In 1999, Sugata Mitra and his colleagues dug a hole in the wall bordering an urban slum in New Delhi, installed an Internet-connected PC, and left it there (with a hidden camera filming the area). What they saw was kids from the slum playing around with the computer and in the process learning how to use it and how to go online, and then teaching each other.
From the profile page on Dr. Mitra from TED.com
Hole in the wall projects have since expanded to many other countries and continue to “light the spark of learning” among children. Using a teaching pedagogy known as “minimally invasive education“, Hold in the wall projects seek to provide sufficient stimulation to motivate children to learn in groups without any teacher supervision.
This is just another way that makes me realise my role is less a source of knowledge (how can I compete with the Internet) and more a facilitator of learning. Rather than telling students how it is, doesn’t it make more sense to tell them where it is and what to do with it?
Education-as-usual assumes that kids are empty vessels who need to be sat down in a room and filled with curricular content. Dr. Mitra’s experiments prove that wrong.
Link to the Hole in the wall project homepage:
http://www.hole-in-the-wall.com/
Link to the presentation Dr. Mitra gave at the LIFT Conference in 2007:
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/sugata_mitra_shows_how_kids_teach_themselves.html
Link to an essay on the hole in the wall project:
http://www.ncl.ac.uk/egwest/holeinthewall.html