Almost twenty years of experiments with children's education takes us through a series of startling results – children can self organise their own learning, they can achieve educational objectives on their own, can read by themselves. Finally, the most startling of them all: Groups of children with access to the Internet can learn anything by themselves. The mechanism of this kind of learning seems similar to the appearance of spontaneous order, or ‘emergent phenomena’ in chaotic systems.
From the slums of India, to the villages of India and Cambodia, to poor schools in Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, the USA and Italy, to the schools of Gateshead and the rich international schools of Washington and Hong Kong, Sugata's experimental results show a strange new future for learning.
Using the 2013 TED Prize, he has built seven ‘Schools in the Cloud’, where Self Organised Learning Environments (SOLEs) and a ‘Granny Cloud’ of mediators over the Internet, interact with unsupervised children. Sugata will present the main findings.
We begin to see some glimpses of what schools should be for and what curricular, pedagogic and assessment changes will be required in the future.
In this talk, Sugata will discuss what steps existing schools can take in order to prepare themselves for the changes that are, inevitably, going to come.
Follow Sugata on @sugatam
