A School in the Cloud: Self Organized Learning Environments

I watched Sugata Mitra’s TED Prize winning talk which is both about a school in the cloud and about Self Organized Learning Environments (SOLE). It made me think of so many projects I have worked on over the years, like teaching or learning on p2pu and other open networks. Schools in the cloud.

In his talk, he asks us to help me design the School in the Cloud, a learning lab in India, where children can explore and learn from each other using resources and mentoring from the cloud. This is what he calls a Self Organized Learning Environments (SOLE).





He is seeking educational partners to help design and build the physical building that will house his School in the Cloud, where students will try out a range of cloud-based, scalable approaches to self-directed learning.

TED offers a SOLE toolkit that might help you contribute to a global network of educators and retired teachers who can support and engage the children through the web.

This not about credits and degree programs. Like the original idea of MOOCs, it is about engaging communities, parents, schools and afterschool programs worldwide, to transform the way kids learn.

This requires facilitators and the SOLE model relies on educators to model curiosity, prompt questions, and support the learners through the process.

Where are the typical incentives that exist for teachers? A job, a salary, personal feedback and face-to-face relationships with students? They don't exist, at least not in the form you knew in school.

Can you deal with that?


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