Learning Without a School? Why Educators Should Pay Attention to Experiments in “Self-Organized Learning”

There was buzz on the blogs this week about the latest project from Sugata Mitra, a professor of educational technology at Newcastle University in the UK. Mitra is known for his “Hole in the Wall” experiments that place internet-enabled computer kiosks in public spaces and schools in poor neighborhoods of India, Cambodia and Africa for children to use without supervised training.

Left to their own devices, Mitra finds that street children use their natural curiosity to teach themselves and each other, even when most of the web content they’re accessing is in English. He calls this “self-organized” learning. (“Hole in the Wall” recently won a 2010 Digital Media and Learning Competition award). | Spotlight on Digital Media and Learning