Sunday, May 27, 2012

More links to Sugata Mitra's work

Through relatives, I have heard of some relatively rich people in places like Vijayawada who want to help with primary education of the poor. Apparently one of them is a retired businessman without children who is prepared to spend over ten crores of rupees for the purpose and is not sure how to go about it. I think Sugata Mitra's programs might provide one possibility and am adding links to help them locate some nearby organizations that may provide more information.
From the Wikipedia article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimally_invasive_education
"Minimally invasive education (MIE) is a term used to describe how children learn in unsupervised environments. It was derived from an experiment done by Sugata Mitra while at NIIT in 1999 often called The Hole in the Wall,[1][2] which has since gone on to become a significant project with the formation of Hole in the Wall Education Limited (HiWEL), a cooperative effort between NIIT and the International Finance Corporation, employed in some 300 'learning stations', covering some 300,000 children in India and several African countries. The programme has been feted with the digital opportunity award by WITSA,[2] and been extensively covered in the media."
According to Matt Ridley http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704584804575645070639938954.html
"Everybody knows that the Internet will transform education, but nobody yet knows how. Most of the models sound like dull attempts to reproduce, at a distance, the medieval habit of schooling—one teacher telling a bunch of children what to think. Now, though, I think I have glimpsed a better idea: the self-organized learning environment (SOLE).

The credit for this approach belongs to Sugata Mitra, an Indian physicist who, a decade ago, began to install public "hole in the wall" computers in the streets of Indian slums."
Here is link to Sugata Mitra's page with links to some of his papers http://sugatam.wikispaces.com/ and a link to Hole-in-the-Wall publications http://www.hole-in-the-wall.com/Publications.html
Here is a link to some of the work in Hyderabad http://solesandsomes.wikispaces.com/A+bit+about+SOLE+%26+SOME



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