(The hole in the wall: self organising systems in education"
Keynote speech by Sugata Mitra, Professor of Educational Technology at Newcastle University at "Into something rich and strange" - Making sense of the sea change, the 2010 conference of the Association of Learning Technology (ALT).)

(Session given in Nottingham, UK, on Wednesday 8 September 2010 at 14:00. For information about ALT go to http://www.alt.ac.uk/ .)
Made publicly available by ALT under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial 2.0 UK: England & Wales license http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/uk/.)

[Applause]

[Sugata Mitra] Thanks very much.

One of the - you know, one of the things that is taught in the business schools, in marketing courses,

is not to raise expectations of the customer.

Because after that, you can only go steadily downwards.

Well, I've sort of optimistically called this talk "The Future of Learning".

Perhaps it should have been called "A Future of Learning"

but it's one of the futures which I think, in the last 11 ears or so,

I have encountered in many different ways, and that's the story I want to tell you.

First, a little break-down of children on our planet:

It's a sort of a personal number - these are difficult numbers to get:

you get different numbers from different sources.

But I would think that there are about 50 million children on the planet

who have more than everything that they need

for their lives, for their education, for everything.

Then there are another about 200 million below that,

who have adequate resources.

And below that, there are 750 million

who do not have adequate resources.

So this is the situation that we're at - we're looking at.

Here in Britain, I would think that we're dealing with

the first two blocks

and maybe the top slice of that 750 million.

That's the impression I get by going around the country.

("When I need to know something, at the time when I need to know it, I can find out in 5 minutes"
(Pre-adolescent, United Kingdon, 2008)

Here are some sentences that I heard here,

in various cities, at various times, from various age groups.

"When I need to know something, at the time when I need to know it, I can find out in 5 minutes"

"My father is an engineer, but he doesn'thave a job"
(onscreen: + "8 year old, United Kingdom, 2009")

"Why should I work hard to be a professor like you when I can earn as much as you by driving a bus"
(onscreen + "Adolescent, United Kingdom, 2006)

So, we need some answers to these questions,

you know, they are important questions for children

and we don't actually have too many convincing answers.

We can give them the academic answer about, you know,

knowledge and deep understanding and so on and so forth.

But these are specific questions.

We have to give specific answers.

On the other side of the world, we can't use the computer room when we want.

It's not allowed.

That's from India.

The internet is down because the school didn't pay.

So, that's the other side of the world.

(Problems of relevance and aspiration - Problems of resources)

So then, if you put the problems together,

they are the problems of relevance and aspiration

in the top part of the triangle

And they are the problems of resources at the bottom.

So, I will start from 11 years ago -

(There are places on Earth, in every country, where, for various reasons, good schools cannot be built and good teachers cannot or do not want to go...)

with this sentence, that there are places on Earth, in every country,

where good schools can't be built and good teachers either will not go or cannot go.

You know, when you first see this, it reminds you of the developing world, first of all:

Africa, India, China.

But think of any country that you know.

Think of the map

and think that you have an imaginary pencil.

Would you not mark out places where you'd say good teachers will not go there?

So it is not a developing country problem.

It's a global problem.

Unfortunately, it's an ironic global problem

because those places where the good teachers won't go

are just the ones where they're needed the most.

So, we're stuck in a bind.

I will show you some figures here.

North Eastern India.

As you go further and further away from Delhi on the X axis,

to 200 km away from Delhi,

leaving all the ........ [check] behind (4:46)

the primary schools drop sharply.

Why?

Because the teachers, 250 km away,

if you ask them and ask them this question:

"Would you like to be somewhere else?"

And the answers changed from "Not really" to "Absolutely".

By the time you hit 300 km, they say:

"You know, if only I could get a job in Delhi,

there's better healthcare, better entertainment, more shopping, ec."

Then I came to England and I thought to myself:

"Now I will not find this problem, because it's much more uniformly developed."

So then, I should expect to see a flat distribution of primary school results.

When I looked at the numbers, that was not the case.

There were schools doing very badly and there were schools doing very well.

So I started looking for relationships and very quickly found one in North Eastern England.

The density of council housing correlates with the primary school results

- the GCSE results in this case.

So, the more the density of council housing,

the worse the results seem to be.

And this is pretty significant, as you can see from that line.

It's not a spurious [check 6:08] thing, it's pretty sharply correlated.

So .... [check] to those, you know, highly dense govenrment housing areas,

and I went to those schools

and, surprisingly, I heard the same thing that I heard in India.

I asked the teachers "Would you consider working in another school?"- same -

as soon as you go into the high density council areas:

"Yes, it's very dangerous here, you know, it's not a nice area,

the children are very rough: I wouldn't mind."

Then there are a few teachers who say "No: that's my challenge, I want to be here."

But not all.

So you do have that problem.

The remoteness in India was geographic.

The remoteness here was socio-economic.

(1999-2001 The Hole In The Wall)

So, back to 1999.

1999, in New Delhi, the rich children all have computers.

Their - it's a new toy, their parents have spent a lot of money,

upward of £1000 to buy them computers.

They are all very good with their computers,

all their parents say their children are geniuses

because they are so good with their computers.

Down in the slums, the children haven't heard of a computer,

they don't even know what it is

and they're not going to make it, because

no computer teacher is ever going to go into the slums to teach.

So, back in 1999, I tried an experiment.

I made an ATM-like structure into the wall of a slum,

which eventually got called The Hole In The Wall

and put on the English internet

and left it there.

And very quickly saw that the children were beginning to teach themselves

how to use the computer.

[video: children's voices]
This happened everywhere,

even in the deserts of Rajahstan.

Here's the desert where of all things, in four hours,

the children were using the sound recorder

to sing into the computer and listen themselves sing.

By themselves.

Down in South India, they were downloading games from disney.com.

This game is to assemble a camera and then take a photograph.

Something that urban children would do all the time,

but remember, these children have seen a computer only a few days ago,

or a few months ago.

They don't know any English,

they've taught themselves whatever English they needed to do --

to be able to do all this.

So I started to document this whole process

and to measure on a computer literacy scale

what happens to groups of children if you just leave a computer with them.

And the numbers were interesting.

It was a straight upward curve, reaching about 42 on that scale,

which is what an office secretary can do.

If you gave that test today to an office secretary here,

she would get about 42, 45 percent.

So they were reaching that on their own in nine months.

(writing on video read aloud later)

This was the conclusion from that section of the work,

that groups of children can learn to use computers and the internet on their own,

irrespective of who or where they are.

So it didn't matter what language they spoke,

it didn't matter how rich or poor they were.

And I tried this in India in hundreds and hundreds of villages,

I tried it in Cambodia, I tried it in Africa,

and everywhere, we got the same result.

So in those days, this was an important result

about computer literacy not having to be taught.

So, I could then say with some amount of confidence

that it doesn't matter if your school doesn't have an excellent computer teacher,

you can still achieve the same results by simply allowing the children access.

But around this time, something different started to happen.

(Lessons from The Hole In The Wall)

In the schools where these computers had been placed,

in the schools in India, many of them --

many of them started to report improvements in English and mathematics scores.

I couldn't quite understand

- actually English, science and mathematics scores -

I couldn't quite understand what was the reason for that,

because as far as I could tell,

the children were continuously playing games all the time.

But then, I wasn't there to watch all the while.

So I started doing a set of experiments to see

what could be the reasons why these schools were going up.

The first experiment was in Hyderabad.

It's a big, sprawling, South Indian city.

Hyderabad has a - hundreds of little private schools,

not for rich people, but for poor people.

And the reason why these really ramshackle little private schools make money

is because they promise to teach English.

And for that segment of Hyderabad society,

learning English makes a huge difference to the kind of lives

that these children will live later on.

So the parents, the poor parents, pay their, whatever,

usually around £5 - £3 to £5 pounds a month

to send their children to these private schools.

The schools try to do their best to teach English.

But the problem that I spoke about prevents them.

Good, native-language English school teachers

are not going to go and teach in the slums of Hyderabad.

So, they don't get native-language speakers.

The children begin to copy the accents of the local, Telugu-speaking

- Telugu is the language there -

Telugu-speaking teachers.

Telugu accents are extremely hard to understand.

So when the children come out of school,

they know a reasonable amount of English:

their spelling is good, their handwriting is good,

their grammar is good.

But when they go for a job interview, the interviewer says:

"Your English may be good, but I don't understand what you're saying."

So they don't get the job.

So here was a problem that could not be solved by human teachers,

because human teachers were not available.

So I had to use technology.

I looked at what's available

and I must say I wasn't very happy with it.

I looked at all sorts of programs that pretend to teach English.

In those days - 2002 -

there were none that specifically taught about pronunciation.

So what I did finally was, I got a PC

and I loaded a speech-to-text software on it,

you know, the kind that you can get for free now with Windows.

What that does is that you take a microphone,

you plug it into the PC,

you speak into the microphone

and the PC will type out whatever youre tell-- whatever you're saying,

provided it understands you.

The system needs to be trained in the voice that it is expected to understand.

What I did was I bought this computer,

I put in the software, I trained it in a neutral English accent.

(The Hyderabad Experiment, 2002)

And then I blocked out the training function

and gave it to a group of children in a private school in Hyderabad

and they spoke into it, and the computer started to type out complete nonsense.

So the children laughed and said:

"It doesn't understand anything, what we're saying."

So I said to them: "Well, I'll leave this with you for two months.

You have to make yourselves understood to the computer."

Now, this is where the new method started forming in my mind,

because the children then asked: "How do we do that?"

And I said to them, with great honesty:

"I don't know.
[laughter]

And anyway, I'm leaving."
[laughter]

So -- so I left them.

I left them. What they did was incredible.

They downloaded pieces of software,

they downloaded films,

they downloaded The Speaking Oxford Dictionary,

which I didn't know existed,

and they started to practice in groups.

In other words, not only were they teaching themselves,

they had invented the pedagogy for -- by which to teach themselves

because I hadn't told them anything.

And the results were remarkable, to say the least.

[Girl] Ian, he's my cousin. [check]

[Text to speech] Ian he's my cousin.

[Girl's recorded voice] Ian he's my cousin.

[Mitra] Real flat English accents and you should

-- I don't have the video here of her speaking before the experiment

and she was barely understandable.

So they had changed their accents. I published the work.

And at that time I began to realize

that children perhaps would achieve educational objectives on their own

if they had a reason to.

Which will bring us to the West in a little while,

because in the West, the problem is that they don't seem to have a reason

why they should do these things.

(Children ...and some surprises)

Well, some surprises in that period from 2002 to 2006:

Well, to start with I got a message from Sir Arthur C. Clarke [check]

who was living in Colombo in those days

and he had heard of my original experiment.

He was interest and - you know, he was in .... [check].

So I went to Colombo to meet him

and he said two very interesting things.

The first thing he said was that a teacher that can be replaced by a machine should be.

OK, now, that's a double-edged...

So, a teacher that can be replaced by a machine should be.

The second thing he said was that

if children are interested, then education happens.

I then started to put in different educational objectives

in a way that I'll describe in a moment,

into India, into Cambodia and into Africa,

to see what else would happen

after the children had taught themselves to use a computer. (16:31)