Sugata Mitra (born 12 February 1952) is an Indian
computer scientist
A computer scientist is a person who is trained in the academic study of computer science.
Computer scientists typically work on the theoretical side of computation, as opposed to the hardware side on which computer engineers mainly focus (al ...
and
educational theorist
Education sciences or education theory (traditionally often called ''pedagogy'') seek to describe, understand, and prescribe education policy and practice. Education sciences include many topics, such as pedagogy, andragogy, curriculum, learning, ...
. He is best known for his
"Hole in the Wall" experiment, and widely cited in works on literacy and education. He is Professor Emeritus at NIIT University, Rajasthan, India. A Ph.D. in theoretical physics, he retired in 2019 as Professor of Educational Technology at
Newcastle University
Newcastle University (legally the University of Newcastle upon Tyne) is a UK public university, public research university based in Newcastle upon Tyne, North East England. It has overseas campuses in Singapore and Malaysia. The university is ...
in England, after 13 years there including a year in 2012 as visiting professor at MIT MediaLab in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA. He won the
TED Prize
TED Conferences, LLC (Technology, Entertainment, Design) is an American-Canadian non-profit media organization that posts international talks online for free distribution under the slogan "ideas worth spreading". TED was founded by Richard Sau ...
2013.
Background
Mitra was born in a
Bengali
Bengali or Bengalee, or Bengalese may refer to:
*something of, from, or related to Bengal, a large region in South Asia
* Bengalis, an ethnic and linguistic group of the region
* Bengali language, the language they speak
** Bengali alphabet, the w ...
family in
Calcutta
Kolkata (, or , ; also known as Calcutta , List of renamed places in India#West Bengal, the official name until 2001) is the Capital city, capital of the Indian States and union territories of India, state of West Bengal, on the eastern ba ...
, India on 12 February 1952.
Early scientific work
After earning a PhD in Solid State Physics from the
Indian Institute of Technology
The Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) are central government owned public technical institutes located across India. They are under the ownership of the Ministry of Education of the Government of India. They are governed by the Institu ...
(IIT), Delhi, during which time h
publishedseveral papers on organic semiconductors, he went on to research battery technology at the Centre for Energy Studies in the IIT, and later at the
Technische Universität, Vienna. He published a paper on a zinc-chlorine battery
and a speculative paper on why the human
sense organ
A sense is a biological system used by an organism for sensation, the process of gathering information about the world through the detection of stimuli. (For example, in the human body, the brain which is part of the central nervous system re ...
s are located where they are.
He then worked setting up networked computers and created the "Yellow Pages" industry in India and Bangladesh.
Education and cognitive science studies
Mitra is a leading proponent of
Minimally invasive education
Minimally invasive education (MIE) is a form of learning in which children operate in unsupervised environments. The methodology arose from an experiment done by Sugata Mitra while at NIIT in 1999, often called ''The Hole in the Wall'', which h ...
. He has a PhD in Physics but is credited with more than 25 inventions in the area of
cognitive science and
education technology
Educational technology (commonly abbreviated as edutech, or edtech) is the combined use of computer hardware, software, and educational theory and practice to facilitate learning. When referred to with its abbreviation, edtech, it often refer ...
. He was conferred the
Dewang Mehta
Dewang Mehta (10 August 1962 – 12 April 2001) was the president of NASSCOM between 1991 and 2001. In addition to his role at NASSCOM, he was appointed in 1998 to an IT and Software Development task force, and was also involved in various advisory ...
Award for Innovation in Information Technology in the year 2005. In September 2012 Mitra won the Leonardo European Corporate Learning Award in the "Crossing Border" category. He argued that broken connections in simulated
neural network
A neural network is a network or circuit of biological neurons, or, in a modern sense, an artificial neural network, composed of artificial neurons or nodes. Thus, a neural network is either a biological neural network, made up of biological ...
s are a model for
Alzheimer's disease
Alzheimer's disease (AD) is a neurodegeneration, neurodegenerative disease that usually starts slowly and progressively worsens. It is the cause of 60–70% of cases of dementia. The most common early symptom is difficulty in short-term me ...
(The effect of synaptic disconnection on bi-directional associative recall. S. Mitra, Proc. IEEE/SMC Conf., Vol.1, 989, 1994 USA).
Mitra's work at
NIIT
NIIT Limited ''(National Institute of Information Technology)'' is an Indian Multinational corporation, multinational Training and development, skills and talent development corporation headquartered in Gurgaon, India. The company was set u ...
created the first
curricula
In education, a curriculum (; : curricula or curriculums) is broadly defined as the totality of student experiences that occur in the educational process. The term often refers specifically to a planned sequence of instruction, or to a view ...
and
pedagogy
Pedagogy (), most commonly understood as the approach to teaching, is the theory and practice of learning, and how this process influences, and is influenced by, the social, political and psychological development of learners. Pedagogy, taken as ...
for that organisation, followed by years of research on
learning styles
Learning styles refer to a range of theories that aim to account for differences in individuals' learning. Although there is ample evidence that individuals express personal preferences for how they prefer to receive information, few studies have ...
, learning devices, several of them now patented, multimedia and new methods of learning. Since the 1970s, Professor Mitra's publications and work has resulted in training and development of perhaps a million young Indians, amongst them some of the poorest children in the world. Some of this work culminated in an interest in early literacy, and the Hole in the Wall experiments.
TED Talk
On 3 May 2013, Mitra's TED Talk "Build a School in the Cloud" was featured in NPR's TED Radio hour on "Unstoppable Learning". In the program, Mitra discusses the "Hole in the Wall" experiment. Mitra claimed that children in the rural slums of India, many of whom had never seen a computer in their lives had, when left with computers in kiosks, taught themselves everything from "character mapping" to advanced topics such as "DNA replication" on their own, without adult assistance. He suggested this would lead to "unstoppable learning" through a "worldwide cloud" – where children would pool their knowledge and resources in the absence of adult supervision to create a world of self-promoted learning.
Mitra's statement that school is obsolete emphasizes the stagnancy of the system of education. He explains that the original Victorian academic priorities were made as such to fit the needs of the time period in regards to producing future generations of competent members of society; “
tudentsmust have good handwriting, because the data is handwritten; they must be able to read; and they must be able to do multiplication, division, addition and subtraction in their head”. When the modern era is so equipped with technology that can be used to the advantage of both educators and their students it is imperative that the schooling system adapts the way society has. Mitra's SOLE model emphasizes minimally invasive methods of teaching where broad questions are asked and students are forced to use collaborative skills, and active problem solving techniques to form hypotheses and come to conclusions on their own. His modern approach additionally perfectly emphasizes many useful academic skills; most notably creativity and innovation as well as communication and collaboration.
Mitra was the TED Prize winner in 2013.
Hole in the Wall
In 1999, the
Hole in the Wall (HIW) experiments in children's learning, was first conducted. In the initial experiment, a computer was placed in a
kiosk
Historically, a kiosk () was a small garden pavilion open on some or all sides common in Iran, Persia, the Indian subcontinent, and in the Ottoman Empire from the 13th century onward. Today, several examples of this type of kiosk still exist ...
in a wall in a
slum
A slum is a highly populated urban residential area consisting of densely packed housing units of weak build quality and often associated with poverty. The infrastructure in slums is often deteriorated or incomplete, and they are primarily inh ...
at Kalkaji,
Delhi
Delhi, officially the National Capital Territory (NCT) of Delhi, is a city and a union territory of India containing New Delhi, the capital of India. Straddling the Yamuna river, primarily its western or right bank, Delhi shares borders w ...
and children were allowed to use it freely. The experiment aimed at proving that children could be taught by computers very easily without any formal training. Mitra termed this
Minimally Invasive Education
Minimally invasive education (MIE) is a form of learning in which children operate in unsupervised environments. The methodology arose from an experiment done by Sugata Mitra while at NIIT in 1999, often called ''The Hole in the Wall'', which h ...
(MIE). The experiment has since been repeated. HIW placed some 23 kiosks in rural India. In 2004 the experiment was carried out in
Cambodia
Cambodia (; also Kampuchea ; km, កម្ពុជា, UNGEGN: ), officially the Kingdom of Cambodia, is a country located in the southern portion of the Indochinese Peninsula in Southeast Asia, spanning an area of , bordered by Thailand t ...
.
This work demonstrated that groups of children, irrespective of who or where they are, can learn to use computers and the Internet on their own with public computers in open spaces such as roads and playgrounds, even without knowing English. Mitra's publication was judged the best open access publication in the world for 2005 and he was awarded the
Dewang Mehta Award for innovation in IT that year.
The Hole in the Wall experiment inspired Indian diplomat
Vikas Swarup
Vikas Swarup (born 22 June 1961) is a retired Indian diplomat and writer. He retired from the Indian Foreign Service as the Secretary (West) at the Ministry of External Affairs, India on 30 June 2021 and has previously served as High Commissione ...
to write his debut novel ''
Q & A'', which later became the movie ''
Slumdog Millionaire
''Slumdog Millionaire'' is a 2008 British drama film that is a loose adaptation of the novel '' Q & A'' (2005) by Indian author Vikas Swarup. It narrates the story of 18-year-old Jamal Malik from the Juhu slums of Mumbai. Starring Dev Pa ...
''.
Evaluations and criticisms
Critics have questioned whether leaving computers in villages results in gains in math and other skills.
[Paradowski, Michał B. (2014]
Classrooms in the cloud or castles in the air?
IATEFL Voices 239, 8–10.
In a study in Peru, with some resemblance to Sugata Mitra's studies, but many differences (number of laptops, how the pedagogic tasks were constructed etc.) Michael Trucano, found no evidence of increases in these key skills.
[Michael Trucano (201]
Evaluating One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) in Peru
/ref> Others see the idea as a recycling of what they see as a "Dump hardware in schools, hope for magic to happen" plan.[Cuban, L, (2012)]
No end to magical thinking when it comes to high tech Schooling
/ref>
The long-term sustainability of the kiosk system has been questioned because they can fall into disrepair and abandonment unless the resources typical of a school are provided.[Arora, P (2010)]
Hope-in-the-Wall? A digital promise for free learning
''British Journal of Educational Technology'' doi 10.1111/j.1467-8535.2010.01078.x UK education researcher Donald Clark has accumulated significant support indicating that the typical fate of a site is abuse and abandonment, unless it is inside a sanctuary such as a school. Moreover, Clark found that the computers were dominated by bigger boys, excluding girls and younger students, and were mostly used for entertainment not education.[Clark D. (2013]
Sugata Mitra: Slum chic? 7 reasons for doubt
/ref>
In a Wired magazine article, it was claimed that a 12-year-old child – Paloma Noyola Bueno – who lived in a Mexican slum, topped the all Mexico Maths exam after her school teacher, Sergio Juarez Correa, implemented Mitra's teaching method in the classroom. It was also suggested that her class went from 0 to 63 per cent in the excellent category on the Maths exam while failing scores went from 45 percent down to 7 per cent and may have improved on other parts of the test.[Wire]
How a Radical New Teaching Method Could Unleash a Generation of Geniuses
/ref>
References
External links
*
Hole in the wall official website
a documentary about the experiment
HIW: Kids learn computer by themselves
An interview with Dr Mitra published in a Hindi
Hindi (Devanāgarī: or , ), or more precisely Modern Standard Hindi (Devanagari: ), is an Indo-Aryan language spoken chiefly in the Hindi Belt region encompassing parts of northern, central, eastern, and western India. Hindi has been de ...
webzine
An online magazine is a magazine published on the Internet, through bulletin board systems and other forms of public computer networks. One of the first magazines to convert from a print magazine format to being online only was the computer magaz ...
.
Wiki referenced during Ted Talks
Should We Replace Old With New? A response to Sugata Mitra
*
{{DEFAULTSORT:Mitra, Sugata
Indian computer scientists
Living people
IIT Delhi alumni
1952 births
20th-century Indian educational theorists