KQED News Mind/Shift – Katrina Schwartz
“When a group of kids from a Delhi slum figured out how to navigate the Internet in English simply by playing with a computer for a few days, it was the beginning of a movement to harness the power of self-organized learning. Sugata Mitra’s “Hole in the Wall” experiment has garnered a lot of attention since it first begun in 1999 and won a TED prize in 2013. It demonstrated that a group of students working together, motivated by a deep question and with access to a computer, could produce amazing results. But few self-organized learning environments exist in traditional education. Cleveland is a world away from Delhi, but Dora Bechtel says many of her students at Campus International School remind her of the Indian children she observed in videos about the Hole in the Wall experiment. Her school is housed on Cleveland State University’s campus and uses the International Baccalaureate (IB) program. Sixty percent of its students come from Cleveland itself and the other 40 percent are the children of professors or residents of suburban communities.”(more)