Turning Kids From India’s Slums Into Autodidacts
December 6, 2010
Source: The Wall Street Journal, Dec 4, 2010
Replacing the medieval habit of schooling — one teacher telling a bunch of children what to think — Sugata Mitra, an Indian physicist whose self-learning experiment inspired the film “Slumdog Millionaire”– is convinced that, with the Internet, kids can learn by themselves, so long as they are in small groups and have well-posed questions to answer.
Dr. Mitra asked a class of poor Tamil-speaking kids to use the Internet, which they had not yet encountered, to learn biotechnology, which they had never heard of, in English, which they did not speak. Two months later he was astounded at what they had taught themselves.
On their own, children can get about 30% of the knowledge required to pass exams. To go further, Dr. Mitra supplements SOLE with e-mediators, or the “granny cloud” as he calls it: amateur volunteers who use Skype to help kids learn online.
And now, Mitra’s Self-Organized Learning Environments (SOLE) are going global.
Showing posts with label self-paced study. Show all posts
Showing posts with label self-paced study. Show all posts
Tuesday, December 7, 2010
Turning Kids From India’s Slums Into Autodidacts | KurzweilAI
via kurzweilai.net
Thursday, December 2, 2010
How to Help Students Write Better
This (mostly reposted/ re-purposed) article is also cross-posted Blogging English, a companion/ mirror blog of sorts, is for and supports an ESL self study group, which means I don't make a habit of marking student writing. Writing is supposed to be the primary focus, not that anyone there has been doing much of that lately.
The lessons in this article go to feed back and editing. Does that makes this article irrelevant to self-paced writing. If you want to write better, you must actually write ~ and the more, the better ~ but feedback and revision are necessary. How much and what kind depends on purpose and audience. Still, handling any kind of writing feedback within DIY (do it yourself) structure is proving problematic.
Dr Davis at Teaching College English writes,
The lessons in this article go to feed back and editing. Does that makes this article irrelevant to self-paced writing. If you want to write better, you must actually write ~ and the more, the better ~ but feedback and revision are necessary. How much and what kind depends on purpose and audience. Still, handling any kind of writing feedback within DIY (do it yourself) structure is proving problematic.
Dr Davis at Teaching College English writes,
I teach developmental composition. In my class, I require 7 essays and 3 rewrites, with a fourth rewrite as optional. Most of the other faculty require between 4 and 6 essays and between 0 and 3 rewrites.
When I was much younger I required 14 essays in a 16-week semester.
I would like to encourage my students to write better, while not having to grade quite so many papers. So when I was reading the CHE forum, this caught my attention.
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