Self-organised learning can be a game changer

In a thought provoking article in The Observer that education policymakers would probably find fascinating to ponder, Prof. Sugata Mitra, concluded by observing that we don’t need to improve schools. We need to reinvent them for our times, our requirements and our future. He was discussing this in his fascinating piece, Advent of Google means we must rethink our approach to education (15th June 2013). In the meantime, Nkubito Bakuramutsa, the national coordinator of Rwanda’s One Laptop Per Child Programme, posed the question: How do we ensure that all our students have access to courses, lessons comparable to the best schools around the world, especially those in highly competitive countries such as Singapore, Japan, Korea or the USA? (The New Times, 19th June 2013).The OLPC Coordinator went on to enumerate the strides that have been made.The government has so far deployed 200,000 laptops in over 400 schools while close to 10,000 teachers have been trained to competently teach with computers. It will only be a matter of time before all 2.3 million primary school children (according to 2011 figures) will each have a lap top on their hands. Then, what?Enter Prof. Mitra, winner of the TED Prize 2013, for devising the Hole in the Wall experiment that aimed to prove young people could be taught computers easily without formal training. In the experiment a computer was embedded in a wall in a slum in Delhi for children to use freely.He wonders in his article: Would a person with good handwriting, spelling and grammar and instant recall of multiplication tables be considered a better candidate for a job than, say, one who knows how to configure a peer-to-peer network of devices, set up an organisation-wide Google calendar and find out where the most reliable sources of venture capital are? The former set of skills, he observe profoundly, are taught in schools, the latter are not.When the Rwandan children will be sufficiently inured in the use of their laptops, one can easily visualize the eventual reality across the hills of Rwanda of the picture Prof. Mitra was painting.He gives the example of a teacher with her class of nine-year olds somewhere in contemporary Britain.The teacher asks her class, “There is something called electromagnetic radiation that we can’t see, can you figure out what it is?” The Professor shows how the children huddle around a few computers, talking, running around and looking for clues. In about 40 minutes, they figure out the basics of electromagnetism and start relating it to mobile signals. He explains that this is called a self-organised learning environment, a Sole. In a Sole, he writes, children work in self-organised groups of four or five clustered around an internet connected computer. They can talk, change group, move around, look at other groups’ work and so on.Herein, lies the possibility that employers and policymakers should pay note. Prof. Mitra suggests that if examinations challenge learners to solve problems the way they are solved in real life today, the educational system will change for ever. It is a small policy change that is required, he says. Allow the use of the internet and collaboration during an examination.The significance of this thought is not just for Rwanda, but for the world at large. Just think about it. “Teaching in an environment where the internet and discussion are allowed in exams would be different. The ability to find things out quickly and accurately would become the predominant skill. The ability to discriminate between alternatives, then put facts together to solve problems would be critical. That’s a skill that future employers would admire immensely.” Twitter: @gituram

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Self-organised learning can be a game changer