Self-Organized Learning Environments - A Conversation with Professor Sugata Mitra

Welcome to the Future Learning Design Podcast.

There's a big difference between self-organizing and self-regulating. If you said we want to have a self-regulating internet, it implies that there will be regulators. Regulation is a dangerous ballgame, but self-organization goes where it goes.

Welcome back. Brilliant to have you here for another episode of the Future Learning Design Podcast. It's my great pleasure to be able to bring you this episode with a hero of mine, Professor Sugata Mitra. Sugata is Professor Emeritus at NIIT University in India. He retired in 2019 as Professor of Educational Technology in the School of Education, Communication and Language Sciences at Newcastle University in the UK. UK. In 1999, Sugata began his now world-renowned Hole in the Wall experiment when a computer was embedded within a wall in an Indian slum in Kalkaji, Delhi. The experiment has since been repeated in many places around the world. Sugata is the recipient of many awards and has conducted research that has pushed the boundaries of many disciplines including electrical engineering, medicine, and computer sciences. He has a PhD in physics and is credited with more than 25 inventions in the area of cognitive science and educational technology. He was conferred the prestigious Diwang Mehta Award from the Government of India for innovation in information technology in 2003, and amongst other awards, was awarded the $1 million TED Prize in 2013. Sugata has published hundreds of groundbreaking academic papers, and in 2019 pulled many of these ideas together into his book, The School in the Cloud: The Emerging Future of Education.

Hi, Sugata. How are you?

Good, good, very well, thank you.

Good.

How is Kolkata?

Oh, it's fine. It's actually quite nice. I mean, we've got good weather.

Oh, good. Well, it's a very particular moment that we're talking, as we've just been discussing the coronavirus, so it'd be a good place maybe just to recognize that and start there. And you've talked about this idea that the current pandemic is a battle between the virus and the internet. If you could start by just saying a bit more about what you mean by that perhaps, and what you've learned from that over the recent pandemic, and perhaps whether the internet is winning that battle.

You know, the idea, the thought came to my mind when I thought of what we are doing about the virus and the amount of information that all of us have about it. And then it suddenly struck me that we've actually managed to survive this year because of the internet. Just imagine to yourself that if you had to have this lockdown situation without the internet, could we have actually managed to get where we are? I assume that we would not have. We would have broken the rules a lot more frequently, and, and that would have led to more deaths. And if you look at the pandemic 100 years ago, the influenza pandemic, when they didn't have this kind of information, the deaths were 100 times, 100 million people, whereas we've got 1 million. Not that that's a small number, but the point is, between us and the virus, there is the internet. Yeah. And it is our weapon in a sense. Whether you're a doctor exchanging data, whether you're a scientist looking at different ways of making vaccines, or you just common person who wants to order some food, it's always the internet. Yeah. So then I sort of half-jokingly said it's the battle of the virus against the internet. Well, and then people would say the internet is all of us. And but you know what is I think relevant to this discussion is that the internet is not us any more than The brain is neurons. The brain is made up of neurons, of course. But isn't the neuron— it's nothing like a neuron. A neuron doesn't even know that the brain exists. It's completely alien. So I want to make this point, you know, for everybody really, particularly for teachers. The internet is alien. We don't know much about it. So when you say that, you know, people are manipulating the social media That's not true. People are only posting and other people are reposting and people are telling lies as they always have and other people are spreading the lies, etc. No one is capable of manipulating the internet. The internet manipulates us because it's alien and we don't know what it does. We don't know what it wants. We don't know if it even knows that we exist. I know this is going to— people are going to say this is senile, but the point is I don't see why we should not allow that conjecture to remain, that this giant network has an existence of its own. So that was what it was. Now, if you say, who is winning? I think we are winning, which means the internet is winning, because so far we've managed to keep it under control. Now whether we will or not depends on if we allow the internet to operate. Okay. And if you listen to the recent news about how we should regulate the internet, it's another way of saying how should we kill it. If we do that, then maybe we won't have fake news anymore, but there won't be too many of us left to read that real news.

Yeah.

Would I be right then in saying it's, it's this idea of emergence, and you talk about this with the self-organized learning environments, there's kind of an emergence of spontaneous order or, you know, emergence of some property that is bigger than the parts that are involved in that.

Yes, it's absolutely, it's derived from that idea of a self-organizing system, which is actually, you know, the work of 1970s of a very famous physicist, Ilya Prigogine. Who won the Nobel Prize for it, with a wonderful little book called Order Out of Chaos. It didn't make much sense to anybody at that time, but we are living through that now, and I'm absolutely astonished that it still doesn't make sense to us. So if I look at a group of children huddled around the internet tackling some kind of a big question and arriving at a surprisingly mature answer, We still say, "Oh, they didn't actually understand," or "They didn't really learn," or "They don't really know." Now, none of those words can be defined. If I've asked people, "What do you mean by 'really know?'" and they would say, "Well, you know, really know." It is a self-organizing system. A group of 4 children gathered around the internet is self-organizing. —yeah—and producing that answer out of spontaneous order. We need to look at that. I mean, do I have enough proof to say that this is absolutely the way it's happening? No, I don't. But I'm saying you cannot rule that possibility out. You cannot ignore it, because that is dangerous. And I think with the complexity of the challenges—

I mean, learning itself, deeply complex, but then if you look globally at the types of challenges, deeply complex— and no single brain, of course, as you As you say, no single neuron understands the brain. No single brain can understand the complexity of the challenges we're facing. So in a sense, we have to do something which is stepping out into a bit of an unknown, but that allows for space for something to emerge, whether that's learning or really knowing in a group of 4 children or some kind of next step for humanity on a global scale.

I think you put that pretty much well. We have to do it that way. As you said, the problems are too complex for single minds to engage or to solve.

Yeah, and I really enjoyed the way you talk about this in the definition of a self-organized learning environment. You use this word unsupervised, and I think that you have mentioned before that that's a really key point for you, is that as soon as it becomes supervised, it takes away the magic somehow. Maybe that connects to what you were saying about regulating the internet, but could you say a little bit more about that in terms of your experiments with self-organized learning environments, what happens when they are tried to be supervised in that sense?

Yeah, well, this is actually connected with a somewhat semantic problem. So, you know, there's a big difference between self-organizing and self-regulating. When, when you apply the same thing to the internet, if you said we want to have a self-regulating internet, it implies that there will be regulators. Who will decide who should be a regulator? Other regulators. And how do we know those other regulators are good regulators? Because yet other regulators say that they're good regulators. It becomes, it becomes a circular argument which is at the root cause of a lot of measurement problems, that who decides the right instrument. Yeah. So regulation's a different thing. Yeah. Regulation's a dangerous ball game. But self-organization goes where it goes. Nobody controls it. It just goes where it goes. So on the internet, when children are learning and when they're self-organizing, then the learning path, which many teachers will agree, goes wherever it goes. And then they say, well, but you know, if I had supervised it just a little bit, then maybe I could have, you know, taken it somewhere. Yeah, the answer is no. You would have destroyed the self-organization. Through regulation. Yeah. It's like saying that I'll go up to a cocoon made by a caterpillar and using a little needle, I will introduce some really nice spots onto the butterfly. That's not how it works, does it? Clearly. So you just kill the butterfly. So that's what I mean by saying that it has to be unsupervised. And on a simpler note, in my experiments, when these computers were stuck on walls and slums and things like that, every time an adult would approach, the children just freeze up. And if you say, what are you doing? They would say nothing. That's very typical of children. You go to any child with a smartphone and say, what are you doing? Nothing. So they freeze up. Yeah, the self-organizing system. Has to be unsupervised.

Obviously, your experiments in schools in Gateshead and in India, in Harlem, that you've been running with the self-organized learning environments are in a physical environment. And obviously over the last year we've had virtual environments where we've suddenly wanted to and needed to try to continue learning. So have you seen some experiments with SOL in virtual learning environments? And if so, have you noticed any differences in the way that they operate when the children are physically in the same place or virtually in the same place?

Yeah, well, I've tried a few, much fewer than I would have liked to. So my experience in conducting self-organized learning environment over the internet is actually limited to maybe half a dozen times. What I observed is that— two things. Firstly, that it works. That's the good news. The second bit is that it works differently from the way it works inside the classroom. You know, one of the things that I don't think anybody knows is why presence is so important for all of us. Like, you and I are talking, and we could put our videos on and audios on, and we could be sort of face-to-face talking to each other, but it's still not being present. We don't know why. I don't know what we exchange when we are face to face that creates this thing called presence. So in a self-organizing environment created in the soul, the presence of the children, the fact that, you know, they can push each other— can't quite do that on the internet, doesn't work the same way. I tried creating rooms in which, you know, groups of 4 or 5 children could gather around the internet, except that the children are not actually there. The room is virtual and they're in their homes. It worked, but it works differently from if they were together. That's about all I can say right now, really, because I, I don't know more than that. So just to conclude, I would say it works. You can try it if the children can't meet. Physically, but expect that it will work differently.

One of the things that I've heard you speaking about related to the physical soul is the idea that they only have one internet connection to gather around. So you have this presence by virtue of only having one internet connection, they have to collaborate in a different way. Whereas obviously virtually they were all on their own individual internet connection. Might that play a role in the difference?

Oh yes, it plays a very great role in that. I've actually tried it in physical environment experiments as well, that if you remove that one large screen and tell the children, use your phones, they tend to talk a lot less to each other, as you might expect, because, you know, they're all searching by themselves. They run into the same websites repeatedly because they don't know that other people have also run into it. So the SOUL proceeds, they converse with each other, they would arrive at a reasonable answer to the question and everything. It goes more slowly and it goes more differently, and different children get different experiences, very different experiences. Yeah. Whereas if there was one big screen and they were all surfing on that and they were arguing with each other on that and drawing their conclusions from what they saw on that, they seem to have similar experiences. And most importantly, they seem to remember what they learned for a very long time.

More strongly than if they were on their own devices.

Yes, I suspect so, but once again, there isn't enough data. Yeah, fascinating.

And I just also wanted to ask you how your grannies are.

Yeah, you know, the Granny Cloud was created in 2010, and Sunita became the honorary director of that group. She lives in India in a city called Pune. And then the pandemic came along and I was watching to see what would happen to the Granny Cloud. Yeah, well, all the sessions stopped because the schools closed. What they used to do is they used to use Skype or whatever to, to Zoom into schools and talk to children and carry out self-organized learning environments and all sorts of little experiments that they did. All that stopped. I kept watching. And then slowly it began to resurface with individual grannies interacting with individual children, sometimes with 2 children, sometimes tiny group, and so on. Then the pandemic started to ease off a bit and the schools kind of started reopening, at least virtually. So it was possible to get gatherings of children. And to my with great satisfaction, the granny cloud woke up and they got into action again. So they are very much there. They've been producing some wonderful results. And only today, 28th of January, I understand that a school which they used to work with in Greenland, of all places, has reopened. And one of the grannies very excitedly said, "I'm going there." Brilliant. So yeah, it's brilliant.

It's really brilliant. Wow. And for people that aren't so familiar with the idea of the Granny Cloud, what was the original thesis behind the idea of bringing them into the classroom to support self-organized learning environments?

You know, the whole premise that I started with was that within a school, unfortunately, people don't really admire children's ability to learn. It's often the reverse. The system seems geared towards pointing out to children what they need to improve in. So if a child has got an A+ in English and a C in math, then instead of saying, wow, you did very well in English, what do you want to do next? We would say to the child, practice your math. Until what? Yeah, in my more bitter moments, I would say until the whole lot of children become equally pedestrian at everything. That seems to be, that seems to be the objective. And if you look at the industrial past from where the education system came, it's quite understandable. Of course, you don't know, you don't want two workers on the factory assembly line, one of whom is, you know, good at English literature and is reciting poems to himself or herself. You don't want that. So, so then I thought How about— but my work was showing that if you admire children, they start doing better at the things that they're really good at, just to show off. So I thought, can I get someone to admire them? And particularly in the rural and remote areas that I was working with in Cambodia, South Africa, India, and so on, where the teachers are very far away from these ideas, I thought that maybe a retired teacher from somewhere who loves their children, who misses the fact that she no longer deals with them, how would it be if they were to interact with these children, not to teach them anything, but to ask them questions, encourage their use of the internet, and to admire the results. This was the genesis of the Granny Cloud. Yeah, we've got a very enthusiastic response, particularly from England. Brilliant.

We love our grannies in England, we do.

That's true, yeah. But also, what you said there is interesting, and I wanted to ask you about this idea of question posing, because, you know, saying one of the roles of the grannies is to pose questions. But it strikes me that the whole self-organized learning environment is fueled by questioning, because we need to spark the initial curiosity and drive for the children within the soul.

And perhaps question posing is a core part of what we do as educators, and maybe that's just something we should dial up in our discussions about what great education needs to be now, is more, more honing our question-posing powers.

Yeah, I mean, that— I agree entirely with what you just said. I would put it this way, that when we make a curriculum and we put in something into it. Let's take an example. We, we made a curriculum and we put in gravity, that, you know, children should understand the nature and workings of gravity. We would then design a pedagogy for how the children will learn it, or rather how it will be taught. Yeah. And then we make a system for how we will examine in order to find out whether they have actually learned But in this whole process, nowhere do we tell the children why they have to learn this. When I was in school, which is a long, long time ago, if I had asked this question, why are we learning this, even the gentlest of teachers would say, you will understand when you grow up. Now that was not a very satisfactory answer to why she was wasting my time at age 8, okay? Because when I was— when I would grow up was very long time in the future. So So coming back to this whole idea of the reason, if the child were to ask, "Oh, why are you teaching us about gravity?" What would we say? I mean, you could say it's very important, it's how rockets are launched to the moon and so on and so forth. That's one kind of teacher. Another kind of teacher would say, "Oh, I'm teaching you gravity because, you know, everything falls down." If you said something like that, something a little zany, 8 to 12 and 13-year-olds are instantly drawn. So what? And you say, no, I wonder if anything falls upwards. You might say, oh, a balloon or something like that. And you say, yeah, that's it. You know, what I want to know is how come everything falls downwards but some balloons go upwards? And I can tell you that if you allow the use of the internet and self-organizing systems, your gravity lesson will just get done by itself. But on the other hand, teachers find this difficult. Even the best of teachers who believe in this method will sometimes say, oh yes, I know what I'll ask. I'll say, okay, today's lesson is on gravity. So the question, the big question is, what is gravity? Big deal, doesn't do anything, you know. So anyway, my best example, and I absolutely must tell you, this was a class of 7-year-olds in London. And the teacher said, "Sugata, you know, I have to teach what I consider the most boring thing on the planet." I said, "My goodness, what is that?" She said, "Gum health." You know, health of the gums. Yeah. That is, you know, super exciting, I must say. Gum health. Okay. So I said, "Okay, I'm going to try my method." And she said, "Yeah, you show me. You show me what you can do with that." So there I was facing this bunch of 7 or 8-year-olds. I said, "Guys, does anybody have a missing tooth?" And of course several hands went up. And I said, "What happened? It fell off?" "Yeah, fell off." "Gosh, you're going to go through your entire life without that tooth?" He said, "No, no, no, it's going to grow back." I said, "Oh, so it falls off and then it grows back. How curious is that? And why does it fall off and why does it grow back again? And then what happens after that, after it's grown back?" 'Will it remain forever?' They said, 'Yes, yes.' And then some of the girls said, 'No, no, no, my granny doesn't have any teeth. They'll fall off again after a long time.' I said, 'My God, this is getting really curious now.' So they fall off, they grow back, and they stay on for a while, and they fall off again. And the second time, they never grow back. My question to you is, why do they grow back the first time And why don't they grow back the second time? Brilliant. Believe it or not, Tim, the result 40 minutes later was gum health.

There you go. Wow. How to make gum health fascinating. Amazing.

So just as one final question, I would love to ask you, particularly with the the pandemic, but even before, a lot of people questioning the way that education is done. And as you talked about the industrial model and standardized practices and standardized assessment, and with the rich pedagogies like using SOLES in the classroom, we still come up against this wall of standardized assessment and these big end-of-phase exams, which, you know, become the reason why we have to continue some of the status quo. But I've also heard you speak about how we might change that testing and assessment system. To be more in line with the pedagogy of the internet and the SOLE framework. Perhaps just to finish off, you could give a bit of a sense of where we might go and, you know, changing the idea of what cheating might mean in an exam, what an exam might look like in, well, let's hope 10 years, maybe less, but probably more.

I think it could be less. Anyway, let me tell you what I think, which is that if you allow children to use the internet during an exam, then that is called cheating. If you use Google Maps while driving, that is not called cheating. We seem to have a bit of a disconnect here, isn't it? So in an exam, if I were to say, how do you go from Oxford Street to the Waterloo Underground? Let's say it's a taxi driver's course or something. You're supposed to write that down on a piece of paper and say, I'll take this turn and I'll go down this road and blah blah blah. You couldn't say, according to my phone, this is the best route at this time. That's cheating. So in an exam, looking up the internet is cheating. In real life, looking up the internet is just being smart. So I'm just saying, isn't that an obvious change that we should make, that we should check if children are capable of looking up things on the internet accurately, quickly, and then answering questions? Instead of how much they remember. Now that's a very bit of a long stretch for the education system because the education system is all about remembering things. Why do I have to remember everything? Because, you know, you can't carry your books with you, you can't carry your teachers with you all the time. What if you're lost in a jungle? What if you're lost in an ocean and in an unknown river? And how would you know where you should go? But firstly, we're not going to be lost in a jungle or on a ship going nowhere. Very unlikely. Secondly, if we were, everybody would pull out their cell phones immediately looking for a signal. Chances are they would find the signal. So why do I need to know about using a sextant and pointing it at various stars in the sky and timing what time the sun rises and sets with a chronometer? And, you know, Yeah, you might as well call my great-grandfather's ghost. So, so the thing is, this is a bad way to end, Tim, but the thing is there are a lot of things we don't need to know anymore. We should cut all those things out. There are a few things that we need to know very much in order to survive with the internet. There are 3 things. Comprehension, the ability to understand visual and audio and, you know, material like that. Comprehension. Communication, the ability to transfer your understanding to another person using whatever method— audio, video, text, blah blah blah. And the third, computing, meaning not writing computer programs but being able to use the internet accurately, correctly, to be able to figure out when it's leading you astray and when it's not— those skills. If we just measure these three— comprehension, communication, and computing— then a child who scores highly in all three of these should be able to answer anything that you ask her, if only you give her her phone back.

But it's just that the questions have to change, right? As you said, talking about big questions and what's a big question earlier, but you can't allow students to use the internet but keep the questions the same. And therefore, absolutely, you need a major revolution in the way that we question in order to spark much deeper comprehension about what it is to be human, what it is to engage with complexity.

Let me put it in a very simple way. Instead of saying solve this equation, change it to how would you go about finding the solution to this equation. That's all. Well, brilliant.

Thank you, Sugata. I mean, there's so much I would love to talk to you about for hours and hours, but I appreciate your time, and it just is such a privilege to be able to talk to you. So thank you for joining me. All the best.

Fantastic. Thank you. Bye-bye.

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