Submission + - 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. While the U.S. has been slow to embrace SOLE, America does its autodidacticism evangelists. Dr. Yung Tae Kim (another physicist) similarly espouses setting up smaller high school and college classes as 'problem solving workshops' where students can work together in groups, with the teacher acting less as an instructor and more as a troubleshooter, helping students if and when they get stuck.
