Description of the podcast
This is a June 2014 radio interview with Sugata Mitra on Brisbane’s (Australia) RN Breakfast show. Mitra is Professor of Educational Technology at the University of Newcastle, and is known for his ‘Schools in the Cloud’ project.
In 1999, Mitra and his colleagues dug a hole in a wall bordering an urban slum in New Delhi, installed an Internet-connected PC, and left it there (with a hidden camera filming the area). What they saw was kids from the slum playing around with the computer and in the process learning how to use it and how to go online, and then teaching each other. He set ‘holes in the wall’ elsewhere and the experiments have shown that, in the absence of supervision or formal teaching, children can teach themselves and each other, if they’re motivated by curiosity and peer interest.
In 2013 he won the TED Prize of 1 million dollars for his wish to create the ‘Schools in the Cloud’ where children can explore and learn on their own, and teach one another, using resources from the Internet, with minimal support from a cadre of retired teachers (the grannys). In December 2013, the first School in the Cloud lab — located inside a high school in Killingworth, England — opened its doors to students. Six more labs have since been opened; five in India and one more in the UK. The labs aim to provide an environment in which researchers can observe the impact of self-organized learning on children from a wide range of educational backgrounds.
In this interview Mitra explains the hopes and possibilities of an education that does not assume that children are empty vessels who need to sit down in a room and be filled with curricular content, but active explorers of knowledge.
More details about Mitra’s work can be found at https://www.theschoolinthecloud.org.
The podcast's use in class
This short podcast will be used with a group of student teachers following the course called Technology-Enhanced Learning and Innovation. This is a hybrid program. The students will be asked to listen to the podcast and then produce an answer to the the following statement, and write a short contribution with their reactions. This will all happen on Moodle.
Traditional educators claim that true learning cannot happen without teachers, and that there will always be a place for face-to-face teaching. But concepts such as Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) and Sugata Mitra’s 'schools in the cloud' may prove this concept wrong.
Research
I carried out a Google search using the following words as parameters: ‘education technology podcasts’. The following site by informED ’50 Educational Podcasts You Should Check Out’ emerged in the Google list. One of the sites was TED Talks, however, most of its links were of videos, rather than podcasts. One of these videos was of Sugata Mitra’s 2013 winning TED talk which I had previously watched and liked, and was eager to use in one of my courses. So, I Googled ‘schools in the cloud podcast’ and a number of links to recordings of interviews and conferences in which Mitra participated emerged. I chose one of the shortest podcasts. This was a 9 minute podcast of an interview on an Australian radio show. I listened to the podcast and liked it. The whole process took around 90 minutes.
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