LIFT07: Sugata Mitra and outdoctrination

Running notes from the LIFT07 conference in Geneva.

Sugata Mitra heads research at an Indian software company, but he is known for the Hole in the Wall project which is about what he calls "outdoctrination": self-organization in education. Remoteness influences the quality of education. By remoteness I mean geographically remote (rural villages) but also socially and economically remote (in slums). Everybody assumes that schools in remote areas do not have good enough teachers and infrastructure. Is that true? We drove out about 300 km from Dehli and wherever we found a school we did a test, and the basic result was that the more remote the school was, the worst the results of the pupils. But this did not correlate with the size of classrooms, the quality of infrastructure, the level of poverty, etc. But we asked also a question to teachers, asking whether they would like to move to a metropolitan area, and those just outside of Dehli said yes, then a bit farther away they said no, and starting from 200 km on they consistently said yes. So: teachers' motivation and teachers' migration was a powerfully correalated variable with the school results.

Education technology is always introduced first in the best (urban) schools, where it is perceived as overhyped and upder-performing, while when education technology reaches the underprivileged it makes a big difference -- so it should reach them first. Sugata proposes an approach for an alternative primary education, for places where schools don't exist or are not good enough, where teachers are not available or are not good enough: children and self-organization.

The Hole in the Wall experiment started in 1999 in New Dehli. I have an office which borders a urban slum. We put a PC in a hole in the wall, high-speed Internet, a browser, and just left it there. And what we saw (he shows a video) are kids from the slum teaching each-other how to browse. Sugata took the experiment out of Dehli, to other cities. Other kids discovered the computer in the wall and they started teaching each-other (in one city, the first kid figured out how to move the trackpad and click within 8 minutes, and by that evening 70 kids had used the computer, with no teacher, no manual, just self-teaching and passing on the information).

I took the experiment to a village where kids had not learned English. Left the computer there, with CDs inside (no Internet connection). Came back weeks later, and found kids there playing and the first thing they told me is "we need a faster processor and a better mouse". And: "you left this machine that speaks only English so we had to learn English" -- and noticed that they were using English words among themselves.

Finally I tried the experiment on a bigger scale, choosing a cross-section of society, in all regions of the country. We found that 6 to 13 year old can self-instruct in a networked environment irrespective of what we measure (educational background, English literacy, economic level, etc), if you lift the adult intervention. What would they learn to do? Basic functions, browsing, painting, chatting and e-mail, games and educational material, playing videos. And they do this in groups: one child uses the computer and two or three others are "advising" him/her, and all of them are learning.

So the conclusion was that primary education can happen on its own. It does not have to be imposed. It could perhaps be a self-organizing system:

• Remoteness affects quality of education.
• educational technology should be introduced into remote areas first.
• Values are acquired, doctrine is imposed.
• Learning is most likely a self-organizing system.

Educational technology and pedagogy that is digital, automatic, fault-tolerant, minimally invasive, connected, and self-organized. Call it outdoctrination.