www.thecourieronline.co.uk Monday 28 October 2013 Issue 1277 Free
The Independent Voice of Newcastle Students
WELCOME TO TOON-SYLVANIA DRACULA’S Step into our lair where we’re going to scare your socks off
DAUGHTERS p.18-20
Est 1948
COUNT LEBRON p.15
Toon prof Sugata Mitra named in top 10 list of global thinkers Sugata Mitra, a Professor of Educational Technology at the School of Education, Communication and Language Sciences, was named as part of ‘The CNN 10: Thinkers.’ Last week CNN Tech announced their top 10 science and technology “visionaries whose ideas are shaping our future”, and Professor Mitra was named as one of these inspirational figures. Among the top names mentioned were Caroline Buckee, who found a way to track the spread of malaria in Kenya by studying cell phone data and Andrew Ng, who started filming lectures at Stanford University and is now developing a series of free online courses. Professor Mitra is known for his “hole in the wall” experiments, where free public computers were installed in Indian slums.
particularly care, if anyone else had done it. “Maybe its lasting impact will be to change our ideas about children’s minds and how those engage with vast clouds of information and ideas.” “Necessity may be the mother of invention, sometimes, but it is not Mitra is known the mother of creativity, or of confor his “hole ceptual jumps,” he in the wall” said. “For making real experiments, jumps, where free pub- conceptual one needs to think lic computers in really different were installed ways and to mix things in one’s in Indian slums up head.” For the following ten years, Professor Mitra created a ‘granny cloud’ consisting of online moderators of retired teachers. The teachers could Skype into
In 1999, Mitra carved a hole in his research centre into an adjoining Delhi slum. He placed an accessible computer into the hole, and found that groups of children from the slum, with no prior experience or knowledge of English, could teach themselves to use the computer’s software. To prove the experiment would work in an isolated environment, Mitra set up another ‘hole in the wall’ computer in a village 300 miles away. After a while, “one of the kids was saying we need a faster processor and a better mouse,” he said. His experiment led to a fundamental reassessment of the position of formal education. Hidden monitoring showed the benefits of what Mitra nicknamed ‘Minimally Invasive Education.’ “I just did it to see what would happen,” Mitra said. “I did not know, or
learning centres and encourage children with questions and assignments. As a leading proponent of self-directed learning, Mitra developed the concept of SOLEs (Self Organised Learning Environments). Mitra’s SOLE approach celebrates learning where educators ask children big life questions, rather than just asking them to memorise facts. Coming to education trained as a physicist, Mitra said he was encouraged by his boss to start teaching people how to write computer programs. When he bought his first personal computer, he was surprised to find that his 6-year-old son was able to tell him how to fix problems he had operating the machine. He thought his son was a genius, but then heard his friends saying the same thing about their children. Continued on page 4
By Anna Templeton News Editor
“Professor Mitra’s vision is helping to improve the education of children all over the world, including those in some of the most deprived areas”
INSPIRED
Sugata Mitra’s findings help to form the story for the Oscar-winning film Slumdog Millionaire