Interview 113: Sugata Mitra on Learning as an Emergent, Self-organising Phenomenon

The Middle Way Society

My guest today is Sugata Mitra, who is professor of Educational Technology at Newcastle University in the UK. Sugata is by training a physicist with over 25 inventions to his name in the area of cognitive science and education technology. He is widely cited in works on literacy and education and is perhaps most well known as a proponent of minimally invasive education and his ‘Hole in the Wall’ experiment. He won the 2013 Ted prize for his talk ‘Build a School in a Cloud’ after which he used the prize money to set up a number of the schools. He’s here to talk to us today about how learning might be seen as an emergent phenomenon in a self organising education system which emerges as spontaneous order at the edge of chaos.