Thursday, January 22, 2009

Sugata Mitra: Can Kids Teach Themselves?

I heartily recommend educators interested in techonology and the philosophical considerations related to education to view this videoclip. It is thought-provoking and certainly makes the case that technology has an innate and powerful way of "capturing the spirit" of young people.

It makes me wonder... how do we capture and direct this power? Toward what ultimate end is educational technology to be used?

As a final cavaet, I do think Sugata Mitra seemed to draw generalizations from a very small of data and he was pretty liberal with his speculations... I think a Statistics teacher might have a heart attack!

1 comment:

  1. "...I think a Statistics teacher might have a heart attack!"

    Yes, it's small scale. One of the other students thought of his experience in Senegal, and couldn't imagine it working there. You wonder, though. I tend to lean to this side of argument--turning kids loose with an abundance of technology, guided by great teachers who differentiate as needed, and teach to the "habits of the mind" skills [ http://www.habits-of-mind.net/whatare.htm ]. I wonder if we turned them loose for five years this way, what would we get in the end? Would it be chaos? Would there be identifiable learning? I don't know.

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