In this talk, Sugata Mitra will take us through the origings of schooling as we know it,
to the dematerialisation of institutions as we know them.
Thirteen years of experiments in children’s education takes us through a
series of startling results –children can self-organise their own learning, they can
achieve educational objectives on their own, can read by themselves. Finally, the
most startling of them all: Groups of children with access to the Internet can learn
anything by themselves.
From the slums of India, to the villages of India and 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, Sugata’s experimental
results show a strange new future for learning.
Skype Grannies were originally recruited in the UK to support Indian pupils on the
subcontinent in learning English. In 2013 the Research Centre for Learning and
Teaching and Culture Lab at Newcastle University ran a pilot project to evaluate
the logistical challenges and early impact of using the Skype Grannies model in
classrooms in NE England. We renamed the pilot Skype Seniors in to broaden our
range of volunteers and encouraged schools to shape the use of Skype to their
particular and varied curriculum needs.
Despite the enormous potential of the medium, and the many positive outcomes
for ‘seniors’, teachers and pupils, Skype did not transform classrooms or curriculum
thinking. Instead teachers generated sophisticated adaptations to their practice in
order to contain the disruption that Skype Seniors offers. I will argue that the current
‘grammar’ of schooling, underpinned by a ferocious performativity culture neutralises
a different future for learning and only significant changes in policy and local
ecologies of learning will allow Sugata Mitra’s ideas to be fully tested in England.