Showing posts with label three cups of tea. Show all posts
Showing posts with label three cups of tea. Show all posts

Sunday, August 31, 2008

Learning Without Teachers

What will happen if you place a single computer workstation with free access to the World Wide Web in a wall so that 'unschooled' children can access it?

In the "Hole-in-the-Wall" project, Sugata Mitra discovered that kids in Delhi, India could and would teach themselves how to use such a tool. No instructions, no teachers, no supervision. The experiment has since been repeated many times and now Sugata Mitra's LIFT talk is available via TED...



In some ways, this self-teaching reminds me of Greg Mortenson stumbling upon students carrying on with their lessons absent of teachers in remote Pakistan. Greg's chronicle of his mission to build schools for these students is chronicled in "Three Cups of Tea".

This peer-teaching and self-learning isn't what you might expect to find when teachers leave their North American classrooms... I wonder why that is?