Ideas Worth Spreading

I just got introduced to such an incredibly great site—

Quoting from their site, “TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design. It started in 1984 as a conference bringing together people from those three worlds. Since then its scope has become ever broader. The annual conference now brings together the world's most fascinating thinkers and doers, who are challenged to give the talk of their lives (in 18 minutes). This site makes the best talks and performances from TED available to the public, for free. More than 200 talks are available, with more added each week. These videos are released under a Creative Commons license, so they can be freely shared and reposted.”

Today I was listening to Sugata Mitra, a professor of educational technology at Newcastle University, who talks about his Hole in the Wall project, where a computer with an internet connection was put in a Delhi slum. When the slum was revisited after a month, the children of that slum had successfully learned how to navigate the Internet. His experiments have shown that, in the absence of supervision or formal teaching, children can teach themselves and each other, if they're motivated by curiosity. Now how intriguing is that?

The "Hole in the Wall" project demonstrates that, even in the absence of any direct input from a teacher, an environment that stimulates curiosity can cause learning through self-instruction and peer-shared knowledge.

Slumdog Millionaire, which just won four Golden Globe Awards, is based on a novel by Vikas Swarup. Swarup said he was inspired to write his book by Mitra’s Hole in the Wall project. He states, “That got me fascinated and I realized that there’s an innate ability in everyone to do something extraordinary, provided they are given an opportunity. How else do you explain children with no education at all being able to learn to use the Internet. This shows knowledge is not just the preserve of the elite.”