Saturday 1 June 2013

Build a School in the Cloud

Twitter was buzzing with amazing ideas and discussions this morning; I love being able to do self directed PD without leaving the warmth of my bed.  It led me to a blog post by "connected principal" Cale Birk on Self-Organized Learning, and this Edtalk (below) "Build a School in the Cloud" by Sugata Mitra.  

It is inspiring to see given SOLE children can learn anything on their own: broadband to access knowledge + collaboration to test and challenge + positive encouragement to engage and inspire "peer tutoring".  

I was rather in awe of his "granny cloud" to encourage and support students, I have always though it is sad that in todays society we have lost the wisdom and companionship of our older generation by sticking them into homes.   How could we harness this idea in our local communities and schools?

Although not a new approach, sending students on intellectual adventures driven by big questions is a key to inspiring self-organized learning.  Watch the video below and see if you get inspired too.


This paragraph I added a few days after writing this post, as I read an interesting counter view to Sugata Mitra's "Hole in the Wall".  Donald Clark rightly points out many holes in Sugata's wall.  Coming from South Africa I can relate to what happened to the experiment there, like any resource the strong dominate and the desperate steal.  Over time this experiment seems to lack convincing data.

Still I think there is some great inspiration and a many ideas we can take from the "hole in the wall" experiment in order to bringing learning to our students.  Even it is only to take a chance, be bold, don't let teaching or learning stagnate.