What if everything you thought you knew about education was
wrong? What if students learn more quickly on their own, working
in teams, than in a classroom with a teacher? What if tests and
discipline get in the way of the learning process rather than
accelerate it? Those are the questions Sugata Mitra has been
asking since the late 1990s, and for which he was awarded the $1
million TED Prize on Tuesday, the first day of the TED2013
conference. Mitra, professor of educational technology at
Newcastle University, won the prize for his concept of "self
organizing learning environments," an alternative to traditional
schooling that relies on empowering students to work together on
computers with broadband access to solve their own problems,
with adults intervening to provide encouragement and admiration,
rather than top-down instruction. Mitra's work with students in
India has gained wide attention and was the focus of a 2010 TED
Talk on his "hole in the wall" experiment, showing the potential
of computers to jump