Beyond The Hole In The Wall: A Book That May Change Everything You Believe About Education

This story is networked by Sugata Mitra, a famous Indian educator at the turn of the millennium, who literally uses a pickaxe and shovel to pierce the wall that separates the office from areas such as New Delhi's slums. With the gap created in this way, you can turn the computer screen and keyboard to the outdoor alley and cover it all with protective plastic material to make rain and sparkle work The

Then he put it there so that local children could find and explore freely without supervision by themselves. Mitra used a variety of technologies and simple observations from his office to keep a detailed record of the child's interaction with the computer and the Internet. Where did he get such an idea? Still do not know. But it was a great experiment.

What these kids have learned from Mitra's “hole in the wall” experiment is that children from one of the world's most hopelessly poor areas can quickly learn how the PC works without guidance or supervision. It was possible. . The children also cooperated freely, exploring the world of high-tech online connections. This was the beginning of Mitra's self-organizing learning and shaped the next decade of his research.

Sugata Mitra has written a concise non-fiction book that is inspired by Amazon's Kindle Single program Beyond the hole in the wall: discover the power of self-organized learning Introduced by Nicholas Negroponte, honorary president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Institute and the founder of the Laptop Association per child.

This is an important update to Mitra's groundbreaking work [many people will not notice the inspiration for an Oscar-winning movie] Slamdog Millionaire ]. Taken from an overnight reading of this work [read like a great sentence Atlantic Monthly Or Harper Decades of work] makes children smarter in an environment where self-learning, meaning unsupervised learning, does not seem to contribute at all to any kind of learning at first glance. All that was able to be more creative. The fact is that humans often learn under very difficult conditions. We must live or we cannot survive.

Sugata Mitra is a physicist, cognitive researcher, talented teacher, and one of the most intelligent and creative thinkers created by educational institutions in the last half century. He is currently teaching at Newcastle University. During the "hole in the wall" experiment, he was responsible for NIIT, one of the world's five largest e-training institutions.

Inappropriate internalization of the PC and the internet by thousands of illiterate children physically hit the long-standing beliefs about what children can and cannot do without the guidance and supervision of adults. Gave. Ability for children without literacy to acquire substantial computer skills and other knowledge Without the help of a teacher .

This experiment was very exciting. The World Bank president and other senior officials personally made a pilgrimage to Delhi. Media hype has begun to accumulate. Soon, this experiment was replicated in many other urban public spaces and villages around India and many other countries such as South Africa. They all gave the same message. Children have great ability and willingness to learn to use computers for learning with or without the help of teachers.

This kind of learning is Minimally invasive education . The large disparities that exist in the Indian school system and the magnitude of the challenge of educating millions of Indian children are less intimidating in light of these new studies.

I highly recommend this long article [not really a book] for those who are only slightly interested in how humans learn. It was thrilling to see cooperation, sharing, discussion, and truly courage taking place in places I didn't expect much. This could be one of the most important books on education appearing in the recent 2nd or 3rd generation. It is also a fun story to spend the night.