A different perspective
I was recently perusing some old files that I was organising when I came across some notes that I made a while ago when we welcomed Sugata Mitra to the school back in 2016. Mitra had won, in 2013, 1 million US dollars for a TED Talk that he did on what became known as ‘the hole in the wall’ experiment. He then went on to develop this idea for schools and called it SOLE (self organising learning environments)
The theory and the practice behind SOLE are very interesting, but too detailed to expound here. Suffice it to say that engagement and motivation levels are exceptionally high as students find themselves at the centre of the process. Understanding is also very high. And this is where the technique wins out in three key ways according to his research. The first way is that in control tests against groups taught in the more traditional way, the SOLE groups score more highly. The second way is that when the SOLE groups are tested later they often actually score higher than when they were first tested; remarkable results! The third positive is that students start to perform at levels way above their age. For instance he has worked with year 3 students who were able to understand and retain work aimed at IGCSE students (age 16).
Later in conversation, he put forward some interesting ideas. He claims that students are as knowledgeable as themselves, the students + their device. He gave two examples. He said that 5 years ago when he came to Hong Kong, he did not know the way to the airport. Now he said that he, plus his phone, now knows the way to the airport. He gave a second example of a phone app, which when you point your phone at, say Japanese, can translate the Japanese into English. Therefore, he postulated that you plus your phone can read Japanese. He also said that he had had an encounter with Arthur C Clarke who had basically told him that a computer should be seen as a prosthetic for the brain, as glasses are a prosthetic for the eyes. It would be unimaginable for students to be told that they couldn’t wear glasses for an exam, therefore why do we stop students from being able to access the internet for examinations. He quoted the example of some countries that were experimenting with the use of the internet during exams. He also said that one of the problems that educationalists face is that everyone has been to school and therefore has an opinion, and people want it to be the same as when they went to school, but he made a very good point by asking this question. Would people want to drive around in the same cars that their grandads did? People have got to embrace change and be open to the fact that the world has moved in the most fundamental and profound ways.
