Sugata Mitra "Hole in the Wall" TED Talk
Sugata Mitra's "Hole in the Wall" TED Talk is incredibly interesting and seems to prophesy great and wonderful things for education in the near future. The implications of his research are intriguing and show that the human capacity for learning by doing is incredible. I have seen this anecdotally in my nephew, who by the age of 1 was able to maneuver his way around a smartphone. I think the implications for the future classroom are that technology will increasingly be adopted at the same pace as it is in wider society, and not the kind of delayed trickle-down that characterizes technological adaptation in the classroom now (e.g. the potential of iPads in the classroom being several years behind their release and adoption by society at large). The potential for advanced instruction at earlier and earlier ages is also an exciting potentiality Mitra proposes, and one I agree with wholeheartedly. In English, at least, the work that is the traditional preserve of AP and IB courses really has no special difficulty or specialness that requires an AP course.
However, I think that there are some important distinctions that need to be made that Mitra failed to address in his talk. He seems content to take the children's regurgitation of the material as a sign that they have learned it. He didn't specify how they were tested, either. My concern is that regurgitation is far from knowing something in the proper context and conflating the two has significant ramifications for educational policy. While the children's ability to navigate the computer is impressive and has its own implications, I am unsure whether we as an educational community are at the point where we can just take it as read that regurgitating complex terms equals knowledge of the terms. Can the children apply that knowledge to a performance task? Can they transfer that knowledge to problems outside of the content that Mitra downloaded into the computer? In terms of the English learning shown in the talk, can the children converse with the vocabulary they have learned or is it all formulaic call and response as shown in the video? These are questions that spring to mind when I reflect on the video.
However, I think that there are some important distinctions that need to be made that Mitra failed to address in his talk. He seems content to take the children's regurgitation of the material as a sign that they have learned it. He didn't specify how they were tested, either. My concern is that regurgitation is far from knowing something in the proper context and conflating the two has significant ramifications for educational policy. While the children's ability to navigate the computer is impressive and has its own implications, I am unsure whether we as an educational community are at the point where we can just take it as read that regurgitating complex terms equals knowledge of the terms. Can the children apply that knowledge to a performance task? Can they transfer that knowledge to problems outside of the content that Mitra downloaded into the computer? In terms of the English learning shown in the talk, can the children converse with the vocabulary they have learned or is it all formulaic call and response as shown in the video? These are questions that spring to mind when I reflect on the video.
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