I have just found this video of a half hour talk by Sugata Mitra about his famous Hole in the Wall experiments which first caught my eye a couple of years ago. This seems like one of those stories which means vastly different things to different people. Some people pick up on the fact that this is a story about how children can learn without teachers (in fact even better than with unmotivated teachers Mitra seems to say) while others concentrate in the collaborative aspect of the children's learning and yet others focus on the way in which the children taught themselves a basic English vocabulary.
The story revolves around an experiment, which Mitra has by now replicated many times and not just in India, whereby simply making a fully functioning and internet connected computer available is enough to motivate children as young as six to learn about browsing, mailing, games, the paint program, music downloads and much else besides in very little time and all spontaneously and in collaboration with their peers.
A short video showing this learning in action can be seen here. Mitra's four tenets are that:
1. Remoteness negatively affects the quality of education.
2. The marginal benefit of ICT is greatest in the most remote and deprived contexts.
3. Values are acquired while dogma and doctrine are imposed.
4. Learning is most likely a self-organising system.
These lead him to conclude that the four tenets could form the basis for a vision of educational technology which is digital, automatic, fault tolerant, minimally invasive, connected and self-organising.
His final point is that most ICT applications used in education are borrowed from business and it is time that education developed its own specs.
Keywords: hole in the wall, minimally invasive education, Mitra
