Turning Kids from India's Slums into Autodidacts

Anybody who is an autodidact in this day and age automatically have the upper hand even if they do little bit of it everyday. I think that little bit of 30 minutes learning something everyday eventually adds up into something huge.

For example, I am getting my first web service running though without a payment processor. Eventually, I'll figure out billing.

I learned how speculation works, how to short sell, and learn technical trading terms like resistances, supports, amongst other things through osmosis learning. I spent 6 dollars and learned how markets really work.

Through debate attrition and conceding every single time that I was wrong, I learned tremendously about economics.

I learned about the concept of open source, the hackerdom subculture, was an early adopter of Mozilla Firefox before I started programming.

Now, I am an early adopter and experimenter with cryptocurrency, something that come right out of a Neal Stephenson novel. I don't know if it succeed, but it's going to be a crazy ride.

I am experimenting with microtransaction business models via selling my own artworks. On top of it, do it copyfree.

Of course, I am 19, a typical youngster hacker-wannabe.

His TED Talks

1. http://www.ted.com/talks/sugata_mitra_shows_how_kids_teach_t...

2. http://www.ted.com/talks/sugata_mitra_the_child_driven_educa...

Great article. The greatest thing you can do is give someone the desire and the means to find their own answers.

Of course, we are born with exactly that anyway, so maybe we just need to answer every question, help when it is asked, and avoid messing them up.

I met Dr Mitra a couple of years ago, in relation to the first Hole in the Wall experiments.

What struck me at the time was that he seemed to be quite mad. He seemed effervescent with novelty, full of grand and strange ideas about the future of education. At the time, he was working on a 'robot teacher' platform based around a radio-controlled model, a webcam and an IP control interface. He seemed quite confident that the next big thing in his work would be some sort of robotic telepresence, capable of moving around the classroom and performing simple tasks to completely supplant the need for a local teacher. The 'granny cloud' is the product of a long succession of very odd experiments.

It got me thinking about the so-called 'Nobel syndrome' - the tendency for newly appointed Nobel laureates to make controversial statements about fields unrelated to their own. Perhaps a certain detachment from reality is necessary to make real progress. Perhaps academia needs to be an ivory tower, perhaps it's for the best that scientists often have little sense of the practical applications of their work. Thinking about my own work, I'm considering instituting my own Googleesque 20% time and allocating a specific part of my working hours to a project that I believe has no commercial relevance whatsoever.

Somehow it reminds me of Neal Stephenson's Diamond Age (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Diamond_Age).

The Primer is intended to intellectually steer its reader toward a more interesting life, and grow up to be an effective member of society. The Primer also reacts to its owners' environment and teaches them what they need to know to survive and grow.

Some times when I think about what it would be like to be stupefyingly rich, I think about all the money super rich people have given universities. And then I think the real way to make a HUGE difference would be to start a huge self-learning thing.

It would be like a university except it would really be up to the students to learn what ever and how much ever of it they wanted, and the autodidact-versity would just provide the venue and the books and the internet connection.

I also think that any certification that comes out of this process would be there only if a student wants it. And the student would decide what level of certification they care to try and get. And much like a Ph.D. thesis defence, a committee would take an adversarial position to the student and if the student successfully defends what they've learned, they would get a shiny certificate of some kind.

Or maybe all will just hinge on a student contributing something to human knowledge by publishing a scientific paper which gets cited by someone. Only if your paper got cited do get the right to call yourself a... something what ever.

Something like that.

Anyone know how to sign up as a SOLE volunteer? Ironically, I cannot seem to find the answer via a web search.

FTA: "In 2006, Dr. Mitra moved to England, became a professor of educational technology at Newcastle University,. . . "

This saddened me. Now, don't get me wrong: he's free to move whereever he feels like; I'm not upset at him. But it would nice if the smartest people in developing countries didn't move to cushy western universities/think-tanks, and stayed where they grew up to enrich everyone around them.