[Originally published on 16 January 2014]

Sugata Mitra is the 2013 TED Prize Winner with his project called Self Organized Learning Environments (SOLE). The idea is to let students learn by themselves using computers. Of course there are older people who guide the students and motivate them.

As a teacher I sometimes do experiences to motivate my students to learn. Putting them doing what they want, how they want, is surprising. They actually get work done and like it much more because they are discovering something. And they help each other spontaneously.

At the beginning of his talk “Build a School in the Cloud” he tells us how the educational system as we know it came to be. According to him, it was the British Empire that wanted to train people all the same so they can perform tasks in the same way everywhere. It was so widespread that even today schools are similar everywhere.

I recently watched a video on a classroom in Japan and it was amazingly (or not) similar to the classrooms here in Portugal. They even have obsolete technology that teachers don’t use, like we do here.

Society is different from what it used to be so maybe education should be different too.

Check other project in the world.