Hack Education Blog

Audry Watters has produced a blog that takes a critical look at the fads in US education. She is very critical of certain claims espoused in TED talks by Sugata Mitra (creater of the "hole in the wall" computer) and Dale Stephens (blogger and author of Hacking Your Education: Ditch the Lectures, Save Tens of Thousands, and Learn More Than Your Peers Ever Will). Watters evaluation of educational technology products is based an what appears to be a reasonable set of criteria. Her annual report on Ed-Tech trends seems to be well researched.

The comment stream also had active dialog from educators. One did defend Surgata Mitra by providing a link to an hour long program of Mitra's talk at MoodleMootUK 2010, where he provides background information on his Hole in the Wall teaching efforts (video clip may display below). Mitra's research provides several insights:

1. Mitra left unsupervised computers in remote or impoverished locations in housings sized for children 7-14. The open locations provided community pressure that kept kids from going to improper sites.
2. When these new resources were left in a village, at first the bullies fought over them, but soon tired of the equipment. Then the studious children started to use the equipment. To complete the sequence, older girls (ages 12-14) would start to administer computer access, establishing community rules for use of this educational resource.
3. Students assigned to learn a topic would learn about 30% of the knowledge needed to pass an exam. To learn enough to pass an exam requires interaction with an encouraging adult who gives regular feedback.

An implication of this third point is that people stop learning short of mastery unless they are encouraged or induced to go further. This causes me to think that Dale Stephens' educational success was an outlier, and not a model for common replication.

-DD

 

source: MoodleMootUK2010 http://moodlemootuk2010.org.uk/videos