So what is this rubbish?

When I decided decided to take the first steps into the world of education I had no idea that it was such a mire of theories, practices and ideals. On reflection it seems ludicrous to assume that my very limited experience of education would be the accepted template for use all around the world but having spent 18 years on the inside of the system looking out, how was I to know any better? Now that I'm a budding educator in initial teacher training and have had the world of educational research revealed to me, I am able to experiment with teaching theory and practice having the safety net of only being a student.


I was first introduced to the notion of self organised learning by my uncle, who also introduced me to TED, when he kept telling me about this crazy idea of giving children in India and seeing what happened. Well of course, being the inquisitive type, I had to look this up and found myself several hours later reading about the 'hole in the wall' project and watching talks on its successes. The project started by Sugata Mitra sought to give children in India computers, access to the internet and ... well that's it. They just left them to get on with it. When Sugata came back several months later he found that the children, on discovering that the majority of the internet was in one language had taught themselves English. Sugata took this research to varying degrees of absurdity, including only giving the children access to documents on DNA replication but found surprising results in attainment and more importantly observed the ways in which children learn and develop together.  

In 2013 Sugata was awarded the TED prize and a lot of money to take his research to a new level. His wish is to develop a 'school in the cloud'. For those of you not savvy with the latest computer mumbo-jumbo he wants to build a school where the children teach themselves and each other using the internet. To make this possible and justifiable he needs evidence that his ideas actually work so as part of his project he is appealing to educators to try out a new learning style in their class and contribute to the research. He has released a very useful pack detailing how to set up and run a SOLE - SOLE ToolKit. 

Now that I'm on my second year teaching experience I have a few short weeks to try out the ideas in the tool kit and see if they work. Initially I was quite sceptical about the idea of self organised learning. I mean why would a group of children who have been in school long enough to be bored with it want to teach themselves? But as I think about it more I am very keen to find out if this is actually a good way of re-kindling interest in learning. While I am working on the project I will try to post all observations on here so that I have some where to keep them and so that you, who ever you are, can be mildly interested in the outcome.