A School in the Cloud (Friday 7/2)

The Question: How does this Ted Talk make you think about your role with young people in an online environment?

A School in the Cloud 

Sugata Mitra's Ted Talk "A School in the Cloud" made me think about my role in the classroom. Mitra uses his experiments to support the idea that a teacher's role is not truly to hold the weight of teaching, but rather to pose a question and provide the opportunity for student to lear through solving that question together. This supports my experience as a 1st grade teacher as the best learning happens in my classroom when I set up the activity and students then do the work and the discussing to complete their learning and figure out how to solve the problems presented. In the same manner, Mitra's talk pushed my practice in the same way. It's not just some learning that should follow this format, it is ALL learning that follows this format. I could present less information and more questions and as a result let students do more learning. In light of Sugata Mitra's Ted Talk "A School in the Cloud," I think of my role as an educator is to use technology and the tools and resources that I have available to me to pose challenges in the form of questions to my students and create a strong learning environment for them to solve together. 

Quotes as take-aways

• "It came from about 300 years ago, and it came from the last and the biggest of the empires on this planet. ["The British Empire"] Imagine trying to run the show, trying to run the entire planet, without computers, without telephones, with data handwritten on pieces of paper, and traveling by ships. But the Victorians actually did it. What they did was amazing. They created a global computer made up of people. It's still with us today. It's called the bureaucratic administrative machine. In order to have that machine running, you need lots and lots of people. They made another machine to produce those people: the school. The schools would produce the people who would then become parts of the bureaucratic administrative machine."

When teaching students instead of using resources to create opportunities for them to learn, then school simply plays into the bureaucratic administrative machine. It turns students into parts of this machine and further it turns them into machines themselves. My role with young people is to aid their learning in a way that makes them more of themselves rather than more of a machine. 

"The empire is gone, so what are we doing with that design that produces these identical people, and what are we going to do next if we ever are going to do anything else with it?"

"Could it be that we are heading towards or maybe in a future where knowing is obsolete?"

• "There is evidence from neuroscience. The reptilian part of our brain, which sits in the center of our brain, when it's threatened, it shuts down everything else, it shuts down the prefrontal cortex, the parts which learn, it shuts all of that down. Punishment and examinations are seen as threats. We take our children, we make them shut their brains down, and then we say, "Perform." Why did they create a system like that? Because it was needed. There was an age in the Age of Empires when you needed those people who can survive under threat. When you're standing in a trench all alone, if you could have survived, you're okay, you've passed. If you didn't, you failed. But the Age of Empires is gone. What happens to creativity in our age? We need to shift that balance back from threat to pleasure."

This science supports the value of letting kids learn instead of trying to poor information into their heads. Mitra's science supports Wesch's ideas on the crisis of significance. Both thinkers challenge the types of questions that foster learning. This is shown through the alignment of this Mitra quote and the ideas presented in Mike Wesch's Ted Talk and article on education in the United States."It struck me that all learning begins with a good question, and if we are ultimately trying to create “active lifelong learners” with “critical thinking skills” and an ability to “think outside the box” it might be best to start by getting students to ask better questions" (Wesch).

"So what's happening here? I think what we need to look at is we need to look at learning as the product of educational self-organization. If you allow the educational process to self-organize, then learning emerges. It's not about making learning happen. It's about letting it happen. The teacher sets the process in motion and then she stands back in awe and watches as learning happens. I think that's what all this is pointing at."