[IAEP] NN, Mitra, and the role of the teacher

[Teemu Leinonen]

On 26.10.2010, at 20.12, Caryl Bigenho wrote:
> I watched Negroponte on the Colbert show last night.  Nice.  He  
> seems to have toned down his former "we don't need teachers... kids  
> will do it all" line a bit, but it is still implied.
>
> Sugata Mitra implies the same in his TED talk:
>
> http://www.ted.com/talks/sugata_mitra_shows_how_kids_teach_themselves.html

I think the latest TED talk of Sugata Mitra is much more interesting  
and relevant:

http://www.ted.com/talks/sugata_mitra_the_child_driven_education.html

I personally think that OLPC and Sugar could learn a lot from Mitra's   
presentation and his latest article:

Mitra, Sugata & Dangwal, Ritu (2010). Limits to self-organising  
systems of learning—the Kalikuppam experiment. British Journal of  
Educational Technology 41 (5), 672–688. http://suoranta.files.wordpress.com/2010/10/mitra.pdf

I think the way how Mitra orchestrates the learning situations in his  
research in very interesting. The model is not 1-to-1 but rather 4- 
to-1 model. He has prove that children are actually teaching and  
learning from each other. On the other hand, Mitra's finding is not  
really anything new in the field of learning science and psychology of  
learning with the sociocultural theory of learning (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural-historical_psychology 
) and social constructivist (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_constructivism 
) approach.

Mitra's cases are also not children learning on they own. For  
instance, there are clear "assignments" for children and  
"evaluation" (in Mitra's case research) taking place after the  
learning situations. That way it is not learning "without teacher" but  
rather learning with a different kind of teacher.

Best regards,

	 - Teemu

-----------------------------------------------
Teemu Leinonen
http://www.uiah.fi/~tleinone/
+358 50 351 6796
Media Lab
http://mlab.uiah.fi
Aalto University
School of Art and Design
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