Newcastle University

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In this talk, Sugata Mitra takes us through the origins of schooling as we know it, to the dematerialisation of institutions as we know them. Thirteen years of experiments in children's education show us a series of startling results – children can self-organise their own learning, achieve educational objectives on their own, and can read by themselves. Finally, and most startling of all, groups of children with access to the Internet can learn anything by themselves. From the slums of India and villages of Cambodia, to poor schools in Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, the USA and Italy, to the schools of Gateshead, and the rich international schools of Washington and Hong Kong, Professor Mitra's experimental results offer a strange new future for learning: a future in which 'knowing' may be obsolete.

Professor Sugata Mitra is Professor of Educational Technology in the School of Education, Communication and Language Sciences at Newcastle University. His interests include children’s education, remote presence, self-organising systems, cognitive systems, physics and consciousness, and he is credited with more than 25 inventions in the area of cognitive science and educational technology. Since the 1970s, Professor Mitra’s publications and work have resulted in the training and development of perhaps a million young Indians, among them some of the poorest children in the world.

His interest in the human led him into the areas of learning and memory and he was one of the first in the world to show that simulated neural networks can help decipher the mechanisms of Alzheimer’s disease. Professor Mitra’s work at the National Institute of Information Technology created the first curricula and pedagogy for that organisation, followed by years of research on learning styles and devices, several of them now patented, multimedia, and new methods of learning. Culminating and, perhaps, towering over his previous work, are his ‘hole in the wall’ experiments with children’s learning where, in 1999, a computer was embedded within a wall in an Indian slum at Kalkaji, Delhi, and children were allowed to freely use it. The experiment aimed to prove that children could be taught to use computers very easily without any formal training.

Since then, Professor Mitra has convincingly demonstrated that groups of children, irrespective of who or where they are, can learn to use computers and the Internet on their own, using public computers in open spaces such as roads and playgrounds. The article, Acquisition of Computer Literacy on Shared Public Computers: Children and the 'Hole in the Wall' (2005), based on this work, was judged the best open-access publication in the world for 2005. The 'Hole in the Wall' experiment has left a mark on popular culture. Indian diplomat Vikas Swarup read about Mitra's experiment and was inspired to write his debut novel that went on to become the 2009 Oscar-winning movie, Slumdog Millionaire.

Professor Mitra holds several memberships including the New York Academy of Sciences, and the Press Club of India, and has received numerous honours and awards – most recently this includes the Klingenstein Award (2011), the Leonardo European Corporate Learning Award (2012) and the Education Leadership Award, AdvancED (2012). He also received an honorary doctorate from Delft Technological University in the Netherlands last year.

For more information about Professor Mitra’s work, please visit: www.sugatam.wikispaces.com