 All right, so dignitaries, ministers, vice-chancellors, distinguished guests, friends, and colleagues, it is my great pleasure to be able to introduce to you this afternoon's keynote. Before I get started, for those of you that I haven't had the pleasure of meeting, my name is Neil Fasina. My day job is to be the president of Athabasca University. And so if you run into any of our team members from AU, they are the rock stars that keep me motivated because of the talent that they bring to the table each and every day. So this afternoon I have the distinct pleasure, like I said, of introducing our keynote address. And I've been asked to keep it brief, which is incredibly difficult when you consider the length of this man's vita. And so just a couple of highlights for you. Following what is arguably an unbelievably remarkable career, our guest speaker retired just earlier this year from being the professor and principal research investigator in the School of Education, Communication, and Language Sciences at Newcastle University. After achieving a PhD in solid-state physics from the ITT in Delhi, our speaker focused early years on studying energy storage systems, which, to name a few, resulted in the design for a new zinc chlorine battery. In the early 80s, his interest in computer networking sorry led to India's first local area network-based newspaper publishing system, which then led to this individual predicting the desktop publishing industry. His interest in the human mind led our speaker to be among the first to demonstrate that simulated neural networks can decipher the mechanisms of Alzheimer's disease. And in 1999, you will likely be familiar with this individual's work as he conducted what was referred to as the Hole in the Wall experiment, in which he embedded a computer in the wall in the Indian slum of Kalkaji, sorry, Delhi. The experiment demonstrated that kids could be taught computers without formal training, something he termed minimally invasive education. This experiment inspired the Indian diplomat, Vikas Swarup, to write his debut novel. This debut novel, ladies and gentlemen, later turned into the Oscar-winning movie, Slumdog Millionaire. He brought these results to England in 2006 and created self-organized learning environments throughout England and around the world. In 2009, he created the Granny Cloud for teachers to be able to interact with children around the globe. And among the long list of accolades and awards, our speaker was given the first $1 million TED prize in 2013 to create a series of seven labs called the schools in the cloud. Needless to say, the impact of our speaker's work on the lives of people and economies around the world can only be guessed. Ladies and gentlemen, distinguished guests, it is my great honor to introduce to you Professor Sagata Mitra. Well, good afternoon. I must tell you something interesting. The length of your bio-data increases with time. I hate to think what will happen 10 years from now. Well, many people in this room have no about the hole in the wall experiment. They were speaking to me about it. This talk is about where that went eventually. But there's also something interesting that I need to say because this is the PCF. It's one of those kind of historical coincidences. You know, in 2006, I moved from India to the United Kingdom. I had lived in India for over 50 years before that movement to the United Kingdom. The day before I joined Newcastle University, I spoke at the PCF in Jamaica. And I flew from there into this new country where I discovered you always need a coat. So, and then this year, I retired from Newcastle University. You know, I live in a small town called Gateshead in northeastern England. I retired this year from Newcastle University because I have a pond and it takes a long time to look after a pond. So, having retired, this is after my retirement, my first keynote. And guess what? It is at the Penn Commonwealth Forum. Anyway, yeah, big circle, isn't it? So, I'm going to take you through mainly these years, from the time when I moved to England until now, what happened after the hole in the wall. I had a different title for this talk, which I had to change due to popular demand. The title of my talk was The End of Knowing. And I was told that this is not exactly a wonderful title to have for a room full of teachers. All right, but I think you might understand as we go along why it was called The End of Knowing. Before I get into anything else, I'm going to show, to leave this picture in your mind, you know, I mean, it's a simple picture. It could be a series of drops falling into a pond or something, or it couldn't be an ocean. No, that's too heavy, something, a flat water body. Anyway, so just keep that in mind. I'll come back to it in a moment. It has something to do with children. Well, 1999, just for a few minutes, because everybody insists that I must talk about the hole in the wall. The thing won't go away. Here it is, 26th of January, 1999, New Delhi. Well, as is obvious from the picture, it's a computer, it's stuck into a wall. It's got children because it's three feet off the ground. It's got the internet on it. It's actually running Microsoft Windows with whatever internet was available in those days. What is remarkable about it, you must throw your mind back, those of you who can, to 1999. There were people who didn't know what a computer was, and there were people who, many people who didn't know what the internet was. So the experiment was what would happen if they were confronted with it, particularly children. And what happened was this experiment, which I didn't call it the hole in the wall, the press. The Times of India called it the hole in the wall. And that name stuck. I'm gonna show you just a few seconds of an old film. It's been shown over and over and over again of the first, after about an hour or so of an eight-year-old boy and a six-year-old girl. As you can see, she's not very tall. And then hundreds and hundreds of children, all milling around. A few weeks later, children downloading games and things, playing all sorts of things on the computer, the Delhi government putting in 30 of them in the slums of Delhi. Everybody very happy about, guess what? We don't need any teachers. Okay, it's all happening by itself. People started asking a question, who is teaching them? And I really had no answer to that question because there wasn't anybody teaching them. So, you know, the question that they didn't ask was, how are they learning? Instead, they asked, who is teaching them? Anyway, we learned the following. Unsupervised groups of children can learn how to use the internet. No, big deal. I mean, that's 20 years ago. I now meet people who are in their, you know, sort of mid-20s and so on, who will sometimes say to me, you know, professor, we've heard about this hole in the wall experiment that you did just about, you know, when I was four or five years old. I have a question. Isn't it obvious? So, I used to tell them, no, it wasn't considered obvious for children to be able to learn how to use a computer by themselves. It's not a big deal anymore. So, I brought this method over to England. And, you know, school teachers in northeastern England had heard of the experiment and they were kind of curious about this guy who's done this hole in the wall experiment. Can we do it here in England? And I told them, we can't. We cannot do the hole in the wall experiment in England. You know, why? Because all you'll get are frozen children. I mean, try doing it outside here today. You can't do anything outdoors in this country. So, anyway, the school teachers persisted. Come on, be serious, do something about it. So, I said, all right, we will do the hole in the wall experiment in the UK. We will turn the hole in the wall inside out. And how do you do that? Well, very simple. I know there are many teachers here. It's the simplest thing on the planet. Take a classroom, put in four or five computers with big screens. Big screens are important. Just scatter them around the classroom, connect them to the internet, get about 20 children inside. So, they'll come in and then just ask them a question. But ask them something interesting, okay? What's an interesting question? Well, let's imagine an interesting question for British children in England, in Gateshead. Do you like potatoes? Yeah, chips, that sort of thing. And, you know, I'm from India. Do you think they eat chips in India? Oh, do they? And their teacher said, can't you think of anything other than chips? No, well, I mean, this is an important question. Do they eat chips in India? Well, the answer is yes, I said. But they didn't used to. Back in the 16th century, they didn't know what a potato was. They said, well, I didn't know what a potato was. I said, yeah, many people, in fact, most people in the world didn't know what a potato was until the Portuguese came. And they said, the Portuguese, who are they? I said, well, now it's your turn. You tell me, I'm gonna give you 20 minutes. You tell me, what did the Portuguese do with potatoes? This is the kind of question that nine-year-olds love. What did the Portuguese do with potatoes? Maybe you like the question also. It has an interesting answer. And they brought the potatoes all over the place. Anyway, so you said this question. So now the children in England said, why are there only four computers? I said, I don't know. I said, that's all I have. So Emma, my school teacher friend, said, should I tell them to make groups? And I said, Emma, if there are four computers and 20 children, what else do you think they can do? So you sit down. So Emma sat down and the children made groups, but not exactly groups of four, but groups of five, six somewhere, four somewhere, whatever. Then they started talking because, you know, four or five children working together will talk. And I had to insist and tell them, listen, you can talk, okay? You can talk. You can talk loudly if you want. You can run around the room. You can look at everybody's work because I am not interested in who finds the answer. My life's mission is only one. I want to know by the end of this period, what did the Portuguese do with potatoes? And the nine year olds would go for it. And they would tell me everything about what happened. We made the questions harder and harder and harder. And we kept getting answers. We gave it a name. We called it the self-organized learning environment. The soul. It's kind of obvious, isn't it? Self-organized. So what is a soul? Well, as I described to you, there's a lot of text on this, you know, set up a few computers, bring in a lot of children, ask them a big question, allow them to talk and walk, give them some time. And at the end of it, say, I want only one answer. I don't care from where. I'm not interested in whether she knows the same thing as he knows and then so on and so forth. I want an answer. And that's all. That's a soul. It started spreading all over the world from Gateshead. He was French. He was born in 1839, and he died in 1906. So all the way from Southern Australia to Argentina to Brazil, or throughout, you know, England, bits and pieces of Europe, finally the United States. I just observed, just watched all this. With a bit of wonder saying, but goodness, this thing is just spreading by word of mouth. And you know why? Well, teachers in England explained it to me in not very kind terms. They said, whenever, one of them said, whenever you're not prepared for a lesson, do a sugata. So I wish it was because of wonderful educational pedagogy, but it wasn't. It spread around the world because a teacher could sit back and watch learning happen. She, I think, learned the difference between how do you teach versus how do they learn? So after several years, after many experiments, all of which is published and available on the internet, I had to write this very dramatic statement, unsupervised groups of children can use the internet to learn anything by themselves, anything. Anything, say, what about some esoteric bit of physics? What about quantum physics? The answer is yes. Not that they will write down the equations of quantum physics, but they will explain it to you in their nine-year-old way. In this case, from Gates said again, quantum physics, things can be in two places at the same time. That's about the heart of it. I learned that in my PhD. So how does it work? By this time, we had this question reverberating around the world saying, OK, we know it works. It's working. I've seen it work. How does it work? Who is doing the teaching? Where is the learning happening from? I just could not figure out the answer. I read everything I could. I'm a natural scientist. My PhD is in physics. So I had to struggle with social sciences. I read everything I could in the social sciences. Couldn't really find an explanation until I turned back to my old subject, back to physics and found that there is an answer, actually. There's a sort of an answer. The answer to how were the children learning lies in this sort of thing. How did that plant figure out how to make a shape like that? Nobody knows the answer, do they? Some people would say there is superior intelligence. Some people would say mathematics, the Fibonacci series. Some people will say the symmetries of nature, but we really don't know. We don't know how it makes that beautiful thing happen. But we know this much. It happens by itself, and it invariably happens. And you can apply both sentences to a self-organized learning environment for children. It happens by itself, and it invariably happens. What happens? Learning. So the answer then was inside this subject, lying around all these years still bumped into it, self-organizing systems. Mathematicians knew about this for a long time. They don't know how it works, but they know about it. Things which make themselves happen, like this, the murmuration of stalling birds. Any individual bird inside that has no idea what it's doing, except there's sort of flapping around trying to follow the one in front of it. The whole thing forms a pattern, but the birds can't see that pattern. Is that what's happening to us? Is that a part of life that we don't know about? Patterns that we can't see, because we are a part of it. Got a rather poetic name, emergent behavior, and spontaneous order. Order that comes out of nothing. OK, I shall remember the water drop, that picture of the water drop. Let me show you where it came from. It wasn't falling in. It was falling out. The first drop fell in. The water body, which is connected, molecules of water responded, and they threw it back up. An exact replica. So after I retired this year, I went back to something I knew how to do quite well, once upon a time, programming. And I thought, why can't I simulate what happens if things are connected to each other and allowed to self-organize? And I started getting some interesting stuff. I can't tell you too much about it, but I can show you one of the experiments. It's a whole bunch of dots, black and white dots. Each dot looks around at its neighbors and behaves and decides whether to remain a dot or to vanish. That's all. It's got a name. It's called cellular automata. But anyway, you take enough of these dots in my program, and you show it a picture. And then you remove the picture. And here's what the dots do. And I'm watching this sitting in my study in my house. I'm watching it over and over again and looking at these cellular automata. Remember, how can you do that? I'd actually written a paper about it a long time ago. You can read it on the internet. It's called Fractal Replication in Cellular Automata, something like that. Anyway, so they're very simple systems, and they recall images. But I couldn't help think of my water dot. Wasn't that doing the same thing? Or was it? If that water drop is what the cellular automata experiment is doing, then is that what's happening inside the self-organizing systems of children's minds? Is that what we teachers do? We show them the image, and then we wait until they recover it or integrate it or do whatever it is with it. And is this what we call learning? I'm not going to go any further into this, but if this is the case, then we have some semblance of an answer to the question, who was teaching them? It wasn't a person and it wasn't a thing. It was a set of interconnected minds. How does it work? We don't know, but we are the first generation of human beings who have seen 4 billion human minds connected to each other. When you do that, then like my program or like the water drops, that entire thing murmurates like birds, forms patterns that the individual elements cannot see. Are we living through that? Well, that's another story. But is it that the self-organizing systems of Gates said and the first self-organizing systems of the whole in the wall were actually telling us about this mechanism of how it all works? In that case, what should we as teachers do when you know that the children are inside this huge enormous network and they're pursuing a question, a question to which perhaps you, the teacher, don't even have an answer? Well, there's only one thing you can do. It's not as though you have to feel pessimistic. I am not needed anymore. That's not the case. Here is your role. You go there, I'll go with you. I think it's a nice thing to say to children. A nice thing to say to children who have access to the internet. I don't understand your world. I don't understand those games. I can hardly use my mobile phone. But you go there and I'll go with you. So what does the adult do in this case? Well, the adult sits back and admires. You just say, wow, you did that on your own? You figured out what the Portuguese did with potatoes. My goodness, I couldn't have done that myself. OK, then I thought, well, this is a good method. Let's give it a name. I called it the method of the grandmother. Think of the grandmother's role. Not like what do the parents do? The parents say, you must practice more. You must practice maths more. You did very well in English, but very badly in mathematics. Therefore, you must study only mathematics from now on. That's the kind of thing that parents do and teachers do. But not the grandmother. The archetypal grandmother says, you're fine. You're the best little girl in this whole world. So what if you didn't do well in mathematics? I used to hit mathematics myself. I called it the method of the grandmother. I wrote an article in The Guardian saying, if you have an internet connection and a web camera, and if you have an interest in children, can you give me one hour of your time every week for free? And I got hundreds and hundreds of people from England and all over the UK, really, who volunteered. We gave them a name. We called them the Granny Cloud. The Granny Cloud sits up there. And wherever you have children in need of an admiring, self-organizing teacher, you beam them in. They don't teach. They have a conversation. I'll show you an example of one of the very first sessions that I did from my office in Newcastle University with the city of Hyderabad thousands of miles away. The center was the audio there. Anyway, she was reading the gingerbread man to them, actually. But it won't make much sense to you and you get the audio. But that's her. That's my colleague in England. And that's the children. What actually happened was that their accents would start to change, not in days, but in minutes. Minutes. I saw it later in one of the schools in the cloud experiments in India, where it was in Bengal. And I can speak Bengali. So there was a little girl. A couple of months down the line, I went back to the school. And I said, in Bengali, I said, OK, I'm going. Goodbye. And she said, take care. So I said, where did you learn that from? And she said, you know that woman who comes on Skype? She doesn't understand anything other than English. That's all it takes to change the little girl's accent. It's simple, really. So admiration and encouragement used correctly will produce rapid learning. I think we all know this, actually, just that we don't use it as often as we should. So in 2013, I got a prize. It's called the TED prize. It's a lot of money, million dollars. So as you might imagine, I felt quite happy. I was going to call my bank to say, guys, no more three-digit numbers from now on, et cetera. When TED told me, that's not how it works. You use the money for research. So I gave up my ideas. I was planning to buy a boat. But I couldn't. I don't have a boat. But I spent the million dollars in building seven experimental facilities called schools in the cloud. What I did there was I brought two ideas together, the self-organized learning environment and the granny cloud, put them together into one place and called it the school in the cloud. This one's in County Durham. You can get an idea of the place. Computers with big screens, groups of children, a granny on the wall, a big question. In this case, the question is, why does red go with black? I can see that there are many people who agree with that combination. The question is, why does red go with black? Why not purple with green or something? Do you know the answer? Ask the nine-year-olds of Durham. They'll tell you. It's deep inside anthropology. The answer, very, very long time ago. Anyway, so I built these schools in the cloud in all sorts of exotic places. For example, this is Killingworth. In India, it would be considered an exotic place. Killingworth near Newcastle. Very close to where the steam engine was invented. A perfect implementation of a school in the cloud. The most remote of the lot, the Sundarbans, where the Ganges meets the sea, is a solar-powered, remotely connected to the internet school in the cloud with six or seven computers. It needs nothing, really. Six or seven computers with big screens. Why big screens? So that everybody can see what's on the screen. Not little screens that children pour over. Why big screens? Because four or five children can gather around it and discuss what's on it. So the big screen is very important. In Korakati, the name of the village near the Sundarbans, we got our first of the clues from measurement. The steady upward rise in reading comprehension. Easy to measure because reading comprehension, there are pretty standard tools for measuring reading comprehension in English. This is in English. And the steady upward rise. Now you might say, but there's a flat bit in the middle. What explains that flat bit? I'm very happy I have that flat bit. Because if you look at the internet resources in that school in the cloud, the flat bit shows a period when the internet was down. You can't have better proof than that of the incredible effect of the internet on reading comprehension. Why not? If children spending all their time in groups looking for the answer to a question and reading page after page of internet, nobody tells them what's meant for children, what's not meant for children. In those remote villages of India, there were children who would quote out of the Harvard business review in a couple of weeks. They don't know it's not meant for them. Another one in Bengal here, the biggest ones that I have built so far. So what do you do? How do you run a school in the cloud? You build this facility. It should look nice, colorful, bright, lots of glass walls. You should be able to see everything that's going on inside it from anywhere around. That's very important. The mums want to know that. They're not going to let their children into this new facility where they know there are no teachers inside and not know what's going on. So you've got to have transparent walls. Then what do you do? You've got computers. You've got the internet connection. You have one guy or one man or one woman there who's the supervisor, mainly for health and safety, law and order, that sort of thing. What does she do? At a certain time in the morning, she opens the door, lets the children in. And then guess what happens? At a certain time in the evening, say, about 5 o'clock, she closes the door and lets them go home. The internet does the rest. This is what it looks like. So, you know, bedlam, chaos. But then that's at the heart of the system, isn't it? You don't get self-organization unless you have chaos to start with. So you've got to have the big question. It's called an attractor. You've got to have the chaos. You've got to have the freedom. And you've got to have the internet. So we did study this across all seven sites that I had. And everywhere we got the same straight upward line for reading comprehension. So by this time, three graphs had emerged. The first one from the hole in the wall at the bottom left-hand corner, which basically says that children can figure out how to use an electronic device, information device, by themselves. You don't need anything else. I think all of us know that. You've seen five-year-olds with cell phones. You don't have to teach them anything. That's the first graph. The middle one, reading comprehension, I already spoke about. As they search on the internet, their reading comprehension go up. Actually, I should say their comprehension goes up, because it's not only reading. It's also videos, it's audios, it's everything. So the general level of comprehension goes up. The third, the one on the top right-hand side, is their ability to search the internet goes up with time. What does that mean? It's very important. They begin to figure out what websites or which websites are not right and which ones are. Which ones agree and which ones don't. What's fake news and what's not? They figure all of this out, 8, 9, 10-year-olds, by themselves in a couple of months. I think it's one of the most important life skills that a child today should have. Unfortunately, doesn't exist in a curriculum and is never asked in an exam. But the school in the cloud does do that. So basically, schools in the cloud improve reading comprehension, produce a kind of sense of well-being, causes learning with good retention. I've got measurements on this, publications and so on. Improves communication and collaboration. And it changes the teachers. To start with, the teachers are gassed at the idea. After a few months of it, they realize that they're most important because they raise the questions. That's the end of the good news. In the few minutes that I have, here's the bad news. The system versus the soul. The system is like this. You're all familiar with the system. We've all been through that system. Sit alone, don't have access to any device or anything at all. Don't look left, don't look right. Okay, dress properly. You know, sit up young man, et cetera. So that's the system. What was it for? It was meant to produce people who would sit in those offices. Remember, the world was run by those offices. There were no computers. You're talking about early 20th century. The entire world used to run using these administrative systems. You needed millions of people who were identical to each other and all of whom had three important properties, reading, writing and arithmetic. You should be able to read and understand. You should be able to write legibly by hand and you should be able to do arithmetic in your head. Otherwise you can't sit in that office and process the books. This particular picture is from Calcutta of that time. The books in question were, I believe the accounts of opium trading or something like that. So, here's what an office today looks like. Okay, doesn't it remind you of the hole in the wall? There are these guys, they've got a problem. They're hanging around the internet trying to figure out what's wrong. So to produce a generation who can fit into that, don't we need an exam that will look like this? I mean, you've seen them in their millions all over. Go to any shopping mall. You'll see them in rows and columns staring at their phones. Why can't that be the exam? Okay, you know, Eldon Square and Newcastle is our downtown. Why can't you have an exam question which says, what's the best shoe sale in Eldon Square next month? Why not? So I've been saying this for years now, completely unsuccessfully to many governments. Use of the internet should be allowed during examinations. Everybody says, yes, that's okay. What time's your train back? Next thing, the internet should be learned like the sciences, arts, and mathematics. It should be a subject for everyone's sake. When you send a message from your phone to another one using WhatsApp, how does it travel? If I ask people, oh, you know, servers. They say, and what's a server? Oh, server, you know, a server. Serves, you see. I mean, what is this? You don't know how the internet works. You use it 24 by seven, but you do know how a steam engine works. There's something wrong with the curriculum. I think we should change reading, writing, and arithmetic into three Cs. Comprehension, communication, and computing. Example, you are a dentist and you want to hire an assistant to just help with your admin work in office. A young woman appears with a GCSE A level and says that she's got an A plus plus in history, A B plus in mathematics, and A in English. Is that good enough information for you to decide whether you want to hire her as a dentist's assistant? I don't think so. So what's missing? Why isn't that certificate telling me what she's good for? It's only telling me that she would be okay for a early 20th century clerk's job. That's all that certificate is still telling me. It's wrong. It no longer works, not fit for purpose. It was perfectly okay in the 1920s. If the Victorians had been around, they would have said, I'm sure they would have said, what on earth are you doing with this today? Well, the purpose of education, I guess, should be to enable people to live happy, healthy, and useful lives. There's a problem with that, actually. Happy, healthy, useful, everybody agrees, except that you can't define any of them. Happy, we don't really know what that means. You can measure levels of chemicals in the brain, I suppose, or you can see how wide a smile is. I don't know how you measure happiness. We don't know how. Healthy, well, we're in safe grounds. Blood pressure, blood sugar, body mass index. That's it. If those three numbers are okay, you're healthy. Any doctor knows that that's nonsense. We don't really know what healthy means. And useful, who's to say what's useful today? What's useful? You tell me what's useful. I think what's useful is to be able to use Google Maps when you need it. That doesn't come in the GCSE. So I think we need a curriculum of not all the things we know. You know why? Because all the things we know are in our pockets. You can figure them out at the point of need in seconds. So does that mean we do away with curriculum? No. I think we need a curriculum of all the big things that we don't know yet. Children love it. If you tell them, here's a list of the big stuff we know nothing about. Nobody knows. Even the internet doesn't know. They'll go for it. It's energizing. And I think ultimately it's the questions to which we don't have an answer that has driven human civilization ever since we got down from the trees. So why a list of things we know? We need a pedagogy that is immersed in the internet. Instead of having a debate about whether children should be allowed to use mobile phones in school, we should do the opposite. A child should be in the internet 24 by seven because that's the world that she is headed for. An assessment should be changed completely. We need an assessment which will tell you something about the individual, about what the strengths of an individual are rather than the letter scores in a few boxes. English, math, science, that sort of thing. So that's about it really. And by the way, my publisher has said I must put this slide up as the last one. I have a book coming out. Should you wish to read it? It's called The School in the Cloud, by the way. So anyway, this is the end of my talk and thank you very much for listening.