Sugata mitra child-driven education
- •
MLTalks: Sugata Mitra
Location
MIT Media Lab, E14 6th Floor
Description
What are the origins of schooling?
If you can access the Internet invisibly, are you educated?
How long can you ‘pretend’ to be a professional without going to school?
What will nature do with a human brain that now has a powerful prosthetic?
Is the Internet collective consciousness? If so, are we taking an evolutionary jump? Are we witnessing the end of Homo Sapiens?
This one-hour talk and discussion will travel through 13 years of experiments that raise the questions above. It is in this context that we will look at the future of learning and its effects around the world, in countries that are developing and countries that have stopped developing.
Biography
Sugata Mitra is professor of educational technology at the School of Education, Communication and Language Sciences at Newcastle University, UK. He is the instigator of the Hole in the Wall (HIW) experiment, where a computer was embedded within a wall in an Indian slum at Kalkaji, Delhi and children were allowed to freely use it. The experiment
- •
A beginner’s guide to Professor Sugata Mitra
Best known for:
In 1999 Mitra carried out a series of Hole in the Wall (HIW) experiments about children's learning. The first experiment involved children being given free access to a computer embedded in a wall between his office and a Delhi slum. The experiment aimed to prove that children could easily learn from computers without any formal training, a phenomenon Mitra called Minimally Invasive Education.
The experiment demonstrated that children could learn to use computers and the Internet on their own in open spaces such as roads and playgrounds, even without knowing English. In 2013, Mitra's TED Talk Build a School in the Cloud discussed the Hole in the Wall experiment. His write-up of the experiment was judged the best open access publication in the world in 2005 and he was also awarded the Dewang Mehta Award for innovation in IT that year.
Quick biography:
Professor Sugata Mitra (image source: TED)
Born: 1952
Nationality: Indian
Where does he work?
Mitra is currently Professor of Educ
- •
Education speaker Sugata Mitra is the Professor Emeritus at NIIT University. He used to be a Professor and Principal Research Investigator at Newcastle University in the United Kingdom.
In 1999, Sugata did an experiment called the Hole in the Wall. He embedded a computer within a wall in an Indian slum letting kids use it as much as they wanted. The experiment aimed to demonstrate that children could learn to use computers very quickly and easily without any prior formal training. In Sugata’s words, this is called “Minimally Invasive Education” (MIE). There have been numerous recreations of the experiment since it was first conducted. Speaker Sugata Mitra has received multiple awards from the United Kingdom, India, the United States, and several other countries.
His primary focus is on Children’s Education, Self-organising systems, Remote Presence, Cognitive Systems, Physics, and Consciousness. The Hole in the Wall experiment inspired the creation of the Oscar-winning movie Slumdog Millionaire. In 2003, Sugata received the Dewang Mehta Award for Innovat
Copyright ©damtree.pages.dev 2025