Reviewed by: Mahmoud Salem.
M.salem.pl@gmail.com.
Supervisor: M. Matysik.
Warsaw University, Poland. 2019.
Sugata Mitra: Building a school in the cloud.
“What is going to be the future of learning?” with this sentence, Sugata Mitra Started his speech to the TED audience on Feb 27, 2013. He introduced his little story in order to tell what his plan is about, by looking at where the kind of learning we do in the school came from-it came about three hundred years ago, from the last and the biggest of the empires on this plane, The British Empire.
Mr.Mitra explained that the Victorians did not have computers and telephones, but with data hand written on a piece of paper, and travelling by ships, they created a global computer made up of people, which was called the bureaucratic administrative machine. In order to have that bureaucratic administrative machine running, they needed many people, and in order to produce these people they created school as we know it. Then he illustrated how these people were identical to each other by knowing three things: they had to have a good handwriting because the data was handwritten, they had to be able to read, and they had to be able to do multiplication, division, addition and subtraction in their head, You could pick one up from New Zealand and ship him to Canada and he would be instantly functional. He noted that the machine no longer exists while we still produce identical people, so he called the current schools obsolete. He argues that the punishments and examinations seen as threats shut the brain down. Neuroscience provides evidence that, when it is threatened the reptilian part of our brain, it shuts down everything else, including the prefrontal cortex, the parts that learn. He described his own experiments with students. The first one was when he used to teach programming in Delhi, when there was a slum near his office, and he made a hole in the wall next to his office. He stuck a computer inside it, just to see what would happen with the students who had never had a computer, did not know what the internet was, and did not know English.
Eight hours later, he found them browsing and teaching each other how to browse. The second experience was when he repeated the experiment 300 miles out of Delhi, in a remote village, where a chance of finding someone to help the kids was very little. Two months later, he found kids playing games on the computer on their own, and they required from him a faster processor and better mouse, and saw that the kids were able to learn English and computer skills in two months.
His next experiment concerns bringing the creativity back to learning and shifting from threat to pleasure. When he got back to England, he asked 200 British grannies from Diggles, northwestern England, to participate in online teaching one hour a week for students located in Tamil Nadu, India, 6,000 miles away, their encouragement continued to the children’s success in learning. He showed the audience his idea for future of education, i,e. self-organized learning environments, collaboration, and encouragement, based on tapping into the children’s and ability to work together.
I like the way Mr. Mitra started his speech with a question to his audience in order to illustrate his points. I also admire the way he presented the definition of the bureaucratic administrative machine. I think he has a point that we all became identical learners especially from school times, when we all taught the same knowledge globally. However, I do not agree with him when he described the current schools as obsolete, I think the concept of schools is still vital and they are still able to provide the necessary knowledge and experiences for the students; in my opinion it just needs to be updated by implementing the new technology and materials. However, I do not think that the local governments are ready for this update because it is too costly.
Reading his experiments, in general, it was good to try to see how the students can learn by themselves, without a teacher. Changing the ways of the acquisition of knowledge is fine but we need to ensure the quality of education and create a living space in the classroom where both students and teachers are socially integrated to their society and culture (Altrichter, Helm, and Kanape, 2018).
References
Altrichter,H. & Helm. C. & Kanape. A. (n.d.). Education and school quality. Retrieved from http://www.sqa.at/pluginfile.php/994/course/section/450/Education%20and%20school%20quality.pdf.
Mitra. S. (2013, 02, 17). Building a school in the cloud. Retrieved from. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y3jYVe1RGaU
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