Diego Golombek: (Spanish) Sugata, it's an honor
to have you here at TEDxRíodelaPlata.
I think that many of us surely know you from your former experiments.
Remember "A hole in the wall," right?
That one about a computer suddenly appearaing in a village.
But now I want to ask you about what's going on at the moment with SOLE,
about what happened with the TED Prize: How is the implementation going?
How is it making progress? What is your assessment of it?
Sugata Mitra: I think he wants to know what happened after that film.
So, let me tell you what happened.
We built seven Schools in the Cloud.
Five in India and two in England.
What is the School in the Cloud?
Well, let me give you a small example.
You know, people used to travel from one place to another
in a horse-drawn carriage for thousands of years,
until the automobile was invented.
When the automobile was invented the horse and carriage went away
and the coachman, the man who used to drive the horse and carriage,
he also went away
and the passengers became the drivers.
In the School in the Cloud what we are trying to find out is:
Is it possible in our education systems --
has the time come to make the passengers drive?
So, we launched these seven schools.
The most distant one had nothing:
no electricity, no health care, no schools.
The best ones, in England, had everything.
And then, we let the learners drive the car.
What happened?
You might think that I am going to say something romantic, but I am not.
I got bitten by one million mosquitoes.
(Laughter)
(Applause)
And then, the children began to change.
In England, the students wrote me an e-mail
saying "Why are they teaching?"
In Korakati, the most distant of our Schools in the Cloud,
the children said,
"Why does the skyped in Granny speak such simple English?
Doesn't she know that we understand her?"
(Laughter)
In another Bengal village, Chandrakona,
I noticed a distinct Birmingham accent.
(Laughter)
It was faster than anything that I had expected.
I don't know if you are going to believe this:
in Korakati, the village where the children know no English at all,
on day number three,
one of the English teachers who skyped in said,
"You know, those children are very sweet, they said 'When are you coming back?'"
I said, "In what language did they ask you?"
And she said: "In English." Three days.
(Applause)
Thank you.
So, I asked the children,
"How did you learn to speak in English so quickly?"
And they looked at me and said,
"You know that woman who comes on the screen?
She doesn't understand anything other than English."
(Applause)
Now, for the bad news.
The seven laboratories have seven different kinds of problems.
The biggest problem is not pedagogy, it is not teaching and learning,
it is technology.
So, I struggle to keep those remote locations running
but I know that I will find the way, I still have one more year to go,
I know I will find the way to keep them running
and I know for sure,
and I tell you this for the first time in the world on a TED stage,
the passengers are driving the car.
(Applause)
Thank you.
So, one last little bit that I need to tell you:
I used to get called to conferences,
I still do,
but for the last one year I have been called
by the Education Department of governments of different countries.
They are listening.
And I have only one suggestion to them;
something that I want some government to try,
perhaps the government here, in Argentina.
It is very simple:
I want someone to allow the use of the Internet during examinations.
(Applause)
Thanks.
I know there are students here, and I know that the examination
is the only day in their life when they don't have access to the Internet.
So I hope I will be able to change that.
And, if the Internet enters the examination,
the entire system will have changed.
It would then be an idea that was worth spreading.
DG: (Spanish) Sugata, a question that you are surely being asked all the time.
With this about self organized learning,
What happens with the teachers, what's left for the teachers?
SM: You know, there is a misconception that teachers will not have a role.
That's not true, that's not true at all.
In a SOLE, children find the answers to questions.
But who makes the question? Who listens to their answers?
Who says, most importantly, "That was well done"?
That is what the teacher has to do.
(Applause)
DG: (Spanish) Regarding what Sugata mentioned
about this being implemented here,
there's a plan for at least one school in Barracas
that will begin soon with this SOLE system
of self organized learning in the School in the Cloud.
And a last question, Sugata.
He arrived yesterday, he's being taken from one place to another.
So it's an honor that he would spend some little time with us here.
The last question is:
One of your main concerns is the school of the future.
Let's think a middle-term future, in 50 years:
How do you imagine... how do you wish school to be?
SM: You know... It's hard for me to say what the school will look like.
But something much deeper will happen and it won't take 50 years to happen.
Our definition of the word 'to know'.
What does it mean when you say "I know something"?
It could be something that you learned in school when you were seven years old
or it could be something that Google told you one minute ago.
Knowing doesn't mean anything.
Should we feel sorry? No, I don't think so.
Ideas, like objects, become obsolete.
When I started, I thought...
I was saying "schools will be obsolete".
I am now forced to say that knowing will be obsolete.
What we will take is this:
the collective consciousness of seven billion people.
(Applause)