Just for fun, enjoy a push out of the "box" with this archived talk at a LIFT conference. Sugata Mitra discusses his experiment of leaving an untended computer available to children in some of the poorest areas of India. His conclusion? Children's learning can be a self-organizing system; children in groups can and will self-instruct.

Children learned web browsing, numerous educational applications, chat tools, email and more--along with the English to discuss computing. Mitra returned to one village after about three months only to be told, "We need a faster processor and a new mouse."

The 2007 presentation received new life with a recent posting on TED.com, a site that collects inspiring lectures. TED explains:

In 1999, Sugata Mitra and his colleagues dug a hole in a 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.

In the following years they replicated the experiment in other parts of India, urban and rural, with similar results, challenging some of the key assumptions of formal education. 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. Mitra, who's now a professor of educational technology at Newcastle University (UK), calls it "minimally invasive education."

Could Minimally invasive education (MIE) be the next step beyond guide-on-the-side?

LIFT describes itself as a series of events to inspire and connect the community of doers and thinkers exploring the social impact of new technologies.

Sources: TED.com and Lift. See also the "Hole in the Wall" site.

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