PANAJI
Speaking at the 10th edition of the DD Kosambi Festival of Ideas, Dr Sugata Mitra, Professor of Educational Technology at Newcastle University, UK citing an experiment he conducted said students tend to learn better in self organised groups.
“The results of the experiment showed that groups of children given unsupressed access to the internet in a safe and public space in a period of nine months can zoom from a literacy level of zero to that of a secretary in the West,” he said.
Working with the concept of Self Organized Learning Environment (SOLE), Mitra also said that providing internet access to students during an examination should be allowed and should break away from the 19th century methodology of learning.
His experiment called The Hole in The Wall that began in 1999 was of embedding a wall in an Indian slum at Kalkaji, Delhi with a computer giving those on the other side access to the monitor and the mouse. The experiment proved that kids could be taught computers and everything else in general without any formal training.
His method was then applied to schools in UK, where five computers are placed in a classroom of 20 students who are asked a question like, for example, how does DNA replicate. With no teacher in the class, the students are forced to form groups and work together in figuring out how genetic material in the human body replicates by itself.
“Groups of children behave like a bee hive. In a group, they have an understanding that is greater than that of each individual. It’s a principle we don’t quiet understand as yet but it has been seen that one can achieve spontaneous order appear out of nowhere,” said Dr. Mitra.
Mitra, thorough replicating similar models in other countries including Cambodia and South Africa and found that there had been a rapid increase in comprehension, communication skills, the ability to search on the internet and detect a wrong website from a right one and to build self confidence.
