\nSugata Mitra is Professor of Educational Technology at the School of Education, Communication and Language Sciences at Newcastle University, UK. He was given the $1m TED Prize in 2013 in recognition of his work and to help build a School...\nSugata Mitra is Professor of Educational Technology at the School of Education, Communication and Language Sciences at Newcastle University, UK.
He was given the $1m TED Prize in 2013 in recognition of his work and to help build a School in the Cloud, a creative online space where children from all over the world can gather to answer 'big questions', share knowledge and benefit from help and guidance from online educators.
The School in the Cloud brings together Self Organised Learning Environments (SOLEs) to link in with the Granny Cloud, originally set up in 2009 following an appeal for retired teachers willing to offer a few hours a week to help teach English to Indian schoolchildren. This mentoring and encouraging role is still a vital part of the success of this educational approach today.
Much of his current research builds on the Hole in the Wall (HIW) experiment, which Sugata instigated in 1999 while chief scientist at NIIT. Children were given free access to a computer embedded within a wall between his office and an Indian slum at Kalkaji, Delhi.
This, and further experiments into children’s learning, have demonstrated that groups of children, irrespective of who or where they are, can learn to use computers and the Internet on their own in a public space - a process which Sugata called Minimally Invasive Education (MIE). (Mitra, Sugata, Ritu Dangwal, Shiffon Chatterjee, Swati Jha, Ravinder S. Bisht and Preeti Kapur (2005), Acquisition of Computer Literacy on Shared Public Computers: Children and the “Hole in the wall”, Australasian Journal of Educational Technology, 21(3), 407-426. www.ascilite.org.au/ajet/ajet21/mitra.html). This publication was judged the best open access publication in the world for 2005.
The Hole in the Wall experiment has also left a mark on popular culture. Indian diplomat Vikas Swarup read about Mitra's experiment and was inspired to write his debut novel that went on to become the Oscar winning movie of 2009 - Slumdog Millionaire.
Sugata's work at NIIT created the first curricula and pedagogy for that organisation, followed by years of research on learning styles, learning devices (several of them now patented), multimedia and new methods of learning
He has a PhD in Physics and is credited with more that 25 inventions in the area of cognitive science and educational technology. He was conferred the prestigious Dewang Mehta Award for Innovation in Information Technology in 2005.
Since the 1970s, Sugata's work has resulted in training and development of perhaps a million young Indians, among them some of the poorest children in the world. The resultant changes in the lives of people and the economy of the country can only be guessed at.\n
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