Sugata Mitra’s bold efforts towards advancing learning earned him the first-ever $1 million dollar TED Prize. At TED2013, Sugata asked the global TED community to make his dream come true by helping him build a “School in the Cloud," where kids can tap into their innate sense of wonder and work together. Since Sugata is passionate about reinven...

By Natasha Scripture Sugata Mitra thinks big. At last year’s TED, he unveiled his dream to transform primary education. Instead of a teacher, a chalkboard and a generic curriculum, the recipient of the 2013 TED Prize asked us to imagine an environment that empowered children to learn on their own, with the guidance of virtual mentors. It ...

“Early one morning last February, a man turned up on my doorstep who had travelled through the night to get there,” said Sugata Mitra, the education reformer who received the 2013 TED Prize. “This schoolteacher wanted to do something positive for his village, which had no electricity, health care or primary education … It was just the kind o...

It’s a question on so many minds: what will the future of education look like? It’s something Sir Ken Robinson has asked for decades. And tonight in Session 3 of TED2013, Robinson got the opportunity to announce the winner of the 2013 TED Prize, someone who has a bold answer. “So many kids are disengaged from education and there’s a t...

Over the past week, we’ve noticed a lot of TED-related news items in the ether. Here, some highlights: A fascinating new article in Wired takes a look at 12-year-old Paloma Noyola Bueno, a schoolgirl in Mexico whose classroom got an intense shake-up from teacher Sergio Juárez Correa, with incredible results. So what inspired Correa to rethi...

Last week, education researcher Sugata Mitra won the first-ever $1 million TED Prize to build his School in the Cloud. Prior to his TED Prize win, Mitra was known for his “Hole in the Wall” experiment. In 1999, Mitra and his colleagues dug a hole in a wall near an urban slum in New Delhi, installed an Internet-connected PC and left it there -- w...

Adam Braun went to school in the US and now runs a nonprofit that builds schools in Ghana, Laos, Nicaragua and Guatemala. In contrast, Sugata Mitra—the winner of the 2013 TED Prize—went to school in India and now is a professor in the UK, where his research on self-directed learning routinely brings him into elementary schools. Both of these...

At TED2013, Sugata Mitra accepted the TED Prize for 2013 with a striking talk. His wish: for children to learn about any variety of subjects through self-organized learning. While this bold project will take form with a "School in the Cloud" in India, Mitra encourages members of our community to help with a global paradigm change by creating...

Picture a classroom teacher without a lesson plan -- a teacher who instead asks students an open-ended question to explore: Can animals think? Did dinosaurs exist? What is a soul? With the opening of Newcastle University’s SOLE Central on Monday, this vision is coming to life, in a research center where the concept can be tweaked and impr...

After his 6-year-old son taught himself to use a computer, 2013 TED Prize winner Sugata Mitra wanted to test the idea that kids can learn on their own, by discovery rather than formal training. So Mitra and his colleagues dug a hole in the wall near a slum in New Delhi, set up an Internet-connected computer there, and abandoned it in 1999. The...

On Wednesday morning at John B. Russwurm Elementary School in Harlem, students pointed excitedly at cat photos on the Internet. No, they weren’t goofing off. They were participating in a “self organized learning environment,” or SOLE, a teaching method where kids are given an open-ended, curiosity-stroking question and asked to research it i...

“Let’s skip ahead and assume that children of the future are always connected,” said education innovator Sugata Mitra. Thinking out loud about the evolution of screen sizes and the future of wearables, he came to the conclusion: “The Internet is a subject as important as science or mathematics.” Mitra shared this in a presentation at the ...