School in the cloud: What happened after TED Prize 2013 | Sugata Mitra | TEDxUFM

This talk was given at a local TEDx event, produced independently of the TED Conferences.

In 2013, Dr. Sugata Mitra earned the first ever one million dollar TED Prize award for his project "School in the Cloud." Two years later, he shares what he did with the prize and the evolution of this innovative project which is changing the life of thousands of children around the world.

Educational researcher Sugata Mitra is the winner of the 2013 TED Prize. In 1999, Mitra and his colleagues dug a hole in a wall bordering an urban slum in New Delhi, installed an Internet-connected PC, and left it there (with a hidden camera filming the area). What they saw was kids from the slum playing around with the computer and, in the process, learning how to use it and how to go online, and then teaching each other.

The last time I stood

on a TED main stage

was in February, 2013.

It was in Long Beach, California.

TED gave me their prize
at that point in time,

a million dollars.

I thought they would put it
in my bank account,

but they didn't, actually.

(Laughter)

They gave it to the university.

But anyhow, here I am again
on a TED main stage.

I spent the million dollars.

(Laughter)

I'll tell you what happened next.

I thought I'll give you a report

on what I did with the money,
and where we are at this point in time.

It's not all gone;
there's just a little bit left.

(Laughter)

When TED gave me the prize, they also gave
another prize, a smaller one,

to Sundance Institute to make
a documentary on the whole project.

The documentary will be called
"The School in the Cloud."

At the moment,
the documentary is not finished,

but I got hold of a trailer

and I thought
you might enjoy watching that.

(Video) Sugata Mitra:
What is the future of learning?

Could it be that we are heading
towards or maybe in a future

when knowing is obsolete?

Could it be that we don't need
to go to school at all?

Could it be that at the point in time
when you need to know something,

you can find it out in two minutes?

[In 2013, Sugata Mitra asked TED

to help him discover
the future of learning.]

My wish is to build a facility

where children go on
these intellectual adventures

driven by the big questions
which their mediators put in.

It's a facility
which is practically unmanned;

it will be called the School in the Cloud.

Woman: (Hindi) We really want him
to become an educated person,

but it's difficult
because of the state of the school.

[Former primary school, Korakati]

Good teachers don’t go to remote places.

The remoter you get,
the worse primary education becomes.

[Sugata has chosen sites
for the project in rural India...

...and in northeast England.]

I don't know how to build
a "School in the Cloud"

because I have never built one.

So, I'm trying to figure out a design

which, really speaking, belongs
to children and is run by children.

So, that's what's going on;
it's a great big experiment.

Schools as we know them now are outdated.

Teacher: As soon as I started doing it

and seeing the buzz
and the enjoyment of the kids,

it made me look at my lessons differently,
and the role of a teacher differently.

Less talking at the front
and more handing it over to the children.

Girl: I really like it
because it's independent,

and you get to work with your friends.

SM: Korakati may or may not be different
from the schools of England,

but that's what we are going to look for.

The idea is to have
a complete glass front

to a building here

and a large screen for a full size

Skyped-in mediator.

Boy: Teachers will teach us from London
using the Internet.

Woman: All I ever really wanted
to know about computers

was how to turn them off.

Hi!

Hello Raveen. Hello [unclear].

How nice to see you.

Look what I made.

Can you see what this is?
Whoo!

(Laughter)

Boy: English is spoken everywhere.

If I learn it from childhood,
then when I grow up

Woman: You help a child to the point

where if he wants to know something

he knows where to look for it,
and how to look for it.

SM: More affluent children have people
who will help them to learn anyway.

But it's children in desolate areas

who really desperately need
to know how to learn,

and I know that the Internet does that.

Learning itself is actually
an emergent phenomenon

like a hive or a thunderstorm.

It's not about making learning happen;
it's about letting it happen.

[School in the cloud]

(Applause)

I made a project.

I made a project for TED.

The way it works is that they tell you
what to do with the money if you get it.

So I made out a project.

The project was that I would build
seven laboratories.

Seven learning laboratories.

Five of them would be in India,
and two would be in England.

What sort of labs?

Well, for that, you need to know
what happened before

which I won't go over,

but what happened in the 15 years
before the TED prize

was that I was able to figure out
something which all of you know

and all of you figure out
for yourselves in 2 minutes.

Which is that if you have a question

you no longer need to ask
a human being for an answer.

There is something out there
which can tell you what the answer is.

What is it out there?

The Internet of course,
we call it the Cloud.

To me it's the first non human,

conscious and intelligent entity

that we have encountered.

We always thought that aliens
will land from other planets

and they will be green with long legs
and round eyes.

It turned out
it was not going to be like that.

The alien entity is made up
of four billion people,

but it is not a person, it's a thing.

You can ask that thing anything,
and it tells you what you want to know.

Given that situation,
what happens to children and education?

There are reports
from all around the world

that children are not asking
questions to people.

Or at least if they have to ask
a question to a person,

they do that after they've asked
their phones.

Children don't want to learn
how to multiply, divide, add and subtract.

Because they say they already know
how to do that.

It's done with phones.

Children don't want
particularly to learn to read

because they say there are things
that can read out things to them,

even if they don't know how to read.

At the moment,
they don't like to write by hand

because they want to know

why they should learn
how to write by hand.

Will they ever do it
in the rest of their lives?

So, what happens in a world
where reading, writing and arithmetic

are treated in such a cavalier manner?

I wanted to experiment with that world.

The idea was to create facilities
for children, which have the Internet,

and the children can go in
and do what they like

without any supervision,
or without any teachers.

We could have presence there

but it would come out of the Internet
over Skype, from somewhere,

if the children wanted to.

I work with children in the age group
of about 8 to 13 years old.

They love speaking to adults over Skype,

particularly adults who are retired
school teachers and people like that.

I asked them,

"Why do you like this so much?
Do you like it?"

"Yes, we love it."

"Why do you like this so much?"

They said, "You know what?
We can switch them off."

(Laughter)

What I did after February, 2013

was to first look for places,
and then start building.

The seven labs are built to cover
from the really remote areas,

such as areas

without electricity, without healthcare,
without schooling,

nothing really, just the wild,

through to middle class England

and all the ones in between.

So, the seven have all been built now;

I finished opening the last one
just this month.

The very first one

was opened in November, 2013

the same year that I got the prize.

You see over there, a picture of that lab.

It's in a town called
Killingworth, England.

It's actually situated inside a school.

The school is called
George Stephenson High School.

It's very close
to George Stephenson's home,

you know the guy who built
the first working steam engine.

In Killingworth

- this is a room -

it just looks like a nice lounge
with computers and an Xbox.

The teachers when I built it said,

"Sugata, this is a bit too much.

Do you have any idea of what
they're going to do with that Xbox?

They are going to do nothing else,
except play with the Xbox."

So I said,
"That's our challenge, isn't it?"

If you have gone in there
to teach geography

and students are playing with the Xbox,

it means geography
is more boring than the Xbox.

Then, we should really look at geography
and chuck it from the curriculum

or put it into the Xbox somehow.

You can't tell the children:
"We will take away your Xbox

and put you into school
to do other things."

That's not the right way to engage
children's attention.

So here is a picture
of what happens in there.

As you can see
there are five children in the corner

researching something or the other,

and there is one on the Xbox.

If you give them something
interesting enough to do,

they don't, actually
play Xbox all the time;

it was our misconception.

Here is more of Killingworth.

What they do in there is called
the self-organized learning environment.

It's very simple, take five computers
and take twenty children.

Put them in there; ask them a question.

The question has to be an interesting one,

what we call a "Big Question."

What's a big question?

It can be all kinds,
but let me give you an example:

A big question could be,
"Can trees think?"

If you give that question to children,
they first will mutter with each other,

"Trees, they can't."
"Maybe they can." "I don't know."

Then you just leave them alone
and you say,

“I don’t know the answer either,
but why don't we look for it? "

And this will happen,
what you see on the screen.

About 30 or 40 minutes later
they will come back to you,

not with childish observations;

they will come back
with the nature of thought,

with the latest advances in biology, etc.

That's called the self-organized
learning environment.

Here is one that we did
in Kalkaji, New Delhi.

It has on the wall a Skyped-in mediator
as you can see, and it's a girls school.

The girls couldn't speak
any English, to start with.

We opened it in February, 2014.

I put in a team of observers

to measure their
beginning levels of English,

which was close to zero, and then I said,

"We will measure every two months or so."

After about three days,

I was talking to this mediator
that you see on the screen, over Skype,

I was asking,
"How is it going there?"

She said, "Very nice.
Those girls are really nice.

One of them said to me,
'When are you coming next?' "

I said, "In what language
did she say that?"

The mediator said, "In English."

When I sent my research team in
after a month to measure the level,

she reported that was too late;
it's done already.

I've never seen anything
happen so quickly,

so I went to Delhi to ask the girls.

I said, "How did you do that so fast?"

They gave me an answer
which was quite astonishing.

They said, "You know that woman
who comes on the TV screen?

She doesn't understand
anything other than English."

(Laughter)

It's as simple as that.

This is a little town called
Newton Aycliffe in England.

If you remember the map,
it's in Northeast.

This school is called Greenfields,

and we have a School in the Cloud there.

What they have done is
they made one of their walls glass.

On the other side, is a typical
English green country side.

Inside they put in astro turf,
so when you enter the room

suddenly you feel as though
you are outside

because of the turf merging in.

They put park benches, gas lamps,
and things like that

and a few computers scattered in there.

So, the children come into the room,
and when you leave them alone -

when you do self-organized
learning environment,

you, the teachers,
don't stay there; you go out -

so, you start the session, and you go out,

and from the other side
which is also glass you can observe them.

Once, very recently in Greenfields,

a group of 8 year olds were sent
into the room by their teacher,

the teacher said -
we often do this in SOLEs -

we say to the children,

"For the next 45 minutes,

I can't talk to you,
you can't talk to me."

There is no communication.

You are on your own,
and there is the big question.

So, she did that.

These 8 year olds were doing things.

After a while - remember what she said?

"You can't talk to me,
and I can't talk to you."

After a little while one of them
came up to the glass window,

he had a piece of paper in his hand,
and he held it up, on it were the words

"Help! We are stuck."

(Laughter)

She didn't say,
"You can't communicate with me,"

she said, "You can't talk to me."

I thought that was clever thinking.

Here is another view of Greenfields.

Another one.

Chandrakona in Bengal,

it's a pretty remote area.

If you can think of the map of India

think of the eastern side,
the side close to Burma and Thailand.

This is somewhere there.

In Chandrakona we have this structure

and we built a School in the Cloud.

The parents came there;
they are all farmers and they said,

"What are we supposed to do here?"

I said, "You are supposed
to send your children here."

They said, "What for?"

I said, "They learn things here."

They pointed to the computers and said,
"From those TV screens?"

I said, "They are not TVs,
they are computers".

And they said,
"Well, isn't that the same thing?"

I said, "No, not quite"

They said, "Who will teach them?"

I said, "They will teach themselves".

"How can they?"
I said, "They will use the Internet."

"What's the Internet?"

Where do you go from there?

This is what it looks like inside.

If you can see it,
you will see it at the far end

an Australian gentleman
who talks to the children.

I hate to think
what will happen to their accents,

but otherwise they love him.

(Laughter)

In Chandrakona, three months later

there's a tall, slim, young girl there.

I have visited the place and she said,
"We really love this place."

I said, "For what?"

She said, "You can find out
all sorts of things here."

I said, "Like what?
What are you finding out today?"

She said, "We were taught in school
that plants are green

because they have chlorophyll.

And they have chlorophyll
to process light in order to make energy.

I've come here to find out

why chlorophyll has to be green
and not blue, yellow or red.

Do you know?"

I said, "No, I have no idea
why it has to be green."

She said, "Ok, we will figure it out."

Three months.

That's a view of the inside again.

Here is our most remote area;
it's called Korakati, also Eastern India;

it's where the Ganges meets the sea.

It has nothing there;

there's no electricity,
no healthcare, no schools.

I won’t say nothing -
they have Bengal tigers,

(Laughter)

and hooded cobras and lots of children.

It took some building,
but I built that one.

It's solar powered, it has a tower
which is 45 ft high.

I couldn't get the Internet,

I had a receiver and kept raising it
on bamboo poles,

at 45 ft above ground,
we now got 8 megabits per second 3G.

3G met the stone age in there.

In Chandrakona,
the sessions are intermittent

because of all sort of problems.

The cables run on the ground,

the Internet cables that connect
all the computers together.

If you have seen those cables,
they are kind of cream colored.

I had to remove them
and lift them up, somewhere,

because there is a very pale, thin snake

which can change its color to the color
of the Internet cable and sleeps there.

A bit of a strange problem,

you don't get these problems
in schools usually.

(Laughter)

The Internet comes and goes.

The children walk for three miles
to come to school

and find there is no Internet
and walk back three miles.

Naturally they are not
very happy about it.

But in the middle of all this,

what they do is to find games,
download them and play them.

Somehow they are able
to get to that point.

I asked them what a web page was recently,

and they thought for a while.

They said, "It's made
by someone who is not here,

someone very far away who sends it
somehow over those things

which look like the cream colored snakes."

(Laughter)

This is the latest of the areas.
I don't have a picture of it.

It's a hexagonal, our best structure.

In there, the studies are just beginning.

It took a lot of time to build,
and it cost close to a million dollars,

but there are a thousand children,

thousand very interesting children
added to the Cloud.

Thank you.

(Applause)