Our education system was constructed hundreds of years ago, and educators made some assumptions based on the technology that was available.
Some years ago did Dr. Sugata Mitra an odd experiment. He placed a PC inside a wall behind a plastic shield in a New Dehli slum. Connected to the internet with a mouse, Mitra simply powered it up and left it behind. “I left it to the wolves, knowing that it would be smashed, opened up and and sold,” Mitra says. “I left it, just to see what would happen.”
When Mitra came back after 2 months he found the kids playing games and browsing the Internet. One kid sauntered up to Mitra and said, “We could use a better mouse and a faster processor.” And there was a small complaint. “You’ve given us a machine that only works in English, so we had to teach ourselves English.”
What Mitra envisions are “schools in the cloud,” classes of 24 students in actual brick-and-mortar spaces managed in person by his volunteer grannies. The grannies ask the questions, offer the encouragement, everything else happens remotely, the lights, heating, and locks are all manipulated via the cloud.
But still access to technology is a huge limitation, we don't need to get an iPad for every child. It could be a $200 refurbished PC for every 6 kids.
Apple announced last Thursday that more than 1 billion items have been downloaded from Apple's online educational catalog, iTunes U. Approximately 1 200 universities; including Yale, MIT and Oxford host more than 2 500 public courses between them.
Or like Salman Khan who is the founder of Khan Academy, a not-for-profit that hosts more than 3 800 free educational videos online.
Today I follow a workshop from Stanford University on my iPad and a course from MIT Media Lab via videoconferencing…
Dr. Sugata Mitra is the winner of this year’s $1 million TED Prize.