Wednesday
Sep082010
by 
Bishop Hill
Bishop Hill Sugata Mitra on kids teaching themselves
Sep 8, 2010 Education Another wonderful TED talk, this time from Sugata Mitra, an academic from the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne. Mitra gets children to teach themselves things.
Reader Comments (13)
Very interesting. May explain why children in remote locations do so well with correspondence courses. The mummy factor.
Very interesting. May explain why children in remote locations do so well with correspondence courses. The mummy factor.
This was an inspiring video and tying it to emergent behavior is brilliant. I am old enough to have been involved in the original personal computer revolution. It was a time when a carpenter at the local school was using hobby computers in the classroom and using the approach in the video to solve Pascal's Triangle. Unfortunately the school decided that the head of the mathematics should make all the decisions about computers and things went downhill from there. In my own case I found myself one evening with the phone in one hand and a soldering iron in the other connecting some power to a telephone coupler to make a self powered modem. The next thing I did, and this really voided the warranty, was reconnect a pin on the clock chip to double the speed of the Z80 CPU making the machine fly! To put all this in context the computer cost the price of a small new car at the time. I have continued to be educated and finding the site by Steve McIntyre at ClimateAudit, Harvard Physicist Lubos Motl
at http://motls.blogspot.com/, this site http://www.icecap.us/ and http://wattsupwiththat.com/ and finally http://bishophill.squarespace.com/ has been as an exciting a journey as the original ventures into computers. We are like the children with 'Cloud Grandfathers' leading the way in climate science and discoveries of all sorts.
A long time ago in another life I did that sort of stuff with kids. It is just as much fun as it appears to be. Even tough them tree sorts and stuff the same way...
Nowadays I sometime do the same stuff for adults -- in addition to my other work -- they are a tougher audience. :-) ...don't learn as quick!
I think the other thing that can be drawn from this is that children have an innate capacity to learn when they have interest and access to the tools that let them learn on their own along with minimal guidance. Give them a problem to solve and they will surprise you.. As Buckminster Fuller once remarked (paraphrase here): "When a child tears a paper into pieces, whether he explicitly realizes it or not, he has learned something of the tensile strength of materials." And he can apply that knowledge to other situations. He soon learns that he cannot tear a piece of wood in two. and so on. The good professor has a very good concept here. I would hope others would adopt this.
Let's try this again -- sorry...
A long time ago in another life I did that sort of stuff with kids. It is just as much fun as it appears to be. Even taught them tree sorts and stuff the same way... This was before the age of the internet...
Nowadays I sometimes do the same stuff for adults -- in addition to my other work -- they are a tougher audience. :-) ... they don't learn as quick!
At first walking away makes you feel guilty... but then they start to learn.
I recently watched a collection of videos from Stephen Molyneux (albeit an ardent libertarian - www.freedomainradio.com) explaining how the pre-state education system in the US was highly effective (huge literacy rates and low cost).
The essence of that system was elder children teaching younger children.
We are so brainwashed in the UK that we're not usually allowed to discuss the merits of the public eduction system - 'education is a good thing', that we never question it.
I look at the conditioning that my 7 year-old son receives - eco-everything, being a 'good citizen', etc and it does make makes me wonder...
Apparently kids learn the internet pretty quick, while the adults at the CRU and the IPCC are yet 'struggling with the internet age'.
The shameless eye-watering lies... :)
did anybody have any opinions about the 'world society' aspect of this video? anyone familiar with the non-fiction writing of arthur c clark?
Interesting video.
Similar to giving a child the remote control to one of the early video recorders, they just seemed to press buttons, and through a sequence of trial and error they got their results. Their parents on the other hand had read the manual and totally confused themselves.
Maybe a moral to that?
Common sense trumps all?
Don't mould kids, let them think for their-selves.
I do not know where common-sense arrives from but we need to get that out to our children at their education stage, it seems they have it initially but lose it through 'learning'.
I guess this is a clever extrapolation of what children do when they are born. There is no language, no knowledge, no cultural background.
They watch and listen to good parents and learn language, absorb a shed load of information and learn how to behave in their culture.
THEN they go to school ^.^
Found it interesting, however school is a place for children to discover an array of things at a superficial level in order that they may identify a direction in life/their strongest skill set. The downside is probably that we have to force feed all of them all of the subjects in order to identify their interest.
What the video does for me is to realise that our methods of teaching can be more varied than the ones we currently operate or indeed are capable of operating.
I can still see a place though for teaching the basic tools and whilst the children in India will have learned some English, the depth of English will be superficial (but very strong for their requirements)
I write this because if you want to understand at higher levels of society you must understand their communication amd English is only part of the story. For example the medical and legal professions used Latin. I suggest specifically to ensure it remained a closed shop. The current legal system in the UK uses a special form of English that only if you study it vigorously will you be able to communicate effectively in a court of law.
My point being that at some point we have to encourage children to study with a little more depth and we have to give them qualifications that the upper echelons (from the children. ie adults) will accept/understand.
Wonderful talk. I loved the idea of a Granny Cloud!
http://www.cartoonsbyjosh.com/granny-cloud-scr.jpg