"The Hole in the Wall" experiments

In his talk Sugata Mitra, the author of “the Hole in the wall” experiments emphasizes the role and the importance of self-teaching in education. In his experiments Sugata MItra getting into areas with poorly developed education put a powerful PC and a touchpad into the wall providing with high-speed internet and a browser. I confess that it’s really fascinating to see children trying to find out solutions in groups, learning and teaching each other even in the case when they didn’t know English. The experiments showed that children very rapidly got used to the computer without any help and even started to use some English words in their daily life.  

Watching this talk I immediately though about my six-year-old cousin who lives in Artik, a city in Gyumri Region in Armenia. Having a computer with Internet connection and Google as the home page of their browser he arrived to find lots of web sites of on-line games, typing the word MARIO in Google, having in mind that Mario is a name of a game. I would not be so amazed if I didn’t know that neither his mother nor his father could help him, just because they are not so familiar with the Internet. 

It’s interesting to note that children, when they find a new video game, they never read the instructions of how to play the game. Just because they don’t need much time to find it out themselves, and neither do I :-)

  All above mentioned showed once again how effectively works self - teaching and how it is important for us, as teachers to provide our students enough time for not only doing homework assignments but also for self-teaching. 

References: 

http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/sugata_mitra_shows_how_kids_teach_themselves.html

Pictures retrieved from:
http://www.quotesbuddy.com/education-quotes/self-education/

http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2011-09-06/parenting/29733511_1_computers-learning-internet