TED Award winner Sugata Mitra addresses conference

TED award winner, Sugata Mitra ended the first day of the Thinking Digital conference on a high with his innovative ‘School in the Cloud,’ concept.

The Newcastle University Professor told conference delegates of his ‘Hole in the Wall’ experiments in Indian slums and villages.

Sugata, who was awarded the first ever $1m TED Prize in 2013, described the experiments in ‘minimally invasive education’ in which he set the children tasks such as teaching themselves biomechanics in English, only using a web-connected PC .

He found that, when left to themselves, the children were able to work together to teach themselves and learn.

Sugata said: “We came to the conclusion that groups of children can reach objectives by themselves, with a computer and the internet.”

The Newcastle University Professor has continued his groundbreaking work in the North East, in areas such as Longbenton.

Sugata is pioneering his SOLE (Self Organised Learning Environments) areas for children.

He said: “SOLE is designed so that it keeps adults away, and so the children know that it belongs to them.”

He has also instituted ‘The Granny Cloud,’ in which hundreds of grannies near Gateshead were recruited to go online to help teach children in India based on the grandmother method - stand behind, admire, act fascinated and praise.

Before Mr Mitra took to the stage, the conference also heard from Maria Giudice, Facebook’s latest talent acquisitions who was acquired by the social networking site in March 2013.

As the founder of a successful design studio, she described her career as a ‘design executive officer’ and told delegates how the skills used in that role can be used to good effect in any industry.

YouTube’s Brand Proposition manager, Derek Scobie went on to give a valuable insight into social media, and how viral videos come about.

He said: “YouTube has democratised content, content that captures little snippets of life that would otherwise stay in living rooms.”

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