Grandmothers, Kids And ‘Hole In The Wall’ Internet Learning

Sugata Mitra is an Indian education researcher. His ‘Hole in the Wall’ experiments have shown that, if motivated by curiosity and peer interest, children can teach themselves and each other without formal supervision.

He says in every country there are places

“where good teachers won’t go”

and

“children will learn to do what they want to do.”

eg learning to record their own music from the internet then playing it back, all in four hours.

About The ‘Hole In The Wall’ Experiment

In 1999 in an urban slum in New Delhi an Internet-connected PC was installed in a hole dug in a wall and left there, with a hidden camera filming the area.

Kids from the slum playing around with the computer learned how to use it, how to go online, and started teaching each other.

The experiment has been replicated in other parts of urban and rural India with similar results, challenging some of the key assumptions of formal education.

The ‘Granny Cloud’ Encourages Learning

Another positive discovered is that children respond well to a ‘granny figure’, not teaching them, but simply standing behind them offering encouragement and positively engaging with what they are doing, like a parent or any involved family member would.

Minimally Invasive Education

Sugata Mitra, who’s now a professor of educational technology at Newcastle University (UK) is proposing an idea for schools called SOLE or Self Organised Learning Environments, that consists of a computer with a bench big enough to let four children sit around the screen.

“It doesn’t work if you give them each a computer individually,” he says.

The children are then backed up by a ‘granny cloud’ – 200 volunteer grandmothers who can be called upon to video chat with the children and provide encouragement.

He has tested the spaces successfully in the UK and Italy, and now believes they should be tested more widely.

During an earlier stage of his experiments, Indian children actually asked to be read fairy tales by UK grandmothers via Skype!

Professor Mitra told the TED Global (Technology, Entertainment and Design) conference in Oxford in the UK:

”I think we have stumbled across a self-organising system with learning as an emergent behaviour.”

Check out the video

Our engaged Indigenous grandmothers, such as the ladies at Fitzroy Crossing, could provide an education revolution in remote communities…