Day 3

Well they saved the best for last! It's not just because of how much I think technology is essential to teaching and learning but how technology is being used to make a difference in the lives of children around the world.

The opening plenary session on Technology was probably the highlight of the conference for me. The two speakers who really intrigued me were Dr. Mitra and his work titled "the Hole in the Wall" and Biz Stone the creator of Twitter.

Dr. Mitra's presentation was titled The Future of Learning. He started a little experiment eventually titled "the Hole in the Wall" by the media. He wanted to see what would happen if you put a computer connected to broadband internet in a slum in New Delhi. After a short period of time children were surfing the web and teaching themselves English in order to operate the computer properly. He continued to refine his question so that eventually he was asking the question: Can non English speaking children who have never used a computer teach themselves BioTechnology? And the short answer to this question is YES!!!! It was incredible to hear him speak and share his discoveries over the years. I found a video on YouTube that has some of his talk. If you want to hear about the experiments that he did skip to 7:30. Although the whole video is interesting he only talked about the Hole in the Wall project and this video does not talk about all of his experiments.



I want to mention that he started his presentation saying that there are problems with the way things are going currently in the world - a lack of teachers, quality teaching etc. He is proposing another way to address the staggering needs for the 1 billion people on the planet that are illiterate. By creating a playground computer, in a safe open area, 200-300 children can use this machine to teach themselves. So he came up with a simple formula. There are 1 billion people. That means he needs 100 million machines which will cost 180 billion over 10 years. That seems like a lot of money but Qatar's GDP last year was 500 billion...so the money exists out there somewhere.

After I picked my jaw up off the ground (along with the rest of the room) we prepared ourselves to hear from the other speakers.

Biz Stone gave me some interesting insights into Twitter. I had only ever thought of it as a self-indulgent, media-abusing, celebrity-magnet tool, especially because I keep hearing it on TV - "follow us on Twitter". Anyway Biz talked about how Twitter is an evolution of the email, the blog, and social networking. He provided some examples of how Twitter has been used for the "good" of humanity. While not as inspirational as Dr. Mitra (what could be?) Biz caused me to rethink the way that we communicate, and the importance of communication.

I was able to make an audio recording of this session, so hopefully I will be able to edit the file into usable chunks so that you can listen to these speakers.