Teachers in the new world
“ A teacher that can be replaced by a machine, should be”.
I find several clear-cut parallels between the Hole in the Wall project by Sugata Mitra, the Digital Youth Portraits and Thomas Friedman's "The World is Flat".
The main recurrent thread that I see in them is the following: because of the technological innovations the world has changed and the roles and attitudes in the newly-shaped world need to be altered accordingly. The world is now one global ecosystem and the opportunity of showing one’s potential is becoming more and more equal, irrespective of one’s social status and country of origin. In the words of Friedman (2007), “The playground has been levelled”. A curious, open mind, with or sometimes without any outer stimulation, can find the tools and the pathways to success. In the Hole in the Wall project Sugata Mitra notes that younger kids usually taught the older ones. This, in my view, shows that the more open the mind is, the more easily it finds the pathways of fulfilling its curiosity. For such a mind, neither the foreign language, nor any other barrier is an obstacle. The digital portraits of Edutopia illustrate this point very well.
All this seems to point to the following question: Do we need teachers in a world where information is just one click away? I think we do and we do so even more than before. In the complexity of the web and the abundance of distracting, low-value information, a guiding and motivating teacher is invaluable. I would just quote Sugata Mitra’s friend’s quote here, since I doubt that I can put it any better: “ A teacher that can be replaced by a machine, should be”.
The main recurrent thread that I see in them is the following: because of the technological innovations the world has changed and the roles and attitudes in the newly-shaped world need to be altered accordingly. The world is now one global ecosystem and the opportunity of showing one’s potential is becoming more and more equal, irrespective of one’s social status and country of origin. In the words of Friedman (2007), “The playground has been levelled”. A curious, open mind, with or sometimes without any outer stimulation, can find the tools and the pathways to success. In the Hole in the Wall project Sugata Mitra notes that younger kids usually taught the older ones. This, in my view, shows that the more open the mind is, the more easily it finds the pathways of fulfilling its curiosity. For such a mind, neither the foreign language, nor any other barrier is an obstacle. The digital portraits of Edutopia illustrate this point very well.
All this seems to point to the following question: Do we need teachers in a world where information is just one click away? I think we do and we do so even more than before. In the complexity of the web and the abundance of distracting, low-value information, a guiding and motivating teacher is invaluable. I would just quote Sugata Mitra’s friend’s quote here, since I doubt that I can put it any better: “ A teacher that can be replaced by a machine, should be”.
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