[OLPC-SF] Fwd: [IAEP] Mitra's talk on hole in the wall

[Edward Cherlin]

On Tue, Jan 13, 2009 at 10:27 PM, Sameer Verma <sverma at sfsu.edu> wrote:
> Just saw Sugata Mitra's talk at Lift (http://liftconference.com/) on
> the hole-in-the-wall experiment and the data they collected.

Does everybody know that the Hole in the Wall experiment inspired the
novel Q&A that became the basis for Slumdog Millionaire?

> Most
> impressive was the concept of self-organized learning that happened in
> these places. http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/sugata_mitra_shows_how_kids_teach_themselves.html
> It goes against all the talk about teacher training, etc.

It goes against the current form of teacher training, but not against
teacher training itself. Teachers need to learn how to be enablers and
facilitators, and how to appreciate the enormous learning capacity
within every child. Currently much of teacher training is meant to
interfere with that learning ability, in order to restrict children to
learning what is in the politically-approved curriculum.

Compare the effects of the training that teachers received in Ethiopia
in the laptop program there, taking them from a pure rote memory
system to exploration, and from treating student questions as insults
to putting question time into their lesson plans.

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Academic_papers#Ethiopia_Implementation_Report.2C_September_-_December_2007

> Sameer
> --
> Dr. Sameer Verma, Ph.D.
> Associate Professor of Information Systems
> San Francisco State University
> San Francisco CA 94132 USA
> http://verma.sfsu.edu/
> http://opensource.sfsu.edu/
> _______________________________________________
> IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!)
> IAEP at lists.sugarlabs.org
> http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep

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And Children are my nation.
The Cosmos is my dwelling place, The Truth my destination.
http://earthtreasury.net/ (Edward Mokurai Cherlin)