 Okay, good afternoon, everyone. It's a pleasure to welcome you all on behalf of the Institute Colloquium Committee to the talk today by Professor Sugata Mitra. Most of you would have heard of Professor Sugata Mitra. Professor Sugata Mitra is Professor of Educational Technology at the School of Education, Communication and Language Sciences at Newcastle University in the United Kingdom. His interests include children's education, remote presence, self-organizing systems, cognitive systems, physics and consciousness. Professor Mitra has a PhD in physics, theoretical physics from IIT Delhi and he has worked at IIT Delhi at TU Vienna and NIIT before moving to Newcastle in the UK. He conducted the well-known Hall in the Wall experiment in 1999 where a computer was embedded within a wall in a slum in Delhi and children were allowed to freely use it. The experiment aimed at providing, proving that kids could be taught computers very easily without any formal training. He termed this as minimally invasive education. The experiment has since been repeated many times at many places. Since 1999, he has convincingly demonstrated that groups of children, irrespective of who or where they are, can learn to use computers and the internet on their own using public computers in open spaces such as roads and playgrounds. He brought these results to England in 2006 when he joined Newcastle and invented self-organized learning environments. Now in use throughout the world. In 2009 he created the Granny Cloud, teachers who interact with children over the internet. He is the recipient of many awards from India, the UK, USA and many other countries. In 2013 he was awarded the first million dollar TED prize to put his educational ideas together to create seven schools in the cloud. I am sure that his views about the future of learning will be very important for us here at IIT Bombay and of course for India in general as well. Prof. Sugata Mitra. Good afternoon. I am back here in Hawaii after several years I think. The last time I was here, I was just trying to remember, I think it was for one of your student festivals about three or four years ago. The reason I mentioned that is because I spoke about a similar topic, in fact the same topic. But I was just thinking that what I said then three years ago and what I am going to say now, there are some very substantial differences which is kind of indicative of how quickly changes happen. So as you can see the talk itself is called the future of learning which is not the easiest thing to study today. It is funny that I am saying that because in this hall if you went back to its beginnings, when was IIT Bombay built? 1958 if you had asked the question future of learning in what will the learning look like 40 years or 50 years from now. In 1958 the answer would have been well it will look exactly like it does today, isn't it? Because there was no concept that learning had to have a future. It is hard to imagine that but we really hadn't thought about learning having a future or changing with time. So when I got into this which is already 17 years ago and started experimenting as I will tell you in a moment. You have to remember that the experiment span 17 years but learning itself is also changing along with that. So the experimental results of 2000 as interpreted by me in 2001 is different from how I would interpret them today. Because now I know in what direction the environment changed. I don't think teachers have ever been through a period like that where the nature of learning is shifting all the time. So our jobs have become really hard. It used to be always quite hard but now it's even worse. So subjects change from under your feet. The way in which something has to be learned changes on a day to day basis. Even worse there are things that you no longer need to know. And removing them from what is being taught, we don't have a mechanism for it. We have one but it's very slow. So where does all this go eventually then? And what's going to happen to you, to the students? So let's go back first to 1999 to what is now called the hole in the wall experiment. And very simple experiment in those days. You just take a computer and you sort of embed it anywhere. Keep it low and put the internet on. No content, no specific content except for the browser. And just leave it there. If you keep it low obviously you'll get children and if you put it in the right kind of place. In those days what was the point of doing an experiment like that? In those days we had an assumption that a computer, how to use a computer is something that needs to be taught. And most of you may not even conceive of from where that comes from. But my generation went through that where we actually stood in a classroom and said that's called a monitor. This is called a mouse. And you move the mouse like this. All this was taught. Back in 1999 the question was if we don't have enough people to teach that then we'll go people's children never learn how to use it. It was a valid research question then. It's a meaningless research question now. Because now everybody knows that the two and a half year old can handle an iPad. We didn't know that then. So hence the experiment. But it led to all sorts of things as I tell you. So when I did the experiment the assumption was that they will not learn. They cannot learn this by themselves. This is state of the art technology and some children cannot learn it particularly in a language that they don't know which is English. Well, that assumption didn't come true. So what happened instead was that we found children flocking around the computer very quickly beginning to browse and within a matter of days and weeks they will start downloading games and installing them. The question was how? And I was asked this repeatedly. The experiment was in Delhi. So all the big newspapers not just Delhi but from everywhere asked this question okay we can see that it's happened. We can see that you are saying that nobody taught them. We don't quite believe that. But if you are right, if nobody did teach them then how did they learn? And that's how I got into education from physics because I didn't have an answer. And obviously if you are faced with an experimental situation where you don't have an answer that's very frustrating. So you sort of head forward and let me find out. And I think I have almost found out how that learning happens but not quite. But let's go to what happened next. So the children start playing games. So what? They get better and better at playing games. So what? But they don't stop there. If you just leave the computer there, eventually they find a search engine. Let's say Google. And it attracts them almost instantly because here is something where no matter what you type in whatever kind of spelling it always produces something back. Maybe rubbish but it produces something back. It never says I don't know. So children like that. So what do they do? They start typing their homework things into it. Back in Kalkaji in Delhi all the local government schools pretty, you know, not, well let me be polite, not a very nice school. The teachers started to say that we don't know what's happened to the children because their English has improved fantastically. And you know the quality of their answers they said to me sometimes Professor Mitter we cannot even understand as teachers what they are writing. So then I went to check what's happening in those slums and obviously they were googling their homework. Now there's something interesting about children on the Internet. The Internet doesn't know that they are children. So the Internet throws everything at them. The children don't know what they should be capable of reading and what they should not be capable of reading. So they read everything. And they start quoting from the Harvard Business Review. Because they have no norms. You're laughing because they're broken norms and we find it funny but they have no norm. They don't know that they're not supposed to quote from Harvard Business Review. So I thought my initial reaction was of horror. You know what is this? What have I done? I mean this is monstrous. But you know what? Not being from the field of education I think I had made a big mistake when I thought that they're just googling. Just googling. I'll tell you what the mistake was. If they're googling how do they know what to copy and paste? Just imagine how silly I was that I never asked myself that question. A student of mine said, but sir they're not taking the first hit. I said don't be silly that can't be true. They're taking maybe the third hit, the fourth hit, the twentieth hit down the line and then they're picking out things from inside it and pasting that. How old are they? 12. Where are they? Kalkachi slum. English minimal. So back to my old question, how does it happen? How is it possible? And again I said, I don't know. When I went to ask the children, you know, how do you handle English? How did you learn English? To which the children said, why say? You can't publish that in a research paper. What does it mean? Just recently, a few days ago in West Bengal, I opened a small facility which I tell you about and these were 10-year-old children and they were not just downloading games within an hour, they all speeded up a lot. But one of them was looking at a website which grades the games according to user perceptions, which are the good ones and saying to another one, let's take the good ones. So I asked them in Bengali, I said, who showed you that? How did you find that out? And they said the Bengali equivalent, they said, how did you learn? And they said, which means messing around. Now, what does that mean? That's not a allowed method. I mean, in your engineering class, you can't say to the professor, do you mind if we mess around for some time? But they seem to use that. So I came to a very peculiar conclusion after a series of experiments, all of which are reported on the internet. The children, given access to the internet in groups, mind you, very important, if there's a single individual, nothing much happens in groups, can learn anything by themselves. So you might say that that's a really tall claim because what do you mean anything? I'll give you an example. You tell me what sense you can make of it. In a classroom in England, year four, that's about nine years old, I think four or five, nine years old. So nine-year-olds, and I was talking to the teacher about the same thing. I was saying that, you know, I think they can learn anything. And she says, don't be silly. I mean, it's okay, it's a picturesque term, learn anything by themselves. But yes, they can do impressive things by themselves, but not everything. So I said, okay, let's try, let's just try an off-hand dipstick experiment. So I asked the children, I said, can something exist in two places at the same time? Firstly, they couldn't quite understand what you mean. I said, you know, this bottle here, can it be over here and can it be over there at the same time? And I said, no, no, no, it can't be. And they said, even if it jumps really fast, it still can't be there at the same time. It can't be there in two places. So I said, well, why don't you stop guessing and I'll give you half an hour. Tell me, is it yes or is it no? So half an hour of Habab, which you'll see what it looks like. It looks like a complete mess happens. And then they came back and they said, the first thing they said, I said, well, they said, have you heard of quantum entanglement? I said, yes, but I don't know how to spell it. So they said, yeah, it's a very difficult spelling. But anyway, quantum entanglement says that you can have something in two places at the same time. So I said, what is this, what is quantum entanglement? So they said, don't you know entanglement? Entanglement is what happens to threads when you wrap them around each other. So I said, yeah, but the particles, they don't have threads. No, they don't have threads. But what it says and what we've understood is that the probabilities of those particles get twined around each other and the particles come up here in two places at the same time. Now that's pretty close. That's pretty close to what? That's pretty close to a PhD in theoretical physics. 25 minutes and nine year olds. So I was forced to write that sentence after that. So it looks like they can learn. Of course, they don't learn the mathematics of it or whatever. But in their nine year old way, they can understand. What does that mean? Well, before that, let me show you a little clip of the first few years of the hole in the wall experiment. This is the first day. And this is pretty, it's all over the internet, this clip, actually. Eight year old on the right, teaching the six year old on the left how to browse. This is from a Kalkaji Islam. And they've just seen a computer maybe a half an hour before. This is in Rajasthan. They say... So you saw that first bit was Kalkaji. Second bit was Rajasthan. The third bit was Aghasthi Swaram right down near the tip near Kannada Kamali. The reason I'm telling you is didn't notice exactly the same expressions on all the faces. So I was noticing that. I was saying these things, why do they look so similar everywhere? Didn't quite understand then why it was so similar. But anyway, I measured... Basically what I measured was that on a computer literacy scale, if you leave this sort of hole-in-the-wall computer alone for months, at what rate does the literacy go up? And the result which is all published is that children in groups given access to a public safe computer in a safe place will in a period of nine months go from a computing literacy level of zero to that of the average office secretary in the West. So you can imagine that the teaching learning community was beginning to get a little unhappy with me by then. Because what was this? But what was happening? Again and again the question would come, how? After years and years, in England finally when I came to England I began to understand something about the process. Firstly, I mean this is actually quite well known to most people that in a group, the level of achievement of a group is not equal to the highest level of the individuals inside that. It's higher than that. Because the group works like a hive, like a collective mind. I started reading the literature on this and it's not really very well understood. It makes for a good PhD problem, a whole series of them. For example, if you've seen during the monsoons if there's a piece of food lying somewhere and you have let's say around 5000 ants and they're pulling that piece of food into their nest. So firstly, they're all around. The food is in the center and they're in a rough circle around the thing. Secondly, the food, piece of food is moving quite purposefully towards the nest. For my question, and I think it's a good PhD question, how does an individual ant inside that know whether to push or pull who taught it? Where is the manager? There's none. So, what does it mean? It means that an objective is being achieved without direction. That's not supposed to happen. It goes entirely against the whole story of human civilization. What is it then? But if you read further into the literature, particularly into the physics of complex dynamical systems, you find that such systems actually do exist and they're very extremely common in nature of things that happen by itself without a leader. So, one way to put it would be you can achieve an objective without leadership but with desire. Common desire acts the same way as a leader does. So, then that's pretty interesting which means I could replace a leader by desire, whatever that is. If I knew how to engineer desire, then I don't need the leader. So, I started looking at natural systems and decided that what we were seeing at the hole in the wall was an example of a self-organizing system. These things official name is a self-organizing system SOS where spontaneous order under certain circumstances you get spontaneous order coming out of nowhere. Nature is full of them. If you've seen, I'm sure you'll get them in your in Delhi IIT ways to get quite commonly these things called dust devils. Have you seen them? Some people nodding, you know. A little spiral of dust and moves around. Now if I were to say who made that? Nobody made it. Under certain circumstances it just forms. It's spontaneous order out of chaos and moves around and then disappears back into chaos. So, and then when you read more about it the real frightening bit is that the DNA is like that. It's like a little dust devil that's formed out of nowhere. Spontaneous order. And therefore, we'll also disintegrate into chaos one day. Let's hope in a couple of million years and not sooner than that. So, spontaneous order is what I thought we were seeing at the hole in the wall. So I took that back to England, the idea and created what's called a soul. Self-organized learning environment. How does it work? It's very simple. You take a classroom, a regular classroom and hopefully remove all the furniture, or most of it. Take five computers with big screens. Big screens are important. Screens which you can see from far away. So big screens, five of them. Take 25 children and send them into the room. You don't have to tell them anything. Firstly, teachers started off in England by saying, okay, children, so now you have to make groups and I would stop them and I would say if there are five computers and 25 children, what else can they do? So you don't have to tell them that. No, but then the group sizes may not be equal. I said, yeah, that's the whole thing. I don't care. And you would get groups of six, groups of three, etc. But you'll always get groups. And then you ask them a big question. A good, important, difficult question. The more difficult, the better. That example I gave you earlier of something existing in two places at the same time, that's what nine-year-olds would consider a big question. Even better are questions where you can tell them that nobody knows the answer. They love that. So I sometimes ask them questions to which I say, you know what? I don't know the answer, so don't ask me for any help. Sometimes I say, as far as I know, nobody knows the answer. I'll give you more examples as we go along. And then you give them some time, usually about 30 minutes or so. And let them work on it. There are no instructions. They can talk, they can walk around, they can use the internet, etc. So there is no method, no prescribed method. There is only the question. And hopefully, a common desire to answer it. So then you wait to see if, like ants, they will pull the piece of food to the target. And then after your half an hour or 35 minutes is over, then you ask for, okay, so what have you found? Sometimes they will answer in groups, sometimes not. It helps if you tell them, I want only one answer from the whole class. You know what that does? Destroy is all competition. When you destroy a competition, you de-stress the system. It's under competition that you feel stressed. But if you're not competing, if you give one answer as a whole group, then you're serious about the whole thing. Let's not say something silly. So that's called a soul. And the teachers discovered that you can teach using a soul. What do you have to do? You have to take whatever it is that you were going to teach and convert it into a question. Really good, interesting question. So in China, a few years ago, one teacher said, okay, Professor Mitra, you see, I am a mathematics teacher and I teach trigonometry to children. And I'm of the opinion that for children, there is nothing that is as boring as trigonometry. So I have a difficulty in getting them to focus on trigonometry. I said, you know, I don't blame them. But why don't we try to see if we can get some interest? So I went into the class and so there they are, all the children. So I said, okay, does everybody have a device? So firstly, they started by saying, oh, yes, but we're not allowed to use them. I said, no, no, pull them out. So, okay, then I said, now, do you agree that your phone or your device knows where it is? If you say location, it will show you on a map where it is. So I said, yeah. So I said, well, how does it do that? How does your phone know where it is? So that was the sole question. So they started working on it. Very quickly, within five minutes, oh, we've got the answer, GPS. So I said, look, that's just a word. That's not exactly how. Some more noise, some more activity. Then they said, you need three satellites. It looks at three satellites. So I was keeping my fingers crossed that I hear the magic number. So I said, why three? So why not one? Why not two? Why not 40? I said, yeah, you can do it with 40, but three is the minimum. So I said, why? Oh, we don't know. Well, I'll give you another 20 minutes. Tell me why three. After 20 minutes, and both of us, the teacher and I, we heard our fingers crossed. After 20 minutes, some hands go up. There is a subject called trigonometry. It uses that. So then I say, I'm still holding my breath. And I said, shall I tell you how it does it? And they said, yes. So then I told the math teacher, look, I just opened the door for you. Now you go in. If you don't tell them what it's for, why should they find signs and cosines and tangents in the interesting? But here was a good question. The thing in your pocket knows where it is using trigonometry. So then this idea of the soul, I live in Newcastle, which is, if you can imagine the map of England, London is down south. If you go up north, there's Scotland on top. So just before Scotland is this city called Newcastle. So the teachers in that area started using souls. They started spreading from staff room to staff room. You know, staff room gossip is the best way to spread any educational technology. So at least in schools. So it's spread out through that whole region. Then it's spread out through the whole country. Because as one of the teachers put it, he said, what can be better than this? I just have to think hard, make up a nice question, and then I just sit back and watch my work getting done, you know, leaderless, driven by desire. So then it spread. Then I started getting calls from other countries in Europe. It went first, not into Europe, by some strange freak, it went straight down south to Australia. And it caught on like wildfire in the Melbourne area in Victoria. So if you can, I'm going to play you a clip. If you can make out the thick Australian accent. This is a school principal called Paul Kenner. What is an analogy you would use for soul? An analogy we thought was really appropriate was the B analogy where the kids visited websites, and they looked for informational content. That was the pollen. They took it back to the hive. The collective knowledge was honey, and they all benefited from the honey. So the websites, the collective knowledge, the sharing, and the benefit of everyone. So his analogy, it's pretty close to self-organizing systems, was of the B hive. I said, flowers are the bits of, flowers are the websites. The B goes over there. The knowledge is the honey, which is brought back and put all together into the hive. So pretty close Paul Kenner. So basically what's a soul? A soul consists of a sort of a mildly chaotic situation caused by a few internet connections. So now you understand why I keep saying few connections, big screens, because otherwise you won't get the chaotic situation. And about a quarter of the number of children, and of course a big question. The big question is the goal. So these are the two components, and you can set it up in, actually in anything. And we do set it up in lots of places. If you think particularly of say an IIT like this, when you have a student's fest, and let's say in the student's fest you have a robotics competition, that's leaderless objective achievement with collective desire. And you've seen the results. Now nobody bothers you, and you just get there somewhere. You always get somewhere very interesting. So it can actually come into any teaching learning situation. We teachers don't quite know how to do it fully yet. So we need to do more experimentation before we get it right. So the idea of souls, as I said it's spread to Australia, then for some strange reason it's spread into Latin America, into Argentina, and then everywhere. So one of our research students at Newcastle leader wrote a troller for Twitter looking for tweets from school teachers which has the word self-organizing learning environment. And this is what he got. So it's virtually, why virtually? It is actually everywhere. I don't know in what exact form it is used, but it's used everywhere. Yes, he's my cousin. I told you that I'll show you the sort of the atmosphere. Yes, he's my cousin. This is for nine year olds. He was French, he was born in 1839 and he died in 1906. The world is going to end because the world is going to turn fast and there will be natural disasters. So people started to spontaneously form groups giving it the name soul followed by a country. So like Seoul, Australia, Seoul, Argentina, Seoul, Spain, Seoul, Portugal, Seoul, Greece, Mexico, Colombia, etc. So here is one from Argentina, which gives a pretty good account of what... This is the University of Buenos Aires, what they've understood from Seoul. This is a space where there are many children, few computers and a big question. To run away from the logic of knowing, to pass on to the logic of the question, of the place where you open, the attitude, where you wake up, the curiosity, where you know, you build it and the other. And then the group has the fourth of the answer, the other has the fourth, the other has the fourth and the other has the fourth. And then there is the whole and we know everything. We put it on the table and we share it. Adding ideas and things and all that and we are reaching that answer. All the actions of Seoul, what we want is to expand the horizons of the children. The first is the horizons of knowledge. To work, to investigate a topic from the question is already an extension of the horizons of knowledge. It was wonderful. The first and most obvious of those would have to be collaboration because the whole process is dependent on people working together. The second skill that I would think is very, very prevalent is communication because that occurs during the sessions informally but also at the end where students share the information. The last one is more of an attitude, I guess, it's independence. Solve problems for themselves, being able to get over the problems and to decide exactly what the right course of action is. So basically he is talking about three key skills. Collaboration, sharing of information and self-confidence. So children begin to answer questions far ahead of their time as I showed you through several examples like the quantum mechanics one, the tectonic plates and so on. So you can take any part of the syllabus and you can actually bring it right down to 8, 9, 10 year olds. And I found something else that if you admire the process particularly with children then the results go up. Again, quite obvious really when these 9 year olds start talking and then you say, oh my God, you did that by yourself, that's fantastic. Then they'll do a little bit more. It struck me that this method of admiring the learning process is not one that is used by either parents or teachers. We use discipline as our method. You better do that quickly, pay attention. Who uses that method? It's the grandparent who uses that method. Who will constantly say, that's fantastic. How did you do that? My granddaughter is a genius, et cetera. So I called it the method of the grandmother and published an article in the Guardian newspaper saying that if you are a British grandmother if you have internet access and a web camera then can you give me one hour of your time every week for free? And in two weeks I got over 200. So I know more British grandmothers than anybody in this room. So the students in the university gave it a name. They called it the Granny Cloud. And what you can do with the Granny Cloud is you can beam them using Skype into places where good teachers either cannot go, don't want to go, et cetera. Do they teach? No. You know, it's bad enough to have a physical person standing and teaching. It's even worse if you have a talking head on Skype teaching you. So that doesn't work. What works is they have a free flowing conversation with the children. Something like, oh, you know, I'm in a really bad mood. Children will say, why, what happened? My dog is not well. Oh, what's happened to him? This is what has happened. Oh, we know in our village there's a dog that had a similar thing and we gave him Haldi. What's Haldi? Haven't you seen Haldi? You don't know anything, et cetera. What does it do? Well, in the Sundarbans where I have an experiment going on right now after about a year I started beginning to hear the distinct Birmingham accent. Where's that coming from? And the English improves very dramatically which for cultural reasons in our country is very important for their future. So why does it improve so dramatically? So when I asked the children in the Sundarbans they had a lovely answer. Only children will give you an answer like that. Why do you learn so much English? You know that woman on the computer? She doesn't understand anything other than English. That's as good a common desire as you can have to take the self-organization further. So here's an example of the beginnings of the Granny Club. You can't catch me. You can't catch a bread man. So you saw that well done. That's the grandmother's method. So back in 2013 I got this prize. It's called the Ted Prize. It's a pretty big prize. It's a million dollars. So naturally when I got the prize as you might imagine I felt rather happy. I was going to call my bank and tell them that look all those days of the three digit numbers is over, finished. Now we're talking about longer numbers. But Ted said nothing doing, that's not how it works. We give the money to your university and then you define a research project that you want to do with it. So anyway my bank account went back to three digit numbers and I set up this experiment, a three year experiment called the School in the Cloud. The idea was to bring the soul and the Granny Cloud together in seven different places. Five of them in India, two in England. The five in India would range all the way from the utterly, utterly remote, which is Sundarbans in this case, no electricity, no potable water, no healthcare, no education, nothing at all, through into somewhat more prosperous rural India then into the urban lower middle class India, Delhi and then into urban middle class India, Fulton in Maharashtra and finally to near Newcastle in England, middle class England. The idea was to see over a three year period where do the children go given this distribution of areas. So I built, I finished building them. So these are, just to give you a look and feel, this is Harlem in New York, this is a little village called Newton, I-Cliff in England. So what did we get? The results, I haven't fully analyzed it but it's very clear results. Reading comprehension in English goes up, communication skills go up, internet searching skills go up quite naturally and self-confidence goes up. So that's as far as the good news is concerned. Now here comes the bad news. We have something called assessment. All of you know this I'm sure the hair, what's that, the hair at the back of your neck starts to stand up when you hear the word examination. It's engineered for that. The British left this behind. It looks like that, you all know that. So you have to sit alone, no assistive devices, you are asked questions, you have to answer those questions using your head, nothing else. So I started looking for where did that come from? Why is that so important that you should be able to do this? Based on this you will get a degree. So why is it that way? And I didn't have to look very far. I'll show you the picture of an office from 1920. That's what it used to look like. There are rows and rows of clerks and a floor supervisor walking up and down. What do the clerks do? They know how to read, they know how to do arithmetic. These are the three skills required because they are like computers. Big ledgers, they transfer. The whole world used to be run with these people. You needed millions and millions of them. So if you want a million people to be able to do reading, writing, arithmetic, sit quietly in the same spot for eight hours, don't look at each other's work, don't ask questions and under no circumstances should you be creative. A creative clerk is terrible. I mean, you had it. So as soon as I saw that, I said, wow, I mean these guys created a system which ran the whole world like an efficient machine using the school as a factory and everything fell into place. Just look at that. The exam, the office. So you know what you're being prepared for? You're being prepared for people who have been dead for 100 years if you wanted a job like that. So in order to cater to a system like that, we, the teachers, we have to behave in a certain way. What do we have to do? We have to use negative reinforcement. You're bad. You're not paying attention. You should really be concentrating more. You must practice harder. The opposite of the granny method. Even if we are not people like that, we still have to do it because in the end the exam is going to test you for that. We need a change in that assessment system. So if you're going to work in an office which looks like this, rather than an office from that 1920s, then obviously your exam has to look like this. It's as straightforward as that. And this has been said to me by many, many students in England after exams. I purposely asked them, so what was it like? Are you now feeling a little more relaxed and all that? And they would say, yeah, I'm feeling relaxed, but look at this question. Why did they ask me this question? And why did they take away my phone? Because I know, I mean, you give me this question, give me my phone, I'll tell you the answer in two seconds. So why the hell are you doing this to me? This is getting asked, and it will get asked all over the world. Unless we, the teachers, first of all, change our tactics and change our methods of examining. There's a lot of work to be done in that. Again, a big research area. So I think what, so this part I'm almost out of time, but this part is just guesswork really. I think what, first of all, what we need to do is that reading, writing, and arithmetic, we need to subsume them into three bigger areas. Comprehension becomes the big area. Inside which reading is one of the ways. Because we know by looking at these children that they comprehend by some other method. They comprehend like a hive. So you should test for, did you comprehend? As opposed to can you read? We should subsume writing into communication. Can you communicate using whatever method? Writing being one of them. And we should remove, I think we should stop teaching handwriting and torturing children with handwriting. They're never going to write by hand anyway. And then we should subsume arithmetic into computation. Not computation as in programming, but if you understand the English phrase to compute an answer, which means that I'll solve the problem for you. Don't worry about how. Again, one of my stories in one of the classes in England, a little girl after I'd explained to them, what do you want? Just get me an answer. So she says, can we do anything that we want? I said yes, you can do anything that we want. So she says, can I call my mom? And then I thought, actually the answer is yes. In life, if you're in real trouble, what do you do? Call your mom. So what's wrong with doing that in an exam? And I think I can... This definition we can use very safely. School should produce happy, healthy and productive people. So should the university. There are three things, three targets. Happy, healthy, productive. And you can then put it into a matrix. You can try this on your own if you like. Comprehension, communication, computation. Happy, healthy, productive. And then try fitting stuff into it. Take something like dance. Does it make you happy? Yes. Does it make you healthy? Yes. Does it make you productive? Yes. You understand rhythm and form and all of that. Hence it should be taught in school. It should be a subject in school. Take the 17 times tables. Does it make you happy? Does it make you healthy? No. Does it make you productive? Yes, it did in 1920. That's the problem. So I think we need a curriculum of big questions. We need a pedagogy that brings the Internet into everything. And we need an assessment system that looks for productivity. Not process and methods. What's the method for solving this? And how will you solve this differential equation? But tell me why I need to solve it? Or instead of saying solve the following differential equation. If you change that to write down in four lines what you would do to solve this equation? Use the Internet. But who's going to evaluate the answer? That one we haven't worked out yet. So that's about what I have. And I guess if you put all of that together in your mind you just might get an idea about the future of learning. Thanks. I'm done. Thank you Professor Mitra. We have time for some questions. Please identify yourself and ask the question. Hello Professor Mitra. I'm Sai from Physics. I'm over here. Where are you? So thank you for that wonderful talk. I'm a bit curious about two questions. One of them is about the volume of stuff that one would want to communicate. To any student there is some sense of aspiration that we have that this is the minimum that we would want to communicate to a student. And I worry slash wonder whether this method while being very effective in teaching students to think themselves if that slows down and what your prescription for that is. And an associated question is have you done tests on trying to evaluate whether the kind of the capacity of the students to try and take a stab at un-Googleable questions. If that goes up, if that is improved because if all we're doing is creating efficient Googlers. Well it's not clear what might serve us for a couple of years. So could you address those two questions? The volume and then does that help their kind of creative thinking capacity in being able to take a stab at un-Googleable questions as I've called it? Well actually to take the first part of your question which is what should we do as teachers meaning do we not deliver at all? Or actually varies, depends on varies from subject to subject and what you're teaching. So if you are going to teach a child how to tie his shoelaces it might be fun to tell him that you know check it out on YouTube and learn it yourself but it's actually not very productive. This is just a skill after all. So you might say that you know I'll just show you how to do it. But on the other hand if it is a skill like cooking and if you did it right in front of them they'll cook all their lives following that as opposed to if you said you do it you know just check out who is doing it how and you figure out which way. There'll be better cooks. So it varies from subject to subject. Coming to the second question, that's what the big questions are all about actually. They are effectively un-Googleable. Beyond a certain age, I mean there are gradations. It could go something like this. What's the time in New York right now? Can you figure it out? And the children say, you purposely gave a very silly, very simple so they come back with an answer. You do the granny bit. My God, that took only 7 minutes. You guys found out in 7 minutes. Yeah, that was easy. Okay, but why is the time different in New York? Now the buzz is a little bit different. Oh because the earth goes around the sun and you know the shadow comes maybe 20, 25 minutes down the line. So the time is different. Is the time different on different planets? What's the time on Mars right now? Now you come back with sometimes nonsense, sometimes with, but there isn't, you see there isn't a time that is on Mars. That is Mars' time. So then comes the killer. Now you're six months into the semester. So what is time? Now you're there. Google can't tell you. So that's how I do it. But you can't do it from day one. That's being unfair. And that goes against the desire driven. You don't generate the desire. If you make it so hard, then they lose out on the desire. Okay. Next question. Yeah, go ahead. Yeah. I mean I'm shouting. Keep the question short. So we can give. Sure. I have a question slightly out of the box. I hear you talking about all your techniques and I'm a great fan of yours. I believe in you. Okay. I just wanted to know if I substitute the word children with adult, what would happen? To be quite honest, I don't know the entire answer. I've tried it. What is it special about children? I'll give you two examples. Where I don't have to guess and then I'll guess. The first one was with teacher trainers in England. Municipal teacher trainers. So they're about the same as our teacher trainers. So there's a room full of very grumpy looking men. Men and women. So then I was trying to say that self-organized and all of that. I thought, no, let's not do this. What I did was I pulled out a newspaper and I showed them the ad for a mobile phone. The Samsung N6 had just come out. I said, have you seen this? Yeah. Yeah. I said, I guess all of you have mobile phones. Yeah. So then you clearly understand what we mean by a ZEOS octa core processor running at 1.8 gigahertz with the lollipop ice cream sandwich. So now they said, no, no, no, we don't understand the world of that. So I said, you will spend the equivalent of 50,000 rupees on buying this stuff which you don't understand the world about except for the fact that you can make phone calls with it. So what does that mean? So then I said, I'll tell you what. Let's use four internet connections. You tell me what this ad means. What each one of those words mean. And is it a good phone? I took them half an hour. But to break the adult ego is difficult. What happened in that half an hour? Is there a few of them worked out the answer? The rest of them said, we are not very tech savvy. Okay. So which is another way of saying, I don't want to make a fool of myself. The trouble is not the trouble. The saving grace is that children below the age of 12 are not worried about making a fool of themselves. They quite like it. And their friends don't worry about it either. But something happens to us after 13. And I don't think it's only hormones. It's hormones plus the education system. And you get the ego. And once you get the ego, you've had it. I mean, you can't eat, drink, sleep. You can't do anything because you're so fond of yourself that, you know. But you certainly don't want a competitive situation anywhere. Anyway, so the second example was in my university. First year, masters in education. I took one course and I said that, you know, let's use souls for this. And we use souls for that. They did reasonably well. At the end of it, I sent around the question as saying, so how did you enjoy the process? It was pretty much okay. Anything bad that you have to report? One of the comments was, why are they paying you? You were never there. So there it's a different thing. You know, university education is extremely expensive in the UK. So if you say, you know, I'm going out. I'll give you 45 minutes. Here's a question. You figure it out. It may be effective, but it's not expected. So it's a different world. But I, the reason why I mentioned all of this in a place like the IIT is, if anyone can do it, the IIT scan. Because you guys would understand. And particularly if you understand the nature of complex dynamical systems and the fact that you can bring them into a classroom. I think the bright engineering minds can figure that out and live with it and not ask your professor why he's being paid a salary. Okay. The next question here. Please keep it short. Go ahead, please. Joke from Mechanical. I'm going to, I'm going to, you give too much importance to engineers. So my question is this, IT seems to be an integral part of soul. Have we thought of eliminating technology? Eliminating technology. As in, I didn't understand your question. Without a soul without IT. Oh, okay. I see what you mean. To be honest, no. I'll tell you why. We often misuse the word technology. Soul is not so much about the technology, but soul is very intimately connected with the internet. So people would often ask me, isn't it like the Socratic method? What Socrates used to use? Just questions, questions, questions. Yes, it is. But Socrates didn't have the internet. Isn't it like what Montessori used to do? Yes it is, but Montessori didn't have the internet. As soon as you add the internet into it, the whole ballgame changes. All of them, including the ancient Greeks, had forever wanted a little opening somewhere into which you can ask a question and an answer would come. They used to call it the Oracle of Delphi. We are lucky. We made it. We actually created it. And without that, you can't do a soul. One second. Hello. My name is Nitin. And I was asking the similar kind of question. Suppose you replace computer with libraries. So you have answered partially. Another question is, were students, were they able to say, give analogies, like analogies between heat flow and water flow, something like that? Or suppose you ask about water and they come out with water and they could not say what happens with heat or air, something like that? Both questions are pretty easy to answer. You can't do it with books in a library. For one very simple reason, books don't point at each other. We have some plagi methods of putting in a bibliography at the end, but nobody uses that. So they don't point. Whereas the internet, you just jump. So you move much faster. The second part of the, do they use analogies? Sometimes they do, but if they don't, you can design a question to do that. So you could, for example, do a soul on heat. You could do a soul on hydrodynamics. And then say, by the way, have you thought of something interesting? Is there any similarity between water and heat? And then leave them to it and they'll discover the analogy. Hello, sir. I'm Feba from Sitara. I have two thoughts to ask. Firstly, my doubt is if we depend too much on the technology, will it slow down our mind capability? Like if we depend too much on the calculators, for example, even for simple calculation, we cannot use our brain. Suddenly we depend on the calculator. And the second doubt is I'm doing my MPEC with special reference to rural development. So now we saw how this technology has solved the... So my doubt is how can this be used as an effective tool, like with collaboration with the government? Can you come up with good schemes to educate the rural people? Well, the first question is about what it does to our minds. We don't know, but I don't think that technology has ever done anything particularly bad to our minds, depends on how you look at it. It's like asking, you know, if you wanted to find out, can I read? And you said, don't use any technical assistance. So I start reading and you say, take off your specs because that's technology. And then I say, no, he can't read. So, you know, technology is that kind. It sort of enables. In this particular case, it's like a crutch, except that it's a crutch for the brain. It's not a crutch for the body. So what will it do to our brains? It will slow down the parts that can be automated and therefore, I think, speed up the parts that cannot be. So what I think if I had to guess is that the more the technology supports your day-to-day life and your day-to-day thinking, the higher your creativity will go. Raja, though you did mention cooking, you know, is this approach restricted to what one may call as the cognitive part of education and does it in any way include what is, let us say, more manual and so on? Cooking, for example, I mean. I have a PhD student working on it and her findings are that it works very well for vocational education. She's got a lovely experiment. She took a class of school dropouts who were all being taught to be builders, you know, to make those superstructures with, well, not bamboo, they use something else nowadays. So they had to make a two-story structure. So she divided the class up into two. One half was taught and the other half, she said, just use YouTube and figure it out. So the YouTube fellows did it first. In fact, they got on top of it and got themselves photographed and put it on Facebook. So then the teacher, they asked the teacher, so what do you think? Then the teacher said, you know, they haven't done it quite right. But obviously it's sufficient because they're standing on top of it. But I wouldn't have done it that way. I don't know what the lesson is in there, but the point is you can achieve educational objectives. It's almost like a digital apprenticeship under Google or whoever. And one last comment on that. YouTube is particularly powerful for teaching of this kind of skill. So we have limited time. We have quick questions. Yeah, Rana. And then... I am happy that you touched briefly on assessment part of in your talk. I think 99% of our education is centered around assessment. And the biggest thing is the education, this examination. Everything is centered at the examination. So that is the incentive the kids, the parents, school, the board, everybody has it. That is incentive-driven kind of a thing. Our books are written for exam. Our teaching is for exams. Our competitions are for exams. Everything is for... There is exam for exams. How to crack an exam. You have another exam for training that also. So in that scenario, where everything is highly exam-oriented, your methods, and I am following most of the similar methods myself in school education, are very good, but often the question comes, how do we use them? Where is the time to use them? It's not going to be asked in the exam. So why do you study that? So this kind of negative approach, if you have any suggestions in your experiences, how one can balance it out. It's very difficult to remove examination system in India, at least. I know that. I have tried my best to remove it some places, informally, but no, there is a problem. How can you do that kind of a thing? So any suggestions we would like to give, which can help in creating some time slots where teachers can embed such kind of things. Thank you. I am actually working on this right now, on the whole issue of assessment and how to change it. And it's difficult, not just in India, it's difficult everywhere, because the old system, the empire-driven system, is more than 300 years old. It's very difficult to budget. But the thing is that you can still integrate the way the teachers in England are doing it. I am talking of school again. They will start a topic with a soul. Nice big question. Once it finishes, the children are interested by then, because, you know, it's they who have found out all this. Then they go into traditional teaching, which is exam-driven. But what they claim is that they have built a base of creativity and interest in that particular area, like my trigonometry example. The rest of the classes will be boring as anything. But the children remember the first bit about how your phone found out where it was. So it's not the very best way to do it, but at least they have managed to fit it into their school, and their school principals have seen the sense of it. Initially, the principals used to ask your question, where's the time and the timetable to do all this? Now they have an answer. So we have a last question. I'm Yakmi, retired physicist from BARC, also in school education. My question is about the role of the typical stereotype teachers in future, keeping in mind your paradigm, new paradigm. I'll just point out, you mentioned the newspaper guardian. Today's guardian has a news item saying that Oxford and Cambridge, Oxbridge, they find it tough now to attract pupils to become teachers in their universities. But in fact, pupils are actually going to private universities. They say Oxford and Cambridge is boring. Does it also correlate somehow? Yeah, yeah, it does very much. I've been called to both of these universities and had extremely unproductive meetings because it's difficult. I mean, they're 1,000 years old. How do you make even a dent in that kind of thinking? But they're trying. They've raised that question. But coming to the thing about the role, you know, the traditional teacher, the real answer is they've got to go. Okay, it's over. So that's kind of staring at us in the face. But there is the role for another kind. And it's a more interesting, more thoughtful, more creative role. The ones who make the transition, they will be the heroes of the next generation of teachers. So I think that's probably where we are headed. I wanted to give Shailesh Gandhi the last word. The simple question is you mentioned about this experiment in India with some kids who have never been exposed to English or maybe the English alphabet. How do you think they are able to make sense out of this? I have yards and yards of films trying to see how this self-organizing system actually works. Very difficult to film also. What works is they will stare at a piece of text and if there is no adult around, this will only happen if there's no adult around. They kind of nudge each other and say, you know what that means. In the meanwhile, back in that corner, somebody has googled that. And then he comes up and says, that word means this. And then another one comes up and says, this word means that. So we join the whole thing together. I'll finish because I'm out of time. I did one experiment in Pune with children who couldn't read English at all. I give them a sentence. There are too many auto rickshaws in Pune and this is causing a serious problem. And I've written in big letters. They were mostly children of auto rickshaw drivers. So they were gathered around that and they said, well, you figure it out. There was one computer. The first word to be figured out, auto rickshaw. The second word to be figured out, it worked like lightning. The second word to be figured out, problem. Immediately all of them jumped up. Auto rickshaws are a problem in Pune, isn't it? So, you know, it's deductive logic. It's like Sherlock Holmes. And I guess we adults would also do that. I mean, if we had a line of Greek and if it was a game and if there were four or five of us we would still crack it in a couple of minutes. Okay. I have to stop the questions here. The speaker has to go. Let me please join me again in thanking the speaker. I request one I request Professor Shagankar to to the honour of Thank you. Thank you. On behalf of the Institute Colloquium Committee I want to thank you all for attending this talk and asking questions. I'm sure you have lots more but I'm sorry the speaker has to leave. So, I also want to thank PRO's office for organizing this event and CDP for recording this. Please join us for tea. Thank you.