A Talk with 2013 TED Prize Winner Dr. Sugata Mitra

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St. Anne's-Belfield School invites you to a talk with TED Prize winner Dr. Sugata Mitra, who is the inaugural speaker in its Inspiration Speaks series. Dr. Mitra is at the forefront of a new approach to education which challenges how we teach today’s children in a technological age. Professor of Educational Technology at Newcastle University, UK and previously a Visiting Professor at MIT, Dr. Mitra is currently working on the "School in the Cloud", the culmination of over a decade of research and observations from all over the world. The School in the Cloud is learning at the edge of chaos - a community, place, and experience to discover and explore children’s learning as a self-organizing system.

From his earliest experiments at NIIT in Delhi with the Hole in the Wall project through setting up SOLEs (self organized learning environments), Dr. Mitra discovered that children’s innate sense of learning is magnified when given the freedom to explore the Internet in small groups. Regardless of who they are or what language they speak, children in these environments can competently search for answers to “big questions,” drawing rational, logical conclusion from their research, questions far ahead of what is expected of them in the school curriculum.

In 1999, Dr. Mitra and his colleagues at NIIT made a hole in a wall bordering an urban slum in Delhi, installed an Internet-connected PC, and left to see what happened. Almost immediately, children from the slum began playing with the computer, teaching each other how to use it and going online. This experiment inspired the book and subsequent Oscar-winning film Slumdog Millionaire, and was replicated in other parts of India with similar results. It challenged key assumptions of formal education, demonstrating that even in the absence of direct input from a teacher, an environment that stimulates curiosity could result in learning through self-instruction and peer-shared knowledge. However, his research shows teachers should not simply be removed from the equation, as children in remote areas often perform poorly at school without access to good teaching. As a result of further research that showed the importance of an encouraging adult in these circumstances, Dr. Mitra created the "Granny Cloud," through which retired teachers in the UK interact with children in India via Skype. Learn more about the Inspiration Speaks series at http://www.stab.org/programs/inspiration-speaks.