The End of Knowing Organized by Difusión and AATSP

The End of Knowing

Organized by Difusión and AATSP

Editorial Difusión and the AATSP will present the first fall webinar featuring award-winning educational innovator Dr. Sugata Mitra, a renowned researcher on the Internet and children’s learning. Dr. Mitra retired in 2019 from Newcastle University, England, where he was Professor of Educational Technology since 2006.

Since the 1990s, experiments with children's education takes us through a series of startling results – children, in groups, can form ‘self-organizing systems’ that results in emergent learning, they can achieve educational objectives on their own, can read by themselves. Finally, the most startling of them all: Groups of children with access to the Internet can learn anything by themselves. The mechanism of this kind of learning seems similar to the appearance of spontaneous order, or ‘emergent phenomena’ in chaotic systems.

From the slums of India, to the villages of India and Cambodia, to poor schools in Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, the USA and Italy, to the schools of Gateshead and the rich international schools of Washington and Hong Kong, Sugata's experimental results show a strange new future for learning. A redefinition of ‘knowing’ and ‘literacy’.

Using the 2013 TED Prize, he has built seven ‘Schools in the Cloud’, where Self Organized Learning Environments (SOLEs) and a ‘Granny Cloud’ of mediators over the Internet, interact with unsupervised children. The results of this three-year study are summarized by Sugata in this talk.

He discusses what schools should be for in an age where ‘knowing’ may not mean what it used to – and what curricular, pedagogic and assessment changes will be required for our times. We glimpse a New Literacy.

Click HERE to sign up for this free webinar, space is limited!