(Teachers) The Hole in the Wall - using technology to maximize learner-to-learner interaction

The Hole in the Wall

using technology to maximize learner-to-learner interaction

Main points from Sugata Mitra's TED talk on child-driven education.

1. Children will learn to do what they want to learn to do.

2. Children can learn to use computers and the internet on their own, irrespective of who or where they were.

3. A group of children who spoke English with a very strong Telugu accent were a computer with a speech-to-text interface and asked them to speak into it. The computer typed out gibberish, so they said, "Well, it doesn't understand anything of what we are saying." Sugata Mitra said "Yeah, I'll leave it here for two months. Make yourself understood to the computer." And left. Two months later their accents had changed and were remarkably close to the neutral British accent.

4. Arthur C. Clarke said "A teacher that can be replaced by a machine should be." 

5. And he said, "If children have interest, then education happens." 

6. Mitra set himself an impossible target: can Tamil speaking 12-year-old children in a South Indian village teach themselves biotechnology in English on their own? He called in 26 children and said "There's some really difficult stuff on this computer. It's all in English, and I'm going." He came back after two months, and said "Did you understand anything?" A 12-year-old girl raised her hand and said, "Apart from the fact that improper replication of the DNA molecule causes genetic disease, we've understood nothing else."

7. The theory: Mitra believes that education is a self-organizing system: one where a structure appears without explicit intervention from the outside and where learning is an emergent phenomenon. He believes that a teacher or instructor is often quite counter-productive because they tend to resist the natural emergent factors which thrive through fluid learner to learner interaction rather than top-down teacher modelling and management.

8. The method: In a school in Britain, Mitra put 32 children into groups of four and said, "You make your own groups of four. Each group of four can use one computer and not four computers. You can exchange groups. You can walk across to another group, if you don't like your group, etc. You can go to another group, peer over their shoulders, see what they're doing, come back to you own group and claim it as your own work." He calls these groupings SOLEs (Self-Organizing Learning Environments).

9. But is this deep learning? Mitra gave the 32 children in Britain six GCSE questions. The first group — the fastest one — solved everything in 20 minutes. The slowest, in 45. They used everything that they knew — news groups, Google, Wikipedia, Ask Jeeves, etc. The teachers said, "Is this deep learning?" Mitra came back after two months and gave them a paper test — no computers, no talking to each other, etc." The average score when he'd done it with the computers and the groups was 76 percent. When he did the paper test 2 months later the score was 76 percent. There was photographic recall inside the children.

10. Learning happens through dialogue, especially peer-to-peer dialogue: Mitra suspects the photographic recall occurs because the groups of children were discussing with each other (not with a teacher). he believes that a single child in front of a single computer, or even a group of children being instructed by a teacher, would not retain what they'd learned so well. 

An example

This morning I was discussing Mitra's ideas with my C2 students in relation to the use of digital and online resources through their course. Overall, the students had negative feelings about iLabs and iPads except in cases where they were asked to use these tools collaboratively. They cited a recent lesson where their teacher Helen had put six different "scrolling texts" on six monitors around the iLab. The students were put into pairs. They had to go to a monitor and read the text as it scrolled very quickly, giving them only enough time to pick up some of the ideas. They then had to exchange what they'd been able to comprehend and then had a second chance to reread the scrolling text. Now the focus became productive. The pairs had to write a quick summary together before they could move to the next scrolling text and repeat the process. They emphasized to me that there was a bit overlap as students moved from monitor to monitor. In other words, Helen gave each pair the time they needed to get through the task properly. Some pairs took longer than others. Some texts required more effort and patience on their part. But this actually didn't distract them, if anything it created more focus through dialogue and learner-to-learner interaction. They told me that this was one of the best activities they did at EF.

Dialogue

We all have ways of making our lessons a dialogue rather than a monologue. How do you go about this? 

Talk briefly about each of these things. Don't go into too much detail:

Dealing with distracted or distracting students / non-participating students / domineering students

Allowing for emergent outcomes

Creating a pathway through the lesson

Acknowledging and exploiting the specific interests the learners

Getting students into a productive mindset

Risk and failure

The changing role of technology

The collaborative dimension

Different learning styles

When to deviate from the syllabus 

When to, and when not to, loosen the reins

Changing Education Paradigms

Discuss these questions first 

1. How do we educate people for the 21st Century, when don't even know what the economy will look like next week?

2. How do we educate children so they have as sense of cultural identity, while being part of the process of globalisation?

3. What do you think is wrong with our public education system? 

4. Where does our public education system come from? Why, How, Where, When did it originate?

5. What is intelligence? How do we measure it? How doe we cultivate it? 

Watch:

Changing Education Paradigms