Slashdot Mirror
Using the Web To Turn Kids Into Autodidacts
theodp writes "Autodidacticism — self-education or self-directed learning — is nothing new, but the Internet holds the promise of taking it to the masses. Sugata Mitra, an Indian physicist whose earlier educational experiments 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. And now, Mitra's Self-Organized Learning Environments (SOLE) are going global, with testing in schools in Australia, Colombia, England and India. On their own, children can get about 30% of the knowledge required to pass exams, so to go further, Dr. Mitra supplements SOLE with e-mediators, amateur volunteers who use Skype to help kids learn online."
Why limit yourself to NYC ?
World list of hackerspaces
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
Except Gatto uses anecdotes to prove his point. Its very sneaky and sounds really nice. But its not strong scholarship. Its in fact ideologically biased scholarship. Be careful when using Gatto as proof for a point because any decent scholar with access to JStor can debunk him (and you).