Tonight whilst looking for somewhere to house an "elearning course" I got side-tracked and ended up watching a TED talk. WOW! It was amazing. Sugata Mitra's "The child-driven education". It powerfully demonstrates the impact of giving children access to technology (the internet). The results are amazing, the potential impact/s phenomenal:
Sugata's results (of giving children access to the internet)
- 12 year old Tamil children teaching themselves biotechnology in English unaided.
- Children becoming deep thinkers
- Introduce "granny" and grades go up (Granny's can be accessed remotely)
- Groups of children learn GCSE questions in 15 minutes! Their recall after two months had no loss. This was put down to visual learning, engagement, doing
- Introduce a granny and results improve further
- After watching 8 TED talks children wanted to be Leonardo DaVinci and not footballers!
- Italians speaking 10 year old children could find the answers to questions posed in a foreign language in 10 minute using the Internet
"Self organising system" - a structure appears without explicit intervention from the outside. Also always show emergence. Education is a SOS and learning is an emergent phenomenon.
- What would happen if the world's population had access to the internet and the learning opportunity/tools it holds?
- Is there a moral obligation on society to provide that?
- Is there a moral obligation to provide open access materials? Surely holding them within vle/lms systems is immoral, and is holding back humanity. Knowledge is power.
- What could humankind achieve if all the world's brains could learn and collaborate?
