Budapest (HU), March 2013 - Prof Sugata Mitra, education scientist and keynote speaker of the 2013 Annual Conference, has been awarded the TED Prize for his answer on the future of learning. Mitra's $1 million seed money is helping to fund the School in the Cloud in India this very year. This school will serve as both an education and research center to further explore approaches to self-directed learning. It will be managed by cloud technology, but with an adult supervisor always on hand. The plans for the school will be open source.
'What will the future of education look like?' This is the question answered by Prof Mitra, one of the keynote speakers of the EDEN 2013 Annual Conference, and with his answer, this year's TED Prize winner. "If we let the educational process be a self-organizing organism, learning emerges," says Prof Mitra. "It's not about making learning happen; it's about letting education happen."
Historically, the TED Prize was awarded to individuals who then made a wish. Starting in 2013, it is awarded to individuals with a big wish already in mind. Prof Mitra's wish is to support children around the globe, in addition to traditional schooling, to get a chance to participate in self-organized learning. Mitra's Prize of one million USD will be spent on the School in the Cloud, a learning environment where children are given the space to explore on their own, make discoveries and share them with their peers.
School in the Cloud shall be a learning lab in India where children can embark on intellectual adventures, connecting with information and mentors online. The Prize comes with The Sundance Institute|TED Prize Filmmaker Award, granted to a filmmaker for a short documentary film project about Sugata and his wish.
Listen to Prof Mitra talk at the 2013 EDEN Annual Conference
Learning is becoming more and more individualized and self-managed. Personalization helps foster engagement and supports awareness and motivation. The 2013 EDEN Annual Conference thus explores themes such as "Engaging and challenging learners" "Enhanced learning experience by participation and collaboration" or "Joy, Fun and ICTs". Prof Mitra's talk on self-directed learning was posted on TED Talks last year, with high edutainment potential.
In this talk, he tackles one of the greatest problems of education - the best teachers and schools don't exist where they're needed most. In a series of real-life experiments from New Delhi to South Africa to Italy, he gave kids self-supervised access to the web and saw results that could revolutionize how we think about teaching.
Academics, researchers, practitioners gather every year at the EDEN Annual conferences to discuss the latest developments of e-learning, open and distance education. In Europe, despite economic and social pressures, there is a collective drive towards realising the creative potential.
