Hole in the Wall
“The best teachers and schools don’t exist where they’re needed most. Dr. Sugata Mitra, Chief Scientist at NIIT, is credited with the discovery of Hole-in-the-Wall. NIIT is an information technology global education and training company headquartered in Gurgaon, India.
Professor Mitra was recently described as a polymath by the University of London and his 30 years of research spans a wide range of disciplines. Starting with molecular orbital computation in the 1970s he discovered that the structure of organic molecules determine their function more than the constituent atoms.
After a Ph.D. in Solid State Physics from the IIT, Delhi, he went on to research energy storage systems, first at the Centre for Energy Studies in the IIT and then at the Technische Universität, Vienna, Austria. This resulted in a new design for the Zinc-Chlorine batteries that are now in use by the military.
His interests in the flow of electricity through biological systems, a consequence of his Ph.D. research on exciton dissociation in organic semiconductors, led on to a seminally speculative paper on why the human sense organs are located where they are.
Interest Computer Networking
Interest in computer networking led him towards the emerging systems in printing in the 1980s. He set up India’s first local area network based newspaper publishing system in 1984 and went on to predict the desktop publishing industry. This in turn led to the invention of LAN based database publishing and he created the ‘Yellow Pages’ industry in India and Bangladesh.
It was the human mind that once again led him into the areas of learning and memory and he was amongst the first in the world to show that simulated neural networks can help decipher the mechanisms of Alzheimer’s disease. Culminating and, perhaps, towering over his previous work, are his “hole in the wall”experiments with children’s learning.
As early as 1982, he had been toying with the idea of unsupervised learning and computers. Finally in 1999, he instigated the Hole in the Wall (HIW) experiment, a computer was placed in a kiosk created within a wall in an Indian slum at Kalkaji, Delhi and children were allowed to freely use it.
Work at NIIT
Professor Mitra’s work at NIIT created the first curricula and pedagogy for that organisation, followed by years of research on learning styles, learning devices, several of them now patented, multimedia and new methods of learning. 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.
The Hole in the Wall experiment has left quite a mark on popular culture too. Indian diplomat Vikas Swarup read about Mitra’s experiment and was inspired to write his debut novel Q & A – this subsequently went on to become the movie Slumdog Millionaire.”
I invite you to learn MORE about HIW work and to be inspired as I have been at the countless numbers of lives Dr Mitra’s ‘interests’ have touched and continue to touch through this work.
