Bits Blog: One on One: Sugata Mitra, 2013 TED Prize Winner

James Duncan Davidson Sugata Mitra speaking on Tuesday.

Are teachers keeping students from learning in the digital age? Sugata Mitra, a professor of educational technology at Newcastle University, believes so. Dr. Mitra is best known for an experiment in which he carved a hole from his research center in Delhi into an adjacent slum, placing a freely accessible computer there for children to use.

The children quickly taught themselves basic computer skills. The “hole in the wall” experiment, as it is known, led Dr. Mitra to develop the idea of learning environments in which teachers would merely be supervisors as children taught themselves by working together at computer terminals. On Tuesday Dr. Mitra was given the 2013 TED Prize, which grants him $1 million to build a learning laboratory based on this principle.

What did you learn from the original “hole in the wall” experiment?

The first thing to point out is that it was done 14 years ago, at a time when few children in India had access to computers. I noticed the rich parents saying that their sons and daughters must be gifted, because they were so good with computers. And since we know that gifted kids are not born only to rich parents, why would there not be similar children in the slums? I was curious to see what would happen if I gave an Internet-connected computer to the kind of kids who never had one.

We noticed that they learned how to surf within hours. It was a bit of a surprise. Long story short, they would teach themselves whatever they had to to use the computer, such was the attraction of the machine.

What does this mean for education?

In those days, the main question was what does it mean for training, because back then people were trained to use computers. So I said it looks like we don’t have to do that.

But I got curious about the fact that the children were teaching themselves a smattering of English. So I started doing a whole range of experiments, and I found that if you left them alone, working in groups, they could learn almost anything once they’ve gotten used to the fact that you can research on the Internet. This was done between 2000 and 2006.

I came to England in 2006, and the schools said, why aren’t you doing it here? So I did, and I realized that what I’ve got has nothing to do with poor children. It probably is just a new way in which children learn in this new environment. It needs two things. First, broadband. That’s fine, everybody loves that. The second thing is, it needs the teacher to stand back.

At first I thought that the children were learning in spite of the teacher not interfering. But I changed my opinion, and realized this was happening because the teacher was not interfering. At that point, I didn’t become entirely popular with teachers. But I explained to them that the job has changed. You ask the right kind of question, then you stand back and let the learning happen.

Do schools need to be radically changed to implement this, or is this a technique that fits into the current structure of schools?

At the moment I pitch it as a technique that you can bring into your schools. But that’s not the real story, which is that the current schooling system is a leftover from the Victorian age of empire. In that world, there were no computers, no telegraphs and data was carried around on ships. This meant that the pillars of education were reading, writing and arithmetic. That age is gone. The system was wonderfully engineered, but we don’t need it anymore; we need something else. But you can’t just say that without saying how you do it.

What I’m doing is I’m putting my foot in the door by saying here’s a new way. Try it. If you’re happy with it, then I’ll say let’s look at the curriculum top to bottom. If we can convert the curriculum into big questions, if we can turn assessment into peer assessment, then neurophysiology tells us that learning gets enhanced. Finally, if you add admiration — what I call the grandmother’s method, where you stand behind and encourage them. Put all of this together and you get a new way to do schooling.

So it seems that you’re saying we don’t need teachers at all.

We need teachers to do different things. The teacher has to ask the question, and tell the children what they have learned. She comes in at the two ends, a cap at the end and a starter at the beginning.

Teachers are not supposed to be repositories of information which they dish out. That is from an age when there were no other repositories of information, other than books or teachers, neither of which were portable. A lot of my big task is retraining these teachers. Now they have to watch as children learn.

Is there a problem with this in that it will serve the good students well, but leave those who need more coaching behind?

Well, yes, to some extent. But there are some interesting things about children working in groups if those groups are self-made. Once you let children do that, the system has a self-correcting ability. Having said that, will there be good students and bad students? Of course.

Does this work for all levels of instruction?

It doesn’t work the same way with adolescents, and definitely not with adults. With 8- to 12-year-olds, that’s the age where big questions turn them on.

What are your specific plans with the prize?

In order to see if this sort of self-organized learning environment is suitable I need to have one in which I have some control over and can do measurements with. So I want to build one of these learning spaces somewhere.

It will be totally automatic, completely controlled from the cloud. There will be a supervisor, but that person is not going to be a computer expert or a teacher in anything. She — and it will probably be a she — will be there only for health and safety requirements.

The rest of the school, if we call it a school, is a facility that I can hand over to a mediator from the cloud. She logs in from her home, wherever her home is, and she’s able to control everything inside, the lights, the air-conditioning, you name it. Then there are four mediators who Skype in and use the pedagogical method. That’s going to take a lot of work.

The second bit is that schools all over the world have been using this method. We need to do a massive multiplication, and TED is going to help me do that. I am going to try to put that into homes; get your children and their friends together. Then, every time they do it, I’ll ask them to collect data and send it to a Web site. If I succeed, in two years I’ll have massive data from all over the world. By that time I’ll be done building the facility and I’ll be ready to build a new model.

Where do you think this school will be?

I’d like to do it in India, because I’d know how to get it done. There will be less of a learning curve, I know who the contractors are, and I know how not to get cheated. So I’d like to do it there, but it’s not set in stone.

Contest Winner Loses Prize for Using Web Forum

Mr. Scott, 60, made it to the second round for which he created a video that was voted on by Gold Peak Tea fans on Facebook. To his surprise, he won the grand prize. He and his family were elated.

“Everybody is shouting and laughing and crying and so happy,” Mr. Scott said. “It’s just like we won the Super Bowl or won the lottery.”

But the feeling was short-lived. Days later, Mr. Scott was informed that he had violated the terms and conditions of the contest and was disqualified. The reason given was that he had used an online contest forum, a Web site where people who enter crowdsourced digital sweepstakes post links to those contests and ask members to vote for them.

But Mr. Scott did not go away quietly, and Gold Peak Tea finds that it is just the latest company to try to create excitement for its brand on social media only to find that sentiment can quickly turn.

The contest, called “Take the Year Off,” was one of several this year sponsored by marketers like McDonald’s and the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority aimed at downtrodden workers looking for respite in a tough economy.

An image on Gold Peak Tea’s Facebook page promoting the contest that showed a woman kneeling against a file cabinet appearing to scream caught Mr. Scott’s attention. “I get it. I see where she is. I understand her,” he said in an interview last week. In his contest entry, Mr. Scott described how his job had taken him away from his family. “I had a family. I had a home,” Mr. Scott’s letter began. “But I let my career defer them. I let my debts outweigh them. I let deadlines sideline them. I let an office, computer, phone, and e-mails crush them.”

Mr. Scott pledged to spend the year off enjoying time with his family — he has four sons, four grandsons, and has been married for more than 35 years. “I’ll enjoy simplicity. Listen to music. Read. Write. Relax. And sip a glass of iced tea — at home,” he wrote in the essay.

In his follow-up video, Mr. Scott is seen at his desk, answering calls, books stacked on his desk, shuffling from office to office.

To increase his chances, Mr. Scott became a member of an online contest forum on About.com and made his pitch to the voters there. Susan Stribling, a representative for Coca-Cola, said the company declined to comment but pointed a reporter to a statement that had been posted on the company’s Facebook page. According to the statement, Mr. Scott had been disqualified for trying “to inappropriately induce members of the public to vote for his submission, a violation of Official Contest Rules.”

In an e-mail to Mr. Scott, Sarah Tabb, an associate brand manager for Gold Peak Tea, cited Section 6B of the contest rules which states that finalists were prohibited from obtaining votes by “offering prizes or other inducements to members of the public, vote farming, or any other activity that artificially inflates such finalists votes as determined by sponsor in its sole discretion.”

Sandra Grauschopf a sweepstakes consultant for brands and the writer of the contests and sweepstakes guide on About.com, said the issues with voter forums were complicated for companies. Brands are caught between wanting to drive traffic to their Facebook pages by encouraging consumer voting and managing how those votes are obtained, Ms. Grauschopf said.

“It’s a tough situation for them to be in,” she said of the companies hosting the sweepstakes. “On the other hand, they don’t want to have their image tarnished by other people saying that there is cheating going on.”

In a statement, ePrize, the company the administered the contest on behalf of Coca-Cola, said brands were seeing “success with promotional campaigns online, particularly in social and mobile channels.”

“But along with that, there will be more technologies developed and attempts to abuse the system,” the statement continued. “Of course, there are other instances in which people don’t intend to break the rules but simply do not follow them correctly.”

Mr. Scott defended his use of the forum saying he saw nothing in the rules that prohibited someone from asking for votes. “These were real people,” he said. “Not robotics or the creation of fake Facebook accounts.”

Ms. Grauschopf agreed. “In my opinion, that’s not cheating if those are real people who aren’t being induced.”

Coca-Cola declined to say who tipped the company off to Mr. Scott’s methods.

Ms. Grauschopf said, “It sounds to me like they are saying, we don’t want the public relations problems.”

One such public relations disaster happened with another online voting contest involving American Apparel, the clothing company known for its risqué ads. In 2011, the company held a contest that asked readers to vote on who should be its plus-size model.

Nancy Upton, an entrant, submitted photos of herself in daring poses, including one where she was almost naked from the waist down and another where she was bathing in a tub of salad dressing.

In the end, Ms. Upton was voted the winner, much to the chagrin of American Apparel. After some back and forth, the company decided to select another candidate as the winning model.

In Mr. Scott’s case, Gold Peak Tea chose another entrant’s submission as the winner, despite a number of posts on the company’s Facebook page calling for Mr. Scott to be reinstated as the winner. (Gold Peak Tea has removed some of the posts related to Mr. Scott’s case citing its decency rules for the Facebook page.)

Mr. Scott has since posted a rebuttal on the Gold Peak Tea Facebook page, and has created a Twitter account to support his cause, @GoTeamTheodore. He said he is deeply embarrassed.

Linda A. Goldstein, a partner and chair of the advertising, marketing and media division at the law firm  Manatt, Phelps & Phillips said there was “a very strong” legal precedent in the courts for upholding contest rules.

“There’s a broad discretion for the sponsor to disqualify an entrant,” said Ms. Goldstein, who has worked with Coca-Cola in the past. “The precedent in the courts for upholding the rules in the sponsor’s favor is quite strong.”