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Use Internet as a learning machine
On the second day of the Transforming Education Conference for Humanity-2017 (TECH 2017) being organised in the city by the UNESCO and Mahatma Gandhi Institute of Education for Peace and Sustainable Development (MGIEP) was dominated by deliberations on the future of education and what it would look like with the rampant spread of technological innovations.
Visakhapatnam: On the second day of the Transforming Education Conference for Humanity-2017 (TECH 2017) being organised in the city by the UNESCO and Mahatma Gandhi Institute of Education for Peace and Sustainable Development (MGIEP) was dominated by deliberations on the future of education and what it would look like with the rampant spread of technological innovations.
On Sunday, in a session titled ‘Talking across generations on education’, nine diverse youth from across the globe met three senior decision makers to discuss whether technology would exacerbate the inequality gap in education or not.
The youth cohort had delegates from South Africa, Armenia, India and Colombia while the distinguished senior decision-makers included Aditya Nath Das, Roza Outenbayeva and Catherine Edmond. The dialogue benefitted from the rich experience of the speakers and touched upon relevant sub-themes such as access to technology, quality control and safety of the learner.
This was followed by a Headline Session on ‘The Future of Learning’ by 2013 TED Prize winner Dr Sugata Mitra (Professor of Educational Technology at Newcastle University, UK) who rose to fame with his famous ‘Hole in the Wall’ experiment 20 years ago. Mitra further defined ‘Self-Organised Learning Environment’ (SOLE) as a mildly chaotic environment of children, clustered around the Internet, in search of answers to big questions”, calling the teacher a friend on this journey.
He highlighted the importance of admiration and encouragement in facilitating children’s learning, referring to ‘The Granny Cloud’ —a group of grandmothers and retired teachers, who interact with children through Skype—he has been experimenting since 2009.
He also touched upon the ‘Schools in the Cloud’ project, where schools in the UK and India adopting his SOLE approach are brought together through the online platform. Mitra called for allowing students to use the Internet and talk to each other during the exams.
If the purpose of education is to enable people to lead happy, healthy and useful lives, he concluded, “We should use the self-organised network of Internet as a learning machine and change how we assess students.”
