Sugata Mitra’s School in the Cloud
In 1999, Sugata Mitra‘s pioneering “Hole in the Wall” experiments helped bring the potential of self-organised learning to the public’s attention.
Fourteen years of research since then continue to support his startling results — groups of children, with access to the Internet, can learn almost anything by themselves.
From the slums of India and villages of Cambodia, to schools in Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, the USA and United Kingdom, Professor Mitra’s experimental results offer an intriguing new future for learning: a future in which ‘knowing’ may be obsolete.
The platform was launched to help accelerate this research by helping educators — teachers, parent or community leaders — to run their own SOLEs (self organised learning environment) and to contribute to the global experiment by sharing their experiences.
The Granny Cloud is a fluid team of emediators, young and old, both male and female. They reach out via Skype to children in SOLEs across the globe.
The aim is to stimulate curiosity, to develop confidence and generally to have fun. It could also involve the posing of Big Questions with the children working in groups, using the web, developing search skills, talking amongst themselves and then feeding back to their Granny.
Taking its lead from Sugata‘s principles of self organisation, the Granny Cloud has developed many different roles within the group. It offers mutual support, mentors individual children, provides technical support, gathers data for research, explores fund-raising opportunities, promotes the project through the media and helps with the recruitment of new Grannies. The Grannies hail from many different locations across the world.
Click here to donate to School in the Cloud.
