Sugata Mitra
Sugata Mitra
Sugata Mitrais Professor of Educational Technology at the School of Education, Communication and Language Sciences at Newcastle University, England. He is best known for his "Hole in the Wall" experiment, and widely cited in works on literacy and education. He is Chief Scientist, Emeritus, at the for-profit training company NIIT. He won the TED Prize 2013...
NationalityIndian
ProfessionEducator
Date of Birth12 February 1952
CountryIndia
learning threatened
Too often we see that teachers and educational administrators feel threatened by self-organized learning. They, therefore, think it is not learning at all.
created creator invent
My wish for humanity is to invent a way to communicate between us and whatever comes next. And in the end that we the creator of the sentient sapient and the created we have a symbiotic relationship.
quite
It's quite fashionable to say that the educational system is broken. It's not broken. It's wonderfully constructed. It's just that we don't need it anymore.
age dish information neither supposed teachers
Teachers are not supposed to be repositories of information which they dish out. That is from an age when there were no other repositories of information, other than books or teachers, neither of which were portable. A lot of my big task is retraining these teachers.
children mind ways
I don't mind children cribbing answers off other children. It's one of the ways they can learn. I also don't think there should be too many constraints on what they can look at on the Internet.
years knowing apes
It took nature 100 million years to make the ape stand up and become Homo sapiens. It took us only 10,000 to make knowing obsolete.
country teacher school
There are places on Earth, in every country, where, for various reasons, good schools cannot be built and good teachers cannot or do not want to go.
children want
Children will learn to do what they want to learn to do.
children profound peers
Profound changes to how children access vast information is yielding new forms of peer-to-peer and individual-guided learning.
children school years
Experiments show that children in unsupervised groups are capable of answering questions many years ahead of the material they're learning in school. In fact, they seem to enjoy the absence of adult supervision, and they are very confident of finding the right answer.
children wall use
I was inspired by the Hole in the Wall project, where a computer with an internet connection was put in a Delhi slum. When the slum was revisited after a month, the children of that slum had learned how to use the worldwide web.
teacher long google
Teachers say to me, 'The internet is full of rubbish, wrong answers.' But you would be surprised how just long it takes to find wrong information on Google, and where it's not obvious that it's wrong.
people google pages
People are adamant learning is not just looking at a Google page. But it is. Learning is looking at Google pages. What is wrong with that?
teacher children school
The best schools tend to have the best teachers, not to mention parents who supervise homework, so there is less need for self-organised learning. But where a child comes from a less supportive home environment, where there are family tensions perhaps, their schoolwork can suffer. They need to be taught to think and study for themselves.