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(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).)

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(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/.)

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[Applause]

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[Sugata Mitra] Thanks very much.

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

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is not to raise expectations of the customer.

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Because after that, you can only go steadily downwards.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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you get different numbers from different sources.

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

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who have more than everything that they need

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for their lives, for their education, for everything.

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Then there are another about 200 million below that,

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who have adequate resources.

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And below that, there are 750 million

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who do not have adequate resources.

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

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

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the first two blocks

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and maybe the top slice of that 750 million.

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

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("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)

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Here are some sentences that I heard here,

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

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

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

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"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)

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So, we need some answers to these questions,

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you know, they are important questions for children

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

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

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knowledge and deep understanding and so on and so forth.

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But these are specific questions.

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We have to give specific answers.

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

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It's not allowed.

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That's from India.

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

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

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(Problems of relevance and aspiration - Problems of resources)

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So then, if you put the problems together,

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they are the problems of relevance and aspiration

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in the top part of the triangle

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And they are the problems of resources at the bottom.

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So, I will start from 11 years ago -

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(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...)

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

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

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

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Africa, India, China.

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But think of any country that you know.

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Think of the map

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and think that you have an imaginary pencil.

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

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So it is not a developing country problem.

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It's a global problem.

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Unfortunately, it's an ironic global problem

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because those places where the good teachers won't go

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

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So, we're stuck in a bind.

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I will show you some figures here.

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North Eastern India.

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

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to 200 km away from Delhi,

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

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the primary schools drop sharply.

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Why?

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Because the teachers, 250 km away,

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if you ask them and ask them this question:

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"Would you like to be somewhere else?"

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

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By the time you hit 300 km, they say:

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

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

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Then I came to England and I thought to myself:

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

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

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

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

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

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The density of council housing correlates with the primary school results

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- the GCSE results in this case.

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So, the more the density of council housing,

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the worse the results seem to be.

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

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

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

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and I went to those schools

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

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

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

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

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

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

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But not all.

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So you do have that problem.

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The remoteness in India was geographic.

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The remoteness here was socio-economic.

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(1999-2001 The Hole In The Wall)

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So, back to 1999.

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

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

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upward of £1000 to buy them computers.

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They are all very good with their computers,

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all their parents say their children are geniuses

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because they are so good with their computers.

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

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they don't even know what it is

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and they're not going to make it, because

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

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So, back in 1999, I tried an experiment.

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

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which eventually got called The Hole In The Wall

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and put on the English internet

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and left it there.

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

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how to use the computer.

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

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even in the deserts of Rajahstan.

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

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the children were using the sound recorder

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to sing into the computer and listen themselves sing.

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By themselves.

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

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

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Something that urban children would do all the time,

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

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or a few months ago.

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They don't know any English,

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

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to be able to do all this.

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So I started to document this whole process

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and to measure on a computer literacy scale

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

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And the numbers were interesting.

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

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which is what an office secretary can do.

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

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she would get about 42, 45 percent.

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

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(writing on video read aloud later)

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This was the conclusion from that section of the work,

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

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irrespective of who or where they are.

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So it didn't matter what language they spoke,

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

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

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

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and everywhere, we got the same result.

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So in those days, this was an important result

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about computer literacy not having to be taught.

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So, I could then say with some amount of confidence

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

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

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But around this time, something different started to happen.

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(Lessons from The Hole In The Wall)

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In the schools where these computers had been placed,

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in the schools in India, many of them --

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

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I couldn't quite understand

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- actually English, science and mathematics scores -

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

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because as far as I could tell,

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the children were continuously playing games all the time.

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

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So I started doing a set of experiments to see

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

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The first experiment was in Hyderabad.

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

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Hyderabad has a - hundreds of little private schools,

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not for rich people, but for poor people.

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

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is because they promise to teach English.

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And for that segment of Hyderabad society,

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learning English makes a huge difference to the kind of lives

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that these children will live later on.

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

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

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to send their children to these private schools.

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The schools try to do their best to teach English.

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But the problem that I spoke about prevents them.

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Good, native-language English school teachers

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

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

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

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- Telugu is the language there -

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Telugu-speaking teachers.

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Telugu accents are extremely hard to understand.

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So when the children come out of school,

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they know a reasonable amount of English:

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their spelling is good, their handwriting is good,

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their grammar is good.

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

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

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So they don't get the job.

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

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because human teachers were not available.

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So I had to use technology.

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I looked at what's available

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

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

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In those days - 2002 -

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there were none that specifically taught about pronunciation.

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So what I did finally was, I got a PC

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

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

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What that does is that you take a microphone,

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you plug it into the PC,

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you speak into the microphone

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

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provided it understands you.

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

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What I did was I bought this computer,

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

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(The Hyderabad Experiment, 2002)

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And then I blocked out the training function

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

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

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So the children laughed and said:

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

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

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You have to make yourselves understood to the computer."

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

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

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And I said to them, with great honesty:

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"I don't know.
[laughter]

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

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So -- so I left them.

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I left them. What they did was incredible.

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They downloaded pieces of software,

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they downloaded films,

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they downloaded The Speaking Oxford Dictionary,

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which I didn't know existed,

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and they started to practice in groups.

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In other words, not only were they teaching themselves,

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

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because I hadn't told them anything.

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And the results were remarkable, to say the least.

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

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

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

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[Mitra] Real flat English accents and you should

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

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and she was barely understandable.

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

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And at that time I began to realize

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that children perhaps would achieve educational objectives on their own

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if they had a reason to.

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

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

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why they should do these things.

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(Children ...and some surprises)

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

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

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who was living in Colombo in those days

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and he had heard of my original experiment.

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

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So I went to Colombo to meet him

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and he said two very interesting things.

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

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

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

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The second thing he said was that

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if children are interested, then education happens.

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I then started to put in different educational objectives

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

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into India, into Cambodia and into Africa,

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to see what else would happen

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