It was the perfect example of a self-organising system, where spontaneous order appears out of nowhere.
I brought the results to England in 2006 and created the ‘Hole in the Wall’ inside the classroom, calling it Self Organised Learning Environment (SOLE). It consisted of a mildly chaotic situation caused by a few Internet connections, with about a quarter of the number of children present. The children formed groups and milled around, much as they did in the Indian experiments and began to answer questions years beyond their time. For children in India, a ‘Granny Cloud’ consisting of people who had the time and inclination to talk to children over Skype was created. Children, who are in places where good teachers aren’t, could utilise these setups.
Of a different kind
When TED awarded me with a prize of one million dollars, I used it to build ‘Schools in the Cloud’ — spaces where SOLEs and the Granny Cloud come together. In a few years, we will see what that does to education, not just in remote places, but everywhere. We built seven such experimental schools with the idea of encouraging children to explore and learn from one another. Five of them are in India ranging from the remote Sunderbans to urban, middle-class Maharashtra. Two are in England’s urban, middle-class schools. The results have not yet been fully analysed, but we do find significant improvements in English reading, comprehension, conversation, self-confidence and, of course, Internet usage and searching skills. A ‘School in the Cloud’ is easier to make and maintain inside a regular school, rather than a standalone facility in the community.
So, does this mean that the teaching profession is headed for obsolescence? Maybe. The teaching profession, as we know it, caters to an examination system that was created to serve the needs of another time. Most of the national curricula for children consist of outdated norms from the last century. These include excessive emphasis on spelling, grammar, cursive writing, multiplication tables and mental arithmetic. These skills were needed and valued in the last century, mostly for clerical work. Today, the proponents of these subjects claim that they improve mental capabilities of children, which is not entirely true. The examination system requires learners to answer questions on paper, using handwriting. The learner must be alone and not in any communication with anyone. The learner must not use any assistive technology other than a pencil, and perhaps a ruler, which is basically technology from the 18th century. In order to cater to the needs of such examination systems, teachers, good or bad, use teaching methods from 18th century consisting of rote learning, drill and practice and negative reinforcement.
After the school years, when the erstwhile learner enters the real world, he is expected to solve problems using the Internet, to collaborate with others while solving problems, to type rather than write, to use calculators and not their minds to calculate, to use spell checkers and grammar checkers while typing and so on. In other words, the learner is asked to do the opposite of what he did in school.
To avoid this conflict, the examination system needs to be changed to include collaborative problem solving using assistive technology. If this is done, teachers will be free to enable learning in newer ways. This is a generation that uses assistive technology, particularly the smartphone and laptop all the time, except when they are in school. They learn continuously from these devices, but there is a powerful resistance to these ideas. The resistance comes from an older generation with a subconscious desire to return to the 1920s, a time that they believe was the best the world ever had.
Younger people are uniformly
appreciative of these ideas. “U R cool,” texted one. Now that is poor grammar. He should have texted, “I appreciate your point of view and consider it refreshing.” That would be the ‘right’ grammar, the grammar of the early 20th century. Anything older would also not be right.
When the Internet takes over from ‘taught’ schools, the learners become their own teachers. But only for a while, until the immense network drives all learning and makes ‘learning’ itself obsolete. A child, 20 years from now, may very well ask ‘what does ‘learning’ mean?’
(The author is professor of educational technology, Newcastle University, UK)
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