…… Part of The Basics series. First published in June 2005 ……

One of my very first ever blog posts from May 2005 was about an experiment carried out by Sugata Mitra and reported in the BBC.   Mitra broke a hole in his office wall and made a computer available to children in a shanty town who had never seen a computer.

The noise goes down, a leader appears…

Mitra, observing the children, said “You find that the noise level begins to come down, and from somewhere a leader appears. Often his face is not visible in the crowd, but he is controlling the mouse because suddenly you see the mouse begin to move in an orderly fashion.”

As I said in my blog post 9 years ago, “This illustrates how leaders emerge naturally and groups are capable of self-regulation and self-teaching  given the opportunity, time and motivation.”

Since then, Mitra has gone far in his work, winning the TED Prize in 2013 of one million dollars: “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.”