Build a School in the Cloud

Undoubtedly, the focus of this course as "student-centered learning" has been a bit of an adjustment. The 'build your own curriculum' (in essence) type of structure had me pretty overwhelmed at first to be honest. I've had a previous course with Dr. Megahed so I completely trusted his judgement and knew that there was significant purpose behind his approach.

Recently, I watched a Ted Talk on the education system as it exists in America. The title of the talk was called "Sugata Mitra: Build a School in the Cloud" and you can find the link here.

Dr. Mitra presents some pretty interesting ideas. The first thoughts he offers surround the history of our classroom structure. Mitra talks about the birth of the current classroom taking place because of the Victorian era and the overarching grasp of the British Empire. During this time, computers weren't present. So, out of necessity, the Empire needed to process "data" (or documents and communiqué)  rapidly and efficiently. Thus, they produced an education system that standardized handwriting and basic arithmetic. This system produced humans that could then enter into the workforce for the empire and be displaced over various continents and act as "data" processers, using their standardized handwriting and arithmetic to communicate and process documents from the rest of the empire.

Mitra then begins his exposition on a set of experiments conducted by him on children. Basically, Mitra goes out into slums all over East Asia and sets up a computer and tells a few local kids that its there. The children generally ask questions like how to use it or what it does and he responds with "I'm not really sure." He leaves the children for an extended amount of time and then returns to see what has developed. In every instance, the children learned at an exponential rate. He observed as they browse (which they learned on their own how to do) and teach one another different methods to use the computer and also specific topics that Mitra programmed the computer to show, such as biochemistry.

The experiment has another important component - the granny. Sugata asks a local CPA in one of the cities that he's conducting an experiment in to stand by while the children are learning and give them gentle encouragement. The CPA has a pre-existing relationship with the children because she plays with them on occasion, but has absolutely no formal education training.  She stands by and makes comments like "oh, wow! how did you do that? I would never have been able to do that at my age." This model seems to have a tremendous amount of success. So much so that Sugata sets up learning communities via Skype where he hires retired granny's (from work, not family) to observe and interact with students from other countries 6,000 miles away as they learn.

Mitra goes on to say that this model encourages us to change our perspective to: "Learning as the product of educational self-organization. If you allow educational process to self-organize, then learning emerges. It's not about making learning happen, it's about letting learning happen."

I won't ruin the ending because I want you to watch it for yourself, but Mitra has developed something called SOLE that uses this model to reshape the learning process in classrooms.

This argument seems to have a great deal of validity. The children are experiencing a tremendous amount of growth in intellectual capacity and look genuinely joyful to be learning. So, the question becomes - can this really work for everyone? I think we've all seen this model in some sense in this class in that the doorway for learning is wide-open. We're challenged to explore and engage in topics that interest us rather than ones forced upon us. Dr. Megahed isn't a "granny" in the hold-your-hand nurturing sense. But, we can all agree that he's probably one of the most engaging and helpful professors that any of us have had.

My opinion is this - I have truly enjoyed this teaching model for a lot of reasons. Mainly because of how open-ended it is and you can get a general grasp of what you're learning and then pursue specific interests. However, I have had some problems with being accountable for my work and being proactive about getting things done. While this has absolutely nothing to do with the model itself, and rather more to do with how I perform - I wonder if this is addressed in Mitra's case. Or, is it because his experiments were conducted in grade school that he saw this extent of success? I would say that there is definitely a vast difference in the environment of grade school and collegiate, however what are some of the important concepts we can take away?