Reflection on the TED talks

As part of the prize for Inspirational Leader of the Year in 2012 I was able to “buy” a membership of TED Live. TED (Technology, Entertainment and Design) is a global set of conferences for "ideas worth spreading." The TED2013 conference just happened in the USA and was broadcast live. This meant I needed to be up from 5am to watch and so in most cases I downloaded to watch the next night. I tweeted the YouTube links as soon as they were public @SymoLyn

At the same time as watching TED my home Apple page just announced that ITunes U had just passed one billion content downloads. Similarly last month the Khan Academy announced they had just passed one billion exercise problems done using Khan Academy resources. These figures again show that the world of education is rapidly changing.

Back to TED! There were some good talks I watched, some OK and a few truly sensational! One of the truly sensational was that of Sugata Mitra in his acceptance of the TED prize ($1million). Now Sugata Mitra’s academic career is nothing short of phenomenal anyway and he has discoveries and publications across Science, Maths, Technology and now Education.

His popular acclaim now is through the Hole in the Wall experiments in children’s learning. In the initial experiment, a computer was placed in a "hole" created within a wall in a slum in Delhi, India and children were allowed to use it freely- even though it only had English and the children could not read or write in English. The experiment aimed at proving that kids could be taught by computers very easily without any formal training- and they certainly did learn. The experiment has since been repeated at many places throughout India and the rest of the world.

… “The Victorians created a global computer made up of people. It’s called the bureaucratic administrative machine,” says Mitra, in the bold opening of his talk. “In order to keep that running, you need lots and lots of people. They must be identical to each other … So they created a system, called school, to make parts [for this human computer]. They must have good handwriting, they must be able to read, and they must be able to add, subtract and do division.”
But these skills aren’t as necessary with the advent of computers. “It’s quite fashionable to say education system is broken,” says Mitra. “It’s not, It’s wonderfully constructed — it’s just that we don’t need it anymore. It’s outdated.”
We can’t imagine the technology of the future, and thus we can’t know what jobs we’ll need the skills for. So Mitra suggests that education should be about developing the ability to learn anything on one’s own. …Sugata Mitra accepts the Ted Prize at Ted2013

We have seen glimpses of this ourselves when we handed Ipads to our preschoolers and watched them play- they experiment and learn and astonish and amaze us with what they can do in such a short period of time.

Sugata challenges us to have a new vision for learning through SOLE = Self Organizing Learning Environments as the old model of schooling was for another time that no longer exists. He believes we need to pose big questions (similar to our Adelaide University Compass program) and support our children through encouragement to develop their own curiosity and solve/answer/find information to develop their ability to learn anything!

In conclusion he made a bold TED Prize wish: “Help me build a place where children can explore and learn on their own -- and teach one another -- using resources from the worldwide cloud”. He asked us to develop SOLEs and then send the data and information to him such that the school in the cloud can truly develop.

WE were challenged if this was something MOCB12 could be part of as our small contribution to the future of learning?