Sugata Mitra: Build a School in the Cloud

Summary

In this insightful talk, Sugata Mitra explores the evolution of education from the British Empire's bureaucratic system to the modern digital age. He challenges the outdated school model, demonstrating through his 'Hole in the Wall' experiments that children can self-teach complex subjects with minimal guidance. Mitra advocates for a future of learning driven by curiosity and collaboration, introducing the concept of Self-Organized Learning Environments (SOLE) and the School in the Cloud, where children's innate wonder and ability to work together are harnessed to shape a new educational paradigm.

Takeaways

• 📚 The origin of modern schooling is traced back to the British Empire, which created a system to produce identical individuals for a bureaucratic administrative machine.
• 🔢 Victorian schools emphasized basic skills like handwriting, reading, and arithmetic to ensure interchangeable functionaries across the empire.
• 🌐 The current education system is considered obsolete as it was designed for a world that no longer exists, with technology now replacing many clerical tasks.
• 💡 The speaker suggests that future jobs are unpredictable, and traditional schooling may not adequately prepare students for the flexible and diverse nature of work in the future.
• 🕳 The 'Hole in the Wall' experiment demonstrated that children can self-teach and learn complex subjects like computer use and even English, when given access to technology.
• 🌟 The experiment showed that with minimal guidance, children were able to achieve significant learning outcomes, challenging conventional educational methods.
• 📈 The potential of self-organized learning environments (SOLE) is highlighted, where learning emerges from the process rather than being forced by external instruction.
• 👵 The 'Granny Cloud' concept introduces the idea of remote mentorship and support, utilizing technology to provide encouragement and guidance to learners.
• 🌏 The speaker calls for a global effort to support children in exploring their curiosity and collaborative abilities, emphasizing the importance of wonder and self-directed learning.
• 🏫 The vision of the 'School in the Cloud' is presented as a facility that facilitates intellectual adventures driven by big questions, with minimal direct instruction.
• 🌟 The speaker's wish is for a future of learning that leverages self-organization, broad collaboration, and the power of encouragement, moving away from traditional teaching methods.

Q & A

What is the origin of the current educational system as described in the script?

The script suggests that the current educational system originates from about 300 years ago during the British Empire. It was designed to produce individuals who could function as part of a bureaucratic administrative machine, requiring good handwriting, reading skills, and basic arithmetic abilities.

Why were the skills of good handwriting, reading, and basic arithmetic important in the past educational system?

These skills were crucial because the administrative machine relied on handwritten data, and individuals needed to be able to read and perform calculations mentally to manage the empire's vast resources and information without modern technology.

What does the script imply about the relevance of the traditional educational system in today's world?

The script implies that the traditional educational system is outdated and no longer necessary, as the jobs and skills required today are different from those needed during the time of the British Empire.

What is the 'Hole in the Wall' experiment mentioned in the script?

The 'Hole in the Wall' experiment refers to placing a computer in a hole in a wall in a slum area to observe how children with no prior computer experience or knowledge of English would interact with it. The experiment demonstrated that children could teach themselves to use the computer and even English to operate it.

How did the children in the 'Hole in the Wall' experiment learn to use the computer?

The children learned to use the computer through self-teaching and peer-to-peer learning. They were curious and persistent, teaching each other how to browse and use the computer without any formal instruction.

What was the purpose of introducing a speech-to-text engine to the children in the script?

The purpose was to improve the children's English pronunciation, which was considered important for better job opportunities. The children were encouraged to speak into the engine until it accurately transcribed their speech.

What was the surprising outcome when the children in the 'Hole in the Wall' experiment were given a complex subject to learn?

The surprising outcome was that the children were able to understand the basics of DNA replication in English, a subject that was a decade ahead of their time and taught in a language they were not familiar with, simply by persistent exposure and trying to understand the information on their own.

What role did the 'Granny Cloud' play in the educational process described in the script?

The 'Granny Cloud' refers to a group of British grandmothers who provided support and encouragement to children learning via the internet. They would appear via Skype to help children who were struggling, offering a nurturing presence that could aid in learning.

What is the concept of Self-Organized Learning Environments (SOLE) proposed in the script?

SOLE is a concept where learning is the product of educational self-organization. It involves allowing the educational process to self-organize, with the teacher setting the process in motion and then stepping back to observe as learning naturally occurs.

What is the speaker's wish for the future of learning as expressed in the script?

The speaker's wish is to help design a future of learning by supporting children worldwide to tap into their curiosity and ability to collaborate. This involves building a facility called the School in the Cloud and encouraging the implementation of Self-Organized Learning Environments globally.

How does the script suggest we should approach learning in the future?

The script suggests that learning in the future should be driven by big questions and curiosity, with an emphasis on self-organization and collaboration rather than traditional instruction. It also highlights the importance of encouragement and the potential obsolescence of 'knowing' in favor of the ability to learn and adapt.

Outlines

00:00

📚 The Evolution of Modern Education

In this section, the speaker reflects on the origins of modern education, tracing it back to the British Empire. He describes how schools were designed to produce uniform individuals for bureaucratic roles, emphasizing handwriting, reading, and arithmetic. The speaker critiques the outdated nature of this system, asserting that it no longer meets the needs of today's society, which relies on computers and does not require such uniformity.

05:00

💻 The Hole in the Wall Experiment

The speaker recounts his experiment in New Delhi, where he placed a computer in a slum. Despite no prior knowledge of English or computers, children quickly learned to use it, teaching themselves and each other. This experiment, replicated in remote villages, consistently showed children independently acquiring computer skills, challenging the assumption that only wealthy, educated children could excel in technology.

10:00

🧬 Self-Teaching and Biotechnology

In a further experiment, the speaker explores how children can teach themselves complex subjects. He describes a scenario where Tamil-speaking children in a village learned about DNA replication using an English computer program. Despite initial struggles, the children made significant progress, demonstrating the potential of self-organized learning environments when combined with encouragement and minimal guidance.

15:02

👵 The Granny Cloud

The speaker introduces the concept of the Granny Cloud, a network of British grandmothers who assist children worldwide via the internet. These grandmothers provide encouragement and support, helping children to learn autonomously. This method, based on creating a supportive and inquisitive environment, is presented as an alternative to traditional teaching methods that rely on punishment and examinations.

20:04

🌍 Designing the Future of Learning

The speaker outlines his vision for the future of education, advocating for Self-Organized Learning Environments (SOLEs). These environments leverage broadband, collaboration, and encouragement to facilitate learning. He invites the audience to help build the School in the Cloud, a project aimed at studying and promoting this new educational model. The section concludes with a call to action, encouraging widespread adoption of SOLEs.

Keywords

💡Bureaucratic Administrative Machine

The term 'Bureaucratic Administrative Machine' refers to the system of administration that was established during the Victorian era to manage the British Empire. It was a metaphorical machine made up of people who performed administrative tasks, such as record-keeping and data processing, which were essential for the functioning of the empire. In the video, this concept is used to illustrate the historical origins of the modern school system, which was designed to produce individuals who could efficiently operate within this bureaucratic framework.

💡Empire

The 'Empire' mentioned in the script refers to the British Empire, which was the largest empire in history, spanning a vast geographical area and influencing global politics and culture. The script uses the empire as a historical context to explain the development of the school system, which was designed to support the administrative needs of such a vast and complex entity.

💡Obsolescence

In the context of the video, 'Obsolescence' refers to the idea that the traditional school system, as it currently exists, is outdated and no longer serves the needs of modern society. The speaker argues that since the administrative machine it was designed to support no longer exists, the system of education that produced 'identical' individuals for it is also obsolete.

💡Self-Organized Learning Environments (SOLE)

SOLE stands for Self-Organized Learning Environments, a concept introduced in the video that emphasizes the importance of allowing learning to emerge naturally through self-organization rather than being imposed. The speaker shares examples of children teaching themselves and others in various contexts, demonstrating the power of curiosity and peer collaboration in learning.

💡Hole in the Wall

The 'Hole in the Wall' is a term used to describe an experiment conducted by the speaker where a computer was placed in a hole in a wall in a slum area, allowing children to interact with it freely. This experiment aimed to explore how children could learn with minimal guidance and access to technology, challenging traditional notions of education.

💡Granny Cloud

The 'Granny Cloud' is a concept introduced in the video where elderly individuals, referred to as 'grandmothers,' provide support and encouragement to children learning remotely via the internet. This idea leverages the wisdom and nurturing qualities of grandparents to facilitate learning in a supportive and non-threatening manner.

💡Educational Self-Organization

Educational self-organization is a key concept in the video that suggests that when given the right conditions, learning can occur organically without the need for a structured, top-down approach. The speaker argues that by setting the educational process in motion and then stepping back, teachers can witness the natural emergence of learning.

💡Big Questions

The term 'Big Questions' in the script refers to broad, open-ended inquiries that can spark curiosity and lead to deep learning experiences. The speaker suggests that a curriculum built around such questions can inspire children to engage in intellectual adventures and self-directed learning.

💡School in the Cloud

The 'School in the Cloud' is a vision presented by the speaker for a future educational institution that is largely unmanned and relies on technology and remote support, such as the Granny Cloud, to facilitate learning. It represents a shift from traditional classroom-based education to a more flexible, technology-enabled model.

💡Neuroscience

Neuroscience is the scientific study of the nervous system and brain function. In the video, the speaker references neuroscience to explain how the reptilian part of the brain responds to threats, such as punishment and examinations, by shutting down the parts of the brain responsible for learning. This is used to argue for a shift from threat-based to pleasure-based learning environments.

💡Intellectual Adventures

In the context of the video, 'Intellectual Adventures' refers to the process of children engaging with complex ideas and questions, often beyond their immediate educational level, in a self-directed manner. The speaker uses this term to describe the kind of exploratory learning experiences he envisions for the School in the Cloud.

Highlights

The origin of the current schooling system dates back to 300 years ago, emerging from the British Empire's need for a bureaucratic administrative machine.

Victorians created a 'global computer' made of people, which required schools to produce identical individuals with specific skills for administration.

The necessity for these individuals included good handwriting, reading ability, and mental arithmetic, ensuring they could be seamlessly integrated anywhere in the empire.

The robust Victorian system is still in place, producing people for a machine that no longer exists, prompting a question about the relevance of current educational designs.

Modern jobs have evolved, with computers taking over clerical tasks, and the need for individuals to be able to read discerningly rather than perform arithmetic mentally.

Future jobs are uncertain, and current schooling may not adequately prepare individuals for a world of flexible work environments.

The 'Hole in the Wall' experiment demonstrated that children from a slum, without prior knowledge of English or computers, could learn to use a computer and browse the internet within hours.

Children in remote villages, when given access to computers, taught themselves English and computer skills to utilize the technology effectively.

An eight-year-old child was observed teaching a six-year-old to browse the internet, showcasing peer learning dynamics.

Experiments with a speech-to-text engine improved English pronunciation among children in southern India, enhancing their job prospects.

Tamil-speaking children in a south Indian village were able to learn complex biotechnology concepts in English from a streetside computer, defying conventional educational methods.

The introduction of a 'granny' figure, who provided encouragement rather than instruction, significantly improved learning outcomes.

The concept of Self-Organized Learning Environments (SOLE) suggests that learning emerges when the educational process is allowed to self-organize, with teachers facilitating rather than dictating.

The 'Granny Cloud' is a virtual network of grandmothers who provide support and encouragement to children in need, demonstrating the power of remote mentorship.

The speaker's wish is to build the 'School in the Cloud,' a facility that supports children's intellectual adventures through big questions and self-organized learning.

The call to action encourages individuals to implement SOLE at home, school, and in clubs, contributing to the creation of the future of learning by sharing data and experiences.

The story of children at 12,000 feet in the Himalayas eagerly engaging with Hole in the Wall computers emphasizes the universal desire for learning and the potential of self-organized education.

Transcripts

Translator: Joseph Geni Reviewer: Morton Bast

What is going to be the future of learning?

I do have a plan,

but in order for me to tell you what that plan is,

I need to tell you a little story,

which kind of sets the stage.

I tried to look at

where did the kind of learning we do in schools,

where did it come from?

And you can look far back into the past,

but if you look at present-day schooling the way it is,

it's quite easy to figure out where it came from.

It came from about 300 years ago,

and it came from the last

and the biggest of the empires on this planet. ["The British Empire"]

Imagine trying to run the show,

trying to run the entire planet,

without computers, without telephones,

with data handwritten on pieces of paper,

and traveling by ships.

But the Victorians actually did it.

What they did was amazing.

They created a global computer

made up of people.

It's still with us today.

It's called the bureaucratic administrative machine.

In order to have that machine running,

you need lots and lots of people.

They made another machine to produce those people:

the school.

The schools would produce the people

who would then become parts of the

bureaucratic administrative machine.

They must be identical to each other.

They must know three things:

They must have good handwriting, because the data is handwritten;

they must be able to read;

and they must be able to do multiplication,

division, addition and subtraction in their head.

They must be so identical that you could pick one up from New Zealand

and ship them to Canada

and he would be instantly functional.

The Victorians were great engineers.

They engineered a system that was so robust

that it's still with us today,

continuously producing identical people

for a machine that no longer exists.

The empire is gone,

so what are we doing with that design

that produces these identical people,

and what are we going to do next

if we ever are going to do anything else with it?

["Schools as we know them are obsolete"]

So that's a pretty strong comment there.

I said schools as we know them now, they're obsolete.

I'm not saying they're broken.

It's quite fashionable to say that the education system's broken.

It's not broken. It's wonderfully constructed.

It's just that we don't need it anymore. It's outdated.

What are the kind of jobs that we have today?

Well, the clerks are the computers.

They're there in thousands in every office.

And you have people who guide those computers

to do their clerical jobs.

Those people don't need to be able to write beautifully by hand.

They don't need to be able to multiply numbers in their heads.

They do need to be able to read.

In fact, they need to be able to read discerningly.

Well, that's today, but we don't even know

what the jobs of the future are going to look like.

We know that people will work from wherever they want,

whenever they want, in whatever way they want.

How is present-day schooling going to prepare them

for that world?

Well, I bumped into this whole thing completely by accident.

I used to teach people how to write computer programs

in New Delhi, 14 years ago.

And right next to where I used to work, there was a slum.

And I used to think, how on Earth are those kids

ever going to learn to write computer programs?

Or should they not?

At the same time, we also had lots of parents,

rich people, who had computers,

and who used to tell me, "You know, my son,

I think he's gifted,

because he does wonderful things with computers.

And my daughter -- oh, surely she is extra-intelligent."

And so on. So I suddenly figured that,

how come all the rich people are having

these extraordinarily gifted children?

(Laughter)

What did the poor do wrong?

I made a hole in the boundary wall

of the slum next to my office,

and stuck a computer inside it just to see what would happen

if I gave a computer to children who never would have one,

didn't know any English, didn't know what the Internet was.

The children came running in.

It was three feet off the ground, and they said, "What is this?"

And I said, "Yeah, it's, I don't know."

(Laughter)

They said, "Why have you put it there?"

I said, "Just like that."

And they said, "Can we touch it?"I said, "If you wish to."

And I went away.

About eight hours later,

we found them browsing and teaching each other how to browse.

So I said, "Well that's impossible, because --

How is it possible? They don't know anything."

My colleagues said, "No, it's a simple solution.

One of your students must have been passing by,

showed them how to use the mouse."

So I said, "Yeah, that's possible."

So I repeated the experiment. I went 300 miles out of Delhi

into a really remote village

where the chances of a passing software development engineer

was very little. (Laughter)

I repeated the experiment there.

There was no place to stay, so I stuck my computer in,

I went away, came back after a couple of months,

found kids playing games on it.

When they saw me, they said,

"We want a faster processor and a better mouse."

(Laughter)

So I said, "How on Earth do you know all this?"

And they said something very interesting to me.

In an irritated voice, they said,

"You've given us a machine that works only in English,

so we had to teach ourselves English in order to use it." (Laughter)

That's the first time, as a teacher,

that I had heard the word "teach ourselves" said so casually.

Here's a short glimpse from those years.

That's the first day at the Hole in the Wall.

On your right is an eight-year-old.

To his left is his student. She's six.

And he's teaching her how to browse.

Then onto other parts of the country,

I repeated this over and over again,

getting exactly the same results that we were.

["Hole in the wall film - 1999"]

An eight-year-old telling his elder sister what to do.

And finally a girl explaining in Marathi what it is,

and said, "There's a processor inside."

So I started publishing.

I published everywhere. I wrote down and measured everything,

and I said, in nine months, a group of children

left alone with a computer in any language

will reach the same standard as an office secretary in the West.

I'd seen it happen over and over and over again.

But I was curious to know, what else would they do

if they could do this much?

I started experimenting with other subjects,

among them, for example, pronunciation.

There's one community of children in southern India

whose English pronunciation is really bad,

and they needed good pronunciation because that would improve their jobs.

I gave them a speech-to-text engine in a computer,

and I said, "Keep talking into it until it types what you say."

(Laughter)

They did that, and watch a little bit of this.

Computer: Nice to meet you.Child: Nice to meet you.

Sugata Mitra: The reason I ended with the face

of this young lady over there is because I suspect many of you know her.

She has now joined a call center in Hyderabad

and may have tortured you about your credit card bills

in a very clear English accent.

So then people said, well, how far will it go?

Where does it stop?

I decided I would destroy my own argument

by creating an absurd proposition.

I made a hypothesis, a ridiculous hypothesis.

Tamil is a south Indian language, and I said,

can Tamil-speaking children in a south Indian village

learn the biotechnology of DNA replication in English

from a streetside computer?

And I said, I'll measure them. They'll get a zero.

I'll spend a couple of months, I'll leave it for a couple of months,

I'll go back, they'll get another zero.

I'll go back to the lab and say, we need teachers.

I found a village. It was called Kallikuppam in southern India.

I put in Hole in the Wall computers there,

downloaded all kinds of stuff from the Internet about DNA replication,

most of which I didn't understand.

The children came rushing, said, "What's all this?"

So I said, "It's very topical, very important. But it's all in English."

So they said, "How can we understand such big English words

and diagrams and chemistry?"

So by now, I had developed a new pedagogical method,

so I applied that. I said, "I haven't the foggiest idea."

(Laughter)

"And anyway, I am going away."

(Laughter)

So I left them for a couple of months.

They'd got a zero. I gave them a test.

I came back after two months

and the children trooped in and said, "We've understood nothing."

So I said, "Well, what did I expect?"

So I said, "Okay, but how long did it take you

before you decided that you can't understand anything?"

So they said, "We haven't given up.

We look at it every single day."

So I said, "What? You don't understand these screens

and you keep staring at it for two months? What for?"

So a little girl who you see just now,

she raised her hand, and she says to me in broken Tamil and English,

she said, "Well, apart from the fact that

improper replication of the DNA molecule causes disease,

we haven't understood anything else."

(Laughter) (Applause)

So I tested them.

I got an educational impossibility, zero to 30 percent

in two months in the tropical heat

with a computer under the tree in a language they didn't know

doing something that's a decade ahead of their time.

Absurd. But I had to follow the Victorian norm.

Thirty percent is a fail.

How do I get them to pass? I have to get them 20 more marks.

I couldn't find a teacher. What I did find was a friend that they had,

a 22-year-old girl who was an accountant

and she played with them all the time.

So I asked this girl, "Can you help them?"

So she says, "Absolutely not.

I didn't have science in school. I have no idea

what they're doing under that tree all day long. I can't help you."

I said, "I'll tell you what. Use the method of the grandmother."

So she says, "What's that?"

I said, "Stand behind them.

Whenever they do anything, you just say,

'Well, wow, I mean, how did you do that?

What's the next page? Gosh, when I was your age, I could have never done that.'

You know what grannies do."

So she did that for two more months.

The scores jumped to 50 percent.

Kallikuppam had caught up

with my control school in New Delhi,

a rich private school with a trained biotechnology teacher.

When I saw that graph I knew there is a way to level the playing field.

Here's Kallikuppam.

(Children speaking) Neurons ... communication.

I got the camera angle wrong. That one is just amateur stuff,

but what she was saying, as you could make out,

was about neurons, with her hands were like that,

and she was saying neurons communicate.

At 12.

So what are jobs going to be like?

Well, we know what they're like today.

What's learning going to be like? We know what it's like today,

children pouring over with their mobile phones on the one hand

and then reluctantly going to school to pick up their books with their other hand.

What will it be tomorrow?

Could it be that we don't need to go to school at all?

Could it be that, at the point in time when you need to know something,

you can find out in two minutes?

Could it be -- a devastating question,

a question that was framed for me by Nicholas Negroponte --

could it be that we are heading towards or maybe in

a future where knowing is obsolete?

But that's terrible. We are homo sapiens.

Knowing, that's what distinguishes us from the apes.

But look at it this way.

It took nature 100 million years

to make the ape stand up

and become Homo sapiens.

It took us only 10,000 to make knowing obsolete.

What an achievement that is.

But we have to integrate that into our own future.

Encouragement seems to be the key.

If you look at Kuppam,

if you look at all of the experiments that I did,

it was simply saying, "Wow," saluting learning.

There is evidence from neuroscience.

The reptilian part of our brain, which sits in the center of our brain,

when it's threatened, it shuts down everything else,

it shuts down the prefrontal cortex, the parts which learn,

it shuts all of that down.

Punishment and examinations are seen as threats.

We take our children, we make them shut their brains down,

and then we say, "Perform."

Why did they create a system like that?

Because it was needed.

There was an age in the Age of Empires

when you needed those people who can survive under threat.

When you're standing in a trench all alone,

if you could have survived, you're okay, you've passed.

If you didn't, you failed.

But the Age of Empires is gone.

What happens to creativity in our age?

We need to shift that balance back

from threat to pleasure.

I came back to England looking for British grandmothers.

I put out notices in papers saying,

if you are a British grandmother, if you have broadband and a web camera,

can you give me one hour of your time per week for free?

I got 200 in the first two weeks.

I know more British grandmothers than anyone in the universe. (Laughter)

They're called the Granny Cloud.

The Granny Cloud sits on the Internet.

If there's a child in trouble, we beam a Gran.

She goes on over Skype and she sorts things out.

I've seen them do it from a village called Diggles

in northwestern England,

deep inside a village in Tamil Nadu, India,

6,000 miles away.

She does it with only one age-old gesture.

"Shhh."

Okay?

Watch this.

Grandmother: You can't catch me. You say it.

You can't catch me.

Children: You can't catch me.

Grandmother: I'm the Gingerbread Man.Children: I'm the Gingerbread Man.

Grandmother: Well done! Very good.

SM: So what's happening here?

I think what we need to look at is

we need to look at learning

as the product of educational self-organization.

If you allow the educational process to self-organize,

then learning emerges.

It's not about making learning happen.

It's about letting it happen.

The teacher sets the process in motion

and then she stands back in awe

and watches as learning happens.

I think that's what all this is pointing at.

But how will we know? How will we come to know?

Well, I intend to build

these Self-Organized Learning Environments.

They are basically broadband, collaboration

and encouragement put together.

I've tried this in many, many schools.

It's been tried all over the world, and teachers

sort of stand back and say, "It just happens by itself?"

And I said, "Yeah, it happens by itself.""How did you know that?"

I said, "You won't believe the children who told me

and where they're from."

Here's a SOLE in action.

(Children talking)

This one is in England.

He maintains law and order,

because remember, there's no teacher around.

Girl: The total number of electrons is not equal to the total number of protons -- SM: Australia

Girl: -- giving it a net positive or negative electrical charge.

The net charge on an ion is equal to the number of protons

in the ion minus the number of electrons.

SM: A decade ahead of her time.

So SOLEs, I think we need a curriculum of big questions.

You already heard about that. You know what that means.

There was a time when Stone Age men and women

used to sit and look up at the sky and say,

"What are those twinkling lights?"

They built the first curriculum, but we've lost sight of those wondrous questions.

We've brought it down to the tangent of an angle.

But that's not sexy enough.

The way you would put it to a nine-year-old is to say,

"If a meteorite was coming to hit the Earth,

how would you figure out if it was going to or not?"

And if he says, "Well, what? how?"

you say, "There's a magic word. It's called the tangent of an angle,"

and leave him alone. He'll figure it out.

So here are a couple of images from SOLEs.

I've tried incredible, incredible questions --

"When did the world begin? How will it end?" —

to nine-year-olds.

This one is about what happens to the air we breathe.

This is done by children without the help of any teacher.

The teacher only raises the question,

and then stands back and admires the answer.

So what's my wish?

My wish is

that we design the future of learning.

We don't want to be spare parts

for a great human computer, do we?

So we need to design a future for learning.

And I've got to -- hang on,

I've got to get this wording exactly right,

because, you know, it's very important.

My wish is to help design a future of learning

by supporting children all over the world

to tap into their wonder and their ability to work together.

Help me build this school.

It will be called the School in the Cloud.

It will be a school where children go on these intellectual adventures

driven by the big questions which their mediators put in.

The way I want to do this

is to build a facility where I can study this.

It's a facility which is practically unmanned.

There's only one granny

who manages health and safety.

The rest of it's from the cloud.

The lights are turned on and off by the cloud,

etc., etc., everything's done from the cloud.

But I want you for another purpose.

You can do Self-Organized Learning Environments

at home, in the school, outside of school, in clubs.

It's very easy to do. There's a great document

produced by TED which tells you how to do it.

If you would please, please do it

across all five continents

and send me the data,

then I'll put it all together, move it into the School of Clouds,

and create the future of learning.

That's my wish.

And just one last thing.

I'll take you to the top of the Himalayas.

At 12,000 feet, where the air is thin,

I once built two Hole in the Wall computers,

and the children flocked there.

And there was this little girl who was following me around.

And I said to her, "You know, I want to give a computer to everybody, every child.

I don't know, what should I do?"

And I was trying to take a picture of her quietly.

She suddenly raised her hand like this, and said to me,

"Get on with it."

(Laughter) (Applause)

I think it was good advice.

I'll follow her advice. I'll stop talking.

Thank you. Thank you very much.

(Applause)

Thank you. Thank you. (Applause)

Thank you very much. Wow. (Applause)