The Future of Learning | Sugata Mitra | TEDxNewcastle

Almost twenty years of experiments with children's education takes us through a series of startling results – children can self organise their own learning, they can achieve educational objectives on their own, can read by themselves. Finally, the most startling of them all: Groups of children with access to the Internet can learn anything by themselves. The mechanism of this kind of learning seems similar to the appearance of spontaneous order, or ‘emergent phenomena’ in chaotic systems.

From the slums of India, to the villages of India and Cambodia, to poor schools in Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, the USA and Italy, to the schools of Gateshead and the rich international schools of Washington and Hong Kong, Sugata's experimental results show a strange new future for learning.

Using the 2013 TED Prize, he has built seven ‘Schools in the Cloud’, where Self Organised Learning Environments (SOLEs) and a ‘Granny Cloud’ of mediators over the Internet, interact with unsupervised children. Sugata will present the main findings.

We begin to see some glimpses of what schools should be for and what curricular, pedagogic and assessment changes will be required in the future.

In this talk, Sugata will discuss what steps existing schools can take in order to prepare themselves for the changes that are, inevitably, going to come.

Follow Sugata on @sugatam Sugata Mitra is Newcastle University’s Professor and Principal Investigator of Educational Technology, and world-wide known expert of self-organising systems. A physicist by training, he has worked on Organic Semiconductors, Energy Storage Systems, Bots, Remote Presence, complex dynamical systems. Since 1999, the focus of his research has been on primary learning and the Internet.

Sugata has achieved international acclaims for his successful ‘Hole in the Wall’, ‘Self Organised Learning Environments’ (SOLEs) and ‘School in the Cloud’ experiments on unsupervised learning amongst groups of children.

He is a recipient of many awards, among them the million-dollar TED Prize in 2013, and has spoken extensively about ‘Minimally invasive education’ all over the world. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at https://www.ted.com/tedx