New Delhi, India

Join UNESCO MGIEP’s 2016 Distinguished Lecture featuring Sugata Mitra, founder of the innovative ‘Hole in the Wall’ and ‘School in the Cloud’ projects, and one of the most influential names in modern education. A winner of the 2013 TED prize, Mitra’s approach uses technology to disrupt and innovate traditional teaching and learning methods. This allows young students to explore the world in new and exciting ways, while empowering marginalized children to take their education into their own hands.

In this talk, Sugata Mitra will take us through the origins of schooling, to the dematerialisation of institutions as we know them. Thirteen years of experiments in children’s education take 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. Using the TED Prize, he has now built seven ‘Schools in the Cloud’, of which some glimpses will be provided in the talk.

About the speaker:

Sugata Mitra is Professor of Educational Technology at the School of Education, Communication and Language Sciences at Newcastle University, UK.

He is the instigator of the Hole in the Wall (HIW) experiment, where in the year 1999 a computer was embedded within a wall in an Indian slum in Kalkaji, Delhi, and children were freely allowed to use it. The experiment aimed at proving that kids could be taught computers very easily without any formal training. Mitra termed this as Minimally Invasive Education (MIE). The experiment has since been repeated in many places. He is the recipient of numerous awards from India, the UK, USA and many other countries in the world.

The Hole in the Wall experiment has left its mark on popular culture. Indian diplomat Vikas Swarup read about Mitra’s experiment and was inspired to write his debut novel which went on to becoming an Oscar-winning movie—Slumdog Millionaire.

Mitra is a PhD in Physics credited with more than 25 inventions in the area of cognitive science and education technology. He was conferred the prestigious Dewang Mehta Award for Innovation in Information Technology in 2005. Among many other awards, he was awarded the 1 million dollar TED Prize in 2013.

To RSVP, click here. Please remember to your registration confirmation along to the event.

Date/Time
Date(s) - 30/03/2016
4:00 pm - 6:00 pm

Location
Indian Institute of Technology Delhi