Future of learning is 3 Cs, not the 3 Rs, says teaching guru
Comprehension, communication, computation can subsume reading, writing and arithmetic
In 1999, Sugata Mitra, Professor of Education
Technology at Newcastle University, England, and his colleagues tried a
dipstick experiment in teaching. They installed a computer in a wall in a busy
slum in New Delhi. Next thing they knew, the computer with online access was
being mobbed by neighbourhood children tapping away at it. In no time, the
children had learnt how to use it and surf the internet, and their lack of
familiarity with the language or the interface did not stand in the way of
their learning.
In another incident, Prof. Mitra asked some
children if was possible for one thing to be present in two places. The
nine-year-olds sat on the computers in groups and threw back the phrase
‘quantum entanglement’ at him. When asked what that meant, the children
explained the process to him, using threads.
On the basis of his assorted case studies,
Prof. Mitra concluded: “If given access to public computing, children in groups
could go from zero computer literacy to that of an officer or secretary in the
West in nine months.” This self-learning model, which came to be popularly
known as ‘holes in the wall’, intrigued Prof. Mitra enough to develop
innovative teaching methodologies.
At an IIT Bombay institute colloquium talk on
‘Future of Learning’ on Thursday, he said it was possible to achieve an
objective without leadership, but with desire that’s common to a group. From
this insight, he developed SOLE, or Self-Organising Learning Environment, which
works on three premises: take whatever you are going to teach and convert it
into a big question, pose it to a group of children in a setting that has fewer
internet-enabled computers than children. No method is prescribed or
proscribed.
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The
idea behind having much fewer computers is to encourage children to work and
learn together. “The level of achievement of a group is higher than the
highest level of achievement of an individual,” he observed.
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In Prof. Mitra’s view, the three Rs of
reading, writing and arithmetic can be productively subsumed by the three
bigger areas of comprehension, communication and computation (in the wider
sense of problem solving) respectively. Conceding it was difficult to work
around strait-jacketed systems of learning, he said, “We need a curriculum of
questions, not facts.”
SOLE soon grew into an attractive teaching
option internationally, starting with Newcastle. Countries like Australia,
Argentina, Spain and Portugal were among the first to try it. By 2016, SOLE had
gone viral, with educational institutions from all over the world adopting it.
An allied discovery along the way was that
admiration fuels a child’s interest. Unlike parents, who prefer the discipline
approach to teach their children, grandparents usually pamper children with
praise. Thus evolved the ‘Granny Cloud’ in 2009, in which Prof. Mitra enrolled
grandmothers in a virtual chat with children, resulting in a remarkable growth
in learning.
With the $1-million TED prize money that he
received in 2013, Prof. Mitra started an experiment that blended SOLE with
Granny Cloud to form the School in the Cloud. It reaffirmed the positives of
his learning model, and he found that “reading, comprehension, communication,
internet searching skills and self-confidence go up with this way of learning”.
The method, of course, poses a challenge to the conventional system of
individual assessment through the examination-interview structure.
Regards
Pralhad Jadhav
Senior Manager @ Library
Khaitan & Co
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