FLOSSE Posse

I remember around 2000 when I first read about the “hole in the wall” experiments in India. These were experiments with unprivileged children, usually from slums or small villages, who were given a possibility and access to a computer and the Internet. What made a real difference with these experiments was that there was no instruction planned nor supervision by adults or experts.

What happened next was that children, usually from 8 to 13-years-old, would gather around these “holes in the wall” and start exploring the computer and the Internet. During the first experiment, Dr. Mitra who ran this research, explained that within the 8 min from installing the computer, a 13-year-old boy who first discovered the “hole”, was surfing on the Web.

By the end of that night, he had called 70 of his friends who were all learning from one another on how to surf the Web for the first time in their lives. This was “the Shivpuri experiment”. In another experiment (Madantusi experiment) in a small village, where Dr. Mirta had installed a “hole in the wall” computer, when he came back after 3 months, the kids asked him for a better mouse and a faster processor. This was rather unexpected, as the village was so poor and remote that they did not even have an English teacher. However, by familiarising themselves with the computer and Internet, the research team evaluated that the group of kids had acquired an average vocabulary of 400 English words, that they spoke in an American accent learned from the games and other material that was pre-installed on the computer.

Dr. Sugata Mitra ran 23 variations of these experiments all over India to find the same thing: children would self-organise themselves around a computer to teach one another how to browse the Internet, explore games that were installed on these computers, teach themselves new languages and even in one of the experiments, teach themselves biotechnology.

Sugata Mitra’s message for a hall full of about 400 European teachers was “if you let them and if they want to” kids can learn anything. The key is in arranging that kind of an environment. Computers, for example, should be given to groups of kids, not for individuals, as learning mostly takes place through the communication in the group. Computers should also be placed in public areas, as kids would right from the beginning get suspicious if they had to learn in a school environment. Also, Sugata Mitra’s team had observed that kids older than 13 would act differently in a self-organised learning situation; they would ask who was the teachers and what was the schedule, etc., as they already were so used to being instructed.

Dr. Mitra received an awesome ovation from eTwinning teachers, who so well knew what he was talking about, but who too often would forget his message. I’m glad to share this audio recording from the keynote speech given by Sugata Mitra in an eTwinning event in Bucharest, Romania, on March 14. Enjoy it!

Audio (about 30 Mb in mp3)

I might also get the slides later, will put the link in here too.

eTwinning event blog

Link: http://www.hole-in-the-wall.com/

Link: http://www.ncl.ac.uk/ecls/staff/profile/sugata.mitra

Wikipedia entry about Dr. Mitra: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sugata_Mitra

The concept of “Personal Learning Environment” (PLE) is getting quite a lot of hits in the edu.tech. blogs. It is often presented as some kind of new paradigm of e-learning. Still there is no proper definition of PLE, and for example Teemu Arina said somewhere that his company is his PLE. I actually like that definition.

Probably the most common definition of PLE is that it is different than “virtual learning environment” (VLE).

Checking “virtual learning environment” from the Wikipedia made me think that, actually I have never had anything to do with “virtual learning environments”:

“A Virtual learning environment (VLE) is a software system designed to facilitate teachers in the management of educational courses for their students, especially by helping teachers and learners with course administration.”

Huh! I am very happy to write that I have never designed or developed anything for teachers to manage their educational courses or to help them with course administration. What a relief.

Really. Fle3 is not VLE. LeMill is not VLE. MobilED is not VLE. UNESCO’s Young Digital Creators website is not VLE. Even the Kuoma learning environment from the year 1997 was not VLE (the short article is still worth of checking – a lot of web 2.0 stuff in it).

These are not VLEs, but they are not “PLEs”, either. What they then are? They are all – first at all – community tools.

Learning is about sharing. Contradictory, “personal” is something you rather not share. Sharing takes place in communities, personal things you keep for yourself.

In general I do not like “personal things”. For example the idea of having a server computers and client computers was almost killed with the idea of “personal computer” (PC). In a client-server environment you just have a terminal, which you use to get access to servers shared with other users. After PC revolutions, suddenly everybody was doing their personal (paper) letter writing with word processor and accounting with spreadsheets. Without the World Wide Web and universities with their UNIX infrastructure, which made the expansion of the web so fast among academics and students, we probably would still sit alone in front of our PC’s with virtual helmet on. The Word Wide Web brought back to life the clients (browse) and servers (web sites).

I know that when people talk about PLE they do not think that “personal” would somehow excludes social interaction between the users of the “personal learning environments”. No, actually they often talk about web 2.0 and social media, and see them as a crucial part of the “personal learning environment”.

Behind the PLE there seems to be a strong ethos of individual right to choose to study whatever they want, with who ever they want. I guess this is what makes it “personal”. The ultimate freedom to choose also means that there can’t be a request of commitment.

I am afraid that behind the PLE concept there is actually the metaphor of learning as a knowledge acquisition, and not only knowledge acquisition, but also community (or people) acquisition. Communities share. individuals consume. With PLE students will consume information and each other.

I also wonder if Linus Torvalds would have started his little project of a (free) operating system on his PLE (what ever it is) and not on an existing community of alternative operating system developers, would there be Linux today?