Take two education activists with very different theories -- and give them a chance to work together on a goal they both care about. That's the thinking in the video above, the kick-off of Microsoft's new Work Wonders project, which pairs up unlikely collaborators to spark new ideas. Watch as TED Prize winner Sugata Mitra joins forces with TE...

British director Jerry Rothwell, the winner of the first annual Sundance Institute | TED Prize Filmmaker Award, has spent the past year trailing TED Prize winner Sugata Mitra as he sets up the first locations of the School in the Cloud. Traveling between a remote village in India and a forward-thinking elementary school in the U.K., Rothwell...

Following a rousing introduction from Sir Ken Robinson, education innovator Sugata Mitra accepted the first-ever $1 million TED Prize at TED2013. As soon as the TED Prize winner’s identity was revealed, the Twittersphere buzzed about Sugata’s vision for the future of learning. People around the world answered Sugata’s invitation to help reinv...

Where does education go from here? On Tuesday, Sugata Mitra accepted the 2013 TED Prize and offered a bold wish for the world: that we encourage children to explore questions about our world in self-organized learning environments. He proposed the founding of a School in the Cloud based in India, and encouraged TED community members, wherever...

Stretch your mind and strengthen your relationships with this simple exercise borrowed from schoolkids. Education innovator Sugata Mitra shows how. It’s probably been a long time since you lay on your back in the grass, looked up and wondered, Why is the sky blue? Or since you took the time to consider a question as difficult as, Where does the...

In a classroom in Ontario, a class of 9th graders learned the book Siddhartha, not by listening to lectures from their teacher, but by asking questions like, “How do you know when you’ve reached enlightenment?” Meanwhile, a group of 3rd through 5th graders in rural Georgia was posed a question in Spanish, even though they speak English: “Why...

Ten years ago, educator Sugata Mitra and his colleagues cracked open a hole in a wall bordering an urban slum in New Delhi, installed a networked PC, and left it there for the local children to freely explore. What they quickly saw in their ‘Hole in the Wall’ experiment was that kids from one of the most desperately poor areas of the world c...

The world as we know it is changing rapidly. Political and economic boundaries are shifting, sometimes to the point of erasure. Power structures are being realigned and, in some cases, dismantled. Disciplines of thought that used to seem divergent now appear to overlap. Our most basic assumptions are being called into question. And thus, T...

About this event: ¿Es la educación tradicional la mejor apuesta para el presente y futuro de nuestros hij@s?¿Pueden los niños aprender ellos por sí mismos contando sólo con el estímulo de la curiosidad? La educación tradicional entendida como "Todos los niños lo mismo, al mismo ritmo" y "El profesor explica, los niños aprenden" no ha variado desde la era de la r...

. At the School in the Cloud learning lab in the village of Korakati, India, students sit on colorful stools in front of computer screens, talking over Skype to educators in England and Germany. So it might be surprising to discover that this high-tech education center was built in a place that can only be accessed by boat and rickshaw, wher...

Over the weekend, we asked the TED community on Facebook this question: "If you wanted to show a TEDTalk to open the school year, which one would you choose?" It's inspired by a question tweeted from the #jed21 conference. On Facebook, almost 1,000 responses flowed in. The job of tallying the results -- given in freeform comments -- fell to our...

An indefinable quality lies at the heart of any successful idea or project ... a spark of intuition, genius or insight that acts as the driver of all later action. Our speakers in this session all possess such a spark, from the educator who's made it his mission to help high-achieving minority students to a young inventor who figured out a novel...

By Courtney E. Martin What do sperm donation, marathon runners, disabled rockstars, and yacht racing have in common? They’ve all been subjects of the careful eye and artistic vision of British director Jerry Rothwell, the winner of the first annual Sundance Institute | TED Prize Filmmaker Award, who has received $125,000 to spend the next ...

Each year, the TED Prize is awarded to an extraordinary individual with a creative and bold vision to spark global change. Think JR’s global participatory art project, Inside Out, or Sugata Mitra’s School in the Cloud. By leveraging the TED community’s resources to support the winner and investing $1 million in their idea, the TED Prize insp...

You’ve probably heard of Area 51. But how about Area Zero? Area Zero is the flagship center of Sugata Mitra’s School in the Cloud, the idea that won him the 2013 TED Prize. It’s the final of Mitra’s labs dedicated to self-organized learning, and it opened this morning in Gocharan in West Bengal, India. A solar-powered building with large ...

In Kingston, Jamaica, 4- to 6-year-olds in early education programs think about questions like, “What does it mean to be selfish?” In a school on the outskirts of Lahore, Pakistan, fifth graders research topics like, “What is WordPress?” In rural Colombia, students at local libraries puzzle over prompts like, “Why are yawns contagious?” T...

Here, your weekly recap of TED-related news: Science writer John Bohannon (watch his TED talk) runs the annual Dance Your Ph.D. contest. This year’s winners must be seen to be believed. In the video above: a dance that explains sperm cell competition in chickens. Bloomberg BusinessWeek has a brilliant, troubling cover story on the drowning...

Who inspires you with their large-scale vision for change? Who offers a bold, unique solution to a global problem — and the capable leadership to make it a reality? The TED Prize is a $1 million grant, awarded annually to someone who is both a dreamer and a doer. And the best candidates invariably come from you. Perhaps you have a teacher...

About this event: En attendant TEDxBordeaux, nous organisons au Node le 21 mai une soirée spéciale sur le thème de l'éducation Au programme, une sélection de talks absolument passionnants : Sugata Mitra TED prize 2013, Ken Robinson (16 M de vues ! on votera au cas où toutes les personnes présentes l'auraient vu...), Salman Khan (Khan Academy) et quelques autres...

At TED 2014, Skype enabled TED Speakers to co-create their next chapter in music, architecture, education etc., and to share their ideas in the following sessions: Sugata and Friends Reports from the future of learning TED Prize winner Sugata Mitra brings together a panel of educational innovators—and, via Skype, their students and teachers. T...

By Sarah Schoengold Sugata Mitra has opened the doors of the world’s first School in the Cloud. Located inside George Stephenson High School in Killingworth, England, this one-room learning lab is a space where students can embark on their own learning adventures, exploring whatever questions most intrigue them. Students even designed ...

After more than 13 years of research convinced him that children have the ability to learn almost anything on their own, 2013 TED Prize winner Sugata Mitra aspires to shape the future of learning by building a School in the Cloud, helping kids “tap into their innate sense of wonder.” In the spirit of Mitra’s invitation to the world to “ask ki...

Over the past week, we’ve noticed a lot of fascinating TED-related news items. Here, some highlights. Jeff Bezos, the co-founder of Amazon (watch his TED Talk), made waves on Monday when it was announced that he will buy The Washington Post for $250 million. “The paper’s duty will remain to its readers and not to the private interests of its ow...

As usual, the TED community has been very busy over the past week. Below, a few newsy highlights. Real estate and corruption. New York is known for its pricey real estate, and TED Prize winner Charmian Gooch suspects that some properties could be supporting global corruption. “Towers of Secrecy,” a series in The New York Times, looks at some of...

The internet connects people all over the world. But could the internet also connect us with dolphins, apes, elephants and other highly intelligent species? In a bold talk in Session 10 of TED2013, four incredible thinkers come together to launch the idea of the interspecies internet. Each takes four minutes to talk, then passes the metap...

The TED Prize turns our staff into genies: every year, we give $1 million dollars to one inspiring leader with a bold wish for the world. A sampling of wishes that have won in recent years: "Help us spark a global movement to record and preserve meaningful conversations with one another that result in an ever-growing digital archive of the ...

David Swancott is a retired biology teacher who lives an hour southeast of Bordeaux, France. He spends his free time bicycling, traveling and, for the past two years, being a “Skype Granny.” Swancott is a part of the “Granny Cloud,” a project created by 2013 TED Prize winner Sugata Mitra to make teachers available online to mentor children p...

Dave Isay was shocked to learn he was in the running for the 2015 TED Prize. And yet, his TED Prize wish — to grow StoryCorps’ digital archive of the collective wisdom of humanity — was granted, fueled by $1 million and the vigor of TED’s global community. Could your idea win the TED Prize? In a word: yes. Nominations for the 2017 TED Pri...

A TED Prize wish must be ambitious and bold, with the ability to impact lives all across the globe. And yet, a TED Prize wish must also be practical -- an actionable plan that can flourish with $1 million in seeding and access to leverage the power of the TED community. With nominations open for the 2016 TED Prize -- you can nominate a visionary...

The mad race to hook up a billion of India's people to the internet sounds daunting -- but it may well make it better for everyone. Politicians often talk about big plans. But rarely do they deliver on even a fraction of plans as huge and ambitious as Digital India, launched by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in July 2015. The nine-pillared progra...