A "School in the Cloud": Kids, Computers and Learning on One's Own

A child who's never seen a computer before suddenly has one at her fingertips. She has no knowledge of the Internet and knows very little English. There are no adults around to teach her. What happens?

The answer, says Indian educator Sugata Mitra, is some extremely impressive learning. For the past 14 years, Mitra has been conducting experiments with kids and computers, showing how quickly they can become computer literate without any intervention from adults. 

Mitra, who was awarded the $1 million 2013 TED Prize this week, argues that the future of learning demands a new system in which adults merely spark children's curiosity then let them teach themselves. With a little help from computers, that is.

Mitra calls this approach "self-organized" learning. "It's not about making learning happen, it's about letting it happen," he said in a speech at the TED2013 conference in Long Beach, California, on Tuesday, where he was awarded the organization's first-ever $1 million prize. (See Mitra's full speech here.)



Mitra's experiments began in 1999, when he dug a hole in a wall between the New Delhi research center where he was teaching computer programming and the slum on the other side. He placed an Internet-connected PC in the hole, facing the slum, and left it there.

Within hours, the kids from the slum had learned how to use the computer and surf the Internet — and were teaching each other how to do it — all on their own. They also taught themselves English over time so they could do it even better.

Mitra replicated this "hole in the wall" experiment in many more locations in rural India. Hole in the wall learning stations have since spread to Cambodia and to several African countries. (The New Delhi hole in the wall project was an inspiration for the novel Q&A, which later became the Oscar-winning hit Slumdog Millionaire.)

"In nine months, a group of children left alone with a computer in any language will reach the same standard as an office secretary in the West," said Mitra, who is a professor of educational technology at Newcastle University in England.

While he does not favor direct teaching or intervention from adults, Mitra said he discovered that encouragement and admiring words from an adult — such as a grandmother would give — did help the kids in his experiments to learn better. This led to a new experiment called the "granny cloud": a community of English grandmothers who volunteer time to Skype with children across oceans and simply tell them that they're doing great.

"The granny cloud sits on the Internet," Mitra told the TED2013 audience. "If there's a child in trouble, we beam a 'gran.' She goes on over Skype, and she sorts things out."

Sugata Mitra's "SOLE Toolkit"

Mitra has developed a new model of education based on his experiments called SOLE, or self-organized learning environments. In this model, adults merely ask children big questions — "What is a soul?" "Can animals think?" — and let them learn on their own using computers and working in groups. Mashable's Chris Taylor explains SOLE this way in the article "How This Teacher Won the $1 Million TED Prize": "Give kids a computer, ask them a serious adult-level question, encourage their efforts to answer it, and stand well back."

Mitra plans to use the TED Prize money to build a "school in the cloud" — a learning laboratory where he can test out his SOLE principles and continue various experiments in self-directed learning. The school would be a physical building, likely in India, that's managed completely by cloud technology. It would be practically unmanned, Mitra said, with only one "granny" present to oversee health and safety issues. Everything else would be done via the cloud — even switching on the lights and AC, Mitra explains in this one-on-one interview with The New York Times.

Mitra has compared the school to a "safe cyber café for children," where they can connect with information and mentors online and work collaboratively with other kids. Mitra would like to see how such self-organized learning centers can be scaled globally. For now, though, the school — along with the $1 million prize that will fund it — is a testament to the wondrous innate capabilities of children. And to the tremendous appeal of a computer, even one that's just stuck in a hole in the wall.

(TED, which stands for Technology, Entertainment and Design, is a global nonprofit organization devoted to "ideas worth spreading." The TED2013 conference ran this week from Monday through today. You can download the "SOLE Toolkit" from Mitra on the TED website to learn how to apply the SOLE model in your own community.)