TCSE: Ted Corpus Search Engine

Recorded at	July 15, 2010
Event	TEDGlobal 2010
Duration (min:sec)	16:51
Video Type	TED Stage Talk
Words per minute	175.31 medium
Readability (FK)	67.32 very easy
Speaker	Sugata Mitra
Country	India
Occupation	professor, writer, physicist
Description	Indian computer scientist, best known for his "Hole in the Wall" experiment


1	00:17	Well, that's kind of an obvious statement up there.
2	00:19	I started with that sentence about 12 years ago, and I started in the context of developing countries, but you're sitting here from every corner of the world.
3	00:30	So if you think of a map of your country, I think you'll realize that for every country on Earth, you could draw little circles to say, "These are places where good teachers won't go."
4	00:43	On top of that, those are the places from where trouble comes.
5	00:48	So we have an ironic problem -- good teachers don't want to go to just those places where they're needed the most.
6	00:55	I started in 1999 to try and address this problem with an experiment, which was a very simple experiment in New Delhi.
7	01:06	I basically embedded a computer into a wall of a slum in New Delhi.
8	01:13	The children barely went to school, they didn't know any English -- they'd never seen a computer before, and they didn't know what the internet was.
9	01:21	I connected high speed internet to it -- it's about three feet off the ground -- turned it on and left it there.
10	01:26	After this, we noticed a couple of interesting things, which you'll see.
11	01:31	But I repeated this all over India and then through a large part of the world and noticed that children will learn to do what they want to learn to do.
12	01:45	This is the first experiment that we did -- eight year-old boy on your right teaching his student, a six year-old girl, and he was teaching her how to browse.
13	01:56	This boy here in the middle of central India -- this is in a Rajasthan village, where the children recorded their own music and then played it back to each other and in the process, they've enjoyed themselves thoroughly.
14	02:12	They did all of this in four hours after seeing the computer for the first time.
15	02:17	In another South Indian village, these boys here had assembled a video camera and were trying to take the photograph of a bumble bee.
16	02:26	They downloaded it from Disney.com, or one of these websites, 14 days after putting the computer in their village.
17	02:36	So at the end of it, we concluded that groups of children can learn to use computers and the internet on their own, irrespective of who or where they were.
18	02:48	At that point, I became a little more ambitious and decided to see what else could children do with a computer.
19	02:57	We started off with an experiment in Hyderabad, India, where I gave a group of children -- they spoke English with a very strong Telugu accent.
20	03:06	I gave them a computer with a speech-to-text interface, which you now get free with Windows, and asked them to speak into it.
21	03:15	So when they spoke into it, the computer typed out gibberish, so they said, "Well, it doesn't understand anything of what we are saying."
22	03:21	So I said, "Yeah, I'll leave it here for two months.
23	03:23	Make yourself understood to the computer."
24	03:27	So the children said, "How do we do that."
25	03:29	And I said, "I don't know, actually."
26	03:33	(Laughter)
27	03:35	And I left.
28	03:37	(Laughter)
29	03:40	Two months later -- and this is now documented in the Information Technology for International Development journal -- that accents had changed and were remarkably close to the neutral British accent in which I had trained the speech-to-text synthesizer.
30	03:56	In other words, they were all speaking like James Tooley.
31	03:59	(Laughter)
32	04:01	So they could do that on their own.
33	04:03	After that, I started to experiment with various other things that they might learn to do on their own.
34	04:09	I got an interesting phone call once from Columbo, from the late Arthur C. Clarke, who said, "I want to see what's going on."
35	04:16	And he couldn't travel, so I went over there.
36	04:19	He said two interesting things, "A teacher that can be replaced by a machine should be."
37	04:26	(Laughter)
38	04:28	The second thing he said was that, "If children have interest, then education happens."
39	04:35	And I was doing that in the field, so every time I would watch it and think of him.
40	04:39	(Video) Arthur C. Clarke: And they can definitely help people, because children quickly learn to navigate the web and find things which interest them.
41	04:49	And when you've got interest, then you have education.
42	04:52	Sugata Mitra: I took the experiment to South Africa.
43	04:55	This is a 15 year-old boy.
44	04:57	(Video) Boy: ... just mention, I play games like animals, and I listen to music.
45	05:06	SM: And I asked him, "Do you send emails?"
46	05:08	And he said, "Yes, and they hop across the ocean."
47	05:12	This is in Cambodia, rural Cambodia -- a fairly silly arithmetic game, which no child would play inside the classroom or at home.
48	05:22	They would, you know, throw it back at you.
49	05:24	They'd say, "This is very boring."
50	05:26	If you leave it on the pavement and if all the adults go away, then they will show off with each other about what they can do.
51	05:34	This is what these children are doing.
52	05:36	They are trying to multiply, I think.
53	05:39	And all over India, at the end of about two years, children were beginning to Google their homework.
54	05:46	As a result, the teachers reported tremendous improvements in their English -- (Laughter) rapid improvement and all sorts of things.
55	05:56	They said, "They have become really deep thinkers and so on and so forth.
56	05:59	(Laughter)
57	06:02	And indeed they had.
58	06:04	I mean, if there's stuff on Google, why would you need to stuff it into your head?
59	06:10	So at the end of the next four years, I decided that groups of children can navigate the internet to achieve educational objectives on their own.
60	06:18	At that time, a large amount of money had come into Newcastle University to improve schooling in India.
61	06:25	So Newcastle gave me a call. I said, "I'll do it from Delhi."
62	06:28	They said, "There's no way you're going to handle a million pounds-worth of University money sitting in Delhi."
63	06:35	So in 2006, I bought myself a heavy overcoat and moved to Newcastle.
64	06:42	I wanted to test the limits of the system.
65	06:46	The first experiment I did out of Newcastle was actually done in India.
66	06:50	And I set myself and impossible target: can Tamil speaking 12-year-old children in a South Indian village teach themselves biotechnology in English on their own?
67	07:05	And I thought, I'll test them, they'll get a zero --
68	07:08	I'll give the materials, I'll come back and test them -- they get another zero, I'll go back and say, "Yes, we need teachers for certain things."
69	07:16	I called in 26 children.
70	07:18	They all came in there, and I told them that there's some really difficult stuff on this computer.
71	07:22	I wouldn't be surprised if you didn't understand anything.
72	07:25	It's all in English, and I'm going.
73	07:28	(Laughter)
74	07:30	So I left them with it.
75	07:32	I came back after two months, and the 26 children marched in looking very, very quiet.
76	07:36	I said, "Well, did you look at any of the stuff?"
77	07:39	They said, "Yes, we did."
78	07:41	"Did you understand anything?" "No, nothing."
79	07:44	So I said, "Well, how long did you practice on it before you decided you understood nothing?"
80	07:50	They said, "We look at it every day."
81	07:53	So I said, "For two months, you were looking at stuff you didn't understand?"
82	07:55	So a 12 year-old girl raises her hand and says, literally, "Apart from the fact that improper replication of the DNA molecule causes genetic disease, we've understood nothing else."
83	08:07	(Laughter) (Applause)
84	08:16	(Laughter)
85	08:19	It took me three years to publish that.
86	08:21	It's just been published in the British Journal of Educational Technology.
87	08:24	One of the referees who refereed the paper said, "It's too good to be true," which was not very nice.
88	08:32	Well, one of the girls had taught herself to become the teacher.
89	08:36	And then that's her over there.
90	08:46	Remember, they don't study English.
91	09:01	I edited out the last bit when I asked, "Where is the neuron?"
92	09:04	and she says, "The neuron? The neuron," and then she looked and did this.
93	09:09	Whatever the expression, it was not very nice.
94	09:12	So their scores had gone up from zero to 30 percent, which is an educational impossibility under the circumstances.
95	09:18	But 30 percent is not a pass.
96	09:21	So I found that they had a friend, a local accountant, a young girl, and they played football with her.
97	09:27	I asked that girl, "Would you teach them enough biotechnology to pass?"
98	09:31	And she said, "How would I do that? I don't know the subject."
99	09:33	I said, "No, use the method of the grandmother."
100	09:35	She said, "What's that?"
101	09:37	I said, "Well, what you've got to do is stand behind them and admire them all the time.
102	09:44	Just say to them, 'That's cool. That's fantastic.
103	09:46	What is that? Can you do that again? Can you show me some more?'"
104	09:49	She did that for two months.
105	09:51	The scores went up to 50, which is what the posh schools of New Delhi, with a trained biotechnology teacher were getting.
106	09:58	So I came back to Newcastle with these results and decided that there was something happening here that definitely was getting very serious.
107	10:10	So, having experimented in all sorts of remote places, I came to the most remote place that I could think of.
108	10:16	(Laughter)
109	10:19	Approximately 5,000 miles from Delhi is the little town of Gateshead.
110	10:24	In Gateshead, I took 32 children and I started to fine-tune the method.
111	10:30	I made them into groups of four.
112	10:33	I said, "You make your own groups of four.
113	10:35	Each group of four can use one computer and not four computers."
114	10:38	Remember, from the Hole in the Wall.
115	10:41	"You can exchange groups.
116	10:43	You can walk across to another group, if you don't like your group, etc.
117	10:47	You can go to another group, peer over their shoulders, see what they're doing, come back to you own group and claim it as your own work."
118	10:53	And I explained to them that, you know, a lot of scientific research is done using that method.
119	10:58	(Laughter) (Applause)
120	11:07	The children enthusiastically got after me and said, "Now, what do you want us to do?"
121	11:11	I gave them six GCSE questions.
122	11:14	The first group -- the best one -- solved everything in 20 minutes.
123	11:18	The worst, in 45.
124	11:21	They used everything that they knew -- news groups, Google, Wikipedia, Ask Jeeves, etc.
125	11:27	The teachers said, "Is this deep learning?"
126	11:30	I said, "Well, let's try it.
127	11:32	I'll come back after two months.
128	11:34	We'll give them a paper test -- no computers, no talking to each other, etc."
129	11:38	The average score when I'd done it with the computers and the groups was 76 percent.
130	11:42	When I did the experiment, when I did the test, after two months, the score was 76 percent.
131	11:50	There was photographic recall inside the children, I suspect because they're discussing with each other.
132	11:57	A single child in front of a single computer will not do that.
133	12:01	I have further results, which are almost unbelievable, of scores which go up with time.
134	12:07	Because their teachers say that after the session is over, the children continue to Google further.
135	12:14	Here in Britain, I put out a call for British grandmothers, after my Kuppam experiment.
136	12:20	Well, you know, they're very vigorous people, British grandmothers.
137	12:24	200 of them volunteered immediately.
138	12:26	(Laughter)
139	12:28	The deal was that they would give me one hour of broadband time, sitting in their homes, one day in a week.
140	12:37	So they did that, and over the last two years, over 600 hours of instruction has happened over Skype, using what my students call the granny cloud.
141	12:48	The granny cloud sits over there.
142	12:51	I can beam them to whichever school I want to.
143	13:00	(Video) Teacher: You can't catch me.
144	13:02	You say it.
145	13:05	You can't catch me.
146	13:08	Children: You can't catch me.
147	13:11	Teacher: I'm the gingerbread man.
148	13:14	Children: I'm the gingerbread man.
149	13:16	Teacher: Well done. Very good ...
150	13:24	SM: Back at Gateshead, a 10-year-old girl gets into the heart of Hinduism in 15 minutes.
151	13:30	You know, stuff which I don't know anything about.
152	13:36	Two children watch a TEDTalk.
153	13:38	They wanted to be footballers before.
154	13:40	After watching eight TEDTalks, he wants to become Leonardo da Vinci.
155	13:45	(Laughter) (Applause)
156	13:51	It's pretty simple stuff.
157	13:53	This is what I'm building now -- they're called SOLEs: Self Organized Learning Environments.
158	13:58	The furniture is designed so that children can sit in front of big, powerful screens, big broadband connections, but in groups.
159	14:06	If they want, they can call the granny cloud.
160	14:09	This is a SOLE in Newcastle.
161	14:11	The mediator is from Pune, India.
162	14:13	So how far can we go? One last little bit and I'll stop.
163	14:16	I went to Turin in May.
164	14:20	I sent all the teachers away from my group of 10 year-old students.
165	14:24	I speak only English, they speak only Italian, so we had no way to communicate.
166	14:29	I started writing English questions on the blackboard.
167	14:33	The children looked at it and said, "What?"
168	14:35	I said, "Well, do it."
169	14:37	They typed it into Google, translated it into Italian, went back into Italian Google.
170	14:42	Fifteen minutes later -- next question: where is Calcutta?
171	14:57	This one, they took only 10 minutes.
172	15:04	I tried a really hard one then.
173	15:07	Who was Pythagoras, and what did he do?
174	15:12	There was silence for a while, then they said, "You've spelled it wrong.
175	15:16	It's Pitagora."
176	15:23	And then, in 20 minutes, the right-angled triangles began to appear on the screens.
177	15:29	This sent shivers up my spine.
178	15:32	These are 10 year-olds.
179	15:47	Text: In another 30 minutes they would reach the Theory of Relativity. And then?
180	15:50	(Laughter) (Applause)
181	16:01	SM: So you know what's happened?
182	16:03	I think we've just stumbled across a self-organizing system.
183	16:07	A self-organizing system is one where a structure appears without explicit intervention from the outside.
184	16:14	Self-organizing systems also always show emergence, which is that the system starts to do things, which it was never designed for.
185	16:21	Which is why you react the way you do, because it looks impossible.
186	16:26	I think I can make a guess now -- education is self-organizing system, where learning is an emergent phenomenon.
187	16:33	It'll take a few years to prove it, experimentally, but I'm going to try.
188	16:37	But in the meanwhile, there is a method available.
189	16:40	One billion children, we need 100 million mediators -- there are many more than that on the planet -- 10 million SOLEs, 180 billion dollars and 10 years.
190	16:51	We could change everything.
191	16:53	Thanks.
192	16:55	(Applause)

Sugata Mitra: The child-driven education