Tedtalk：Sugata mitra shows how kids teach themselves,Kiran Sethi: kids to take charge.

I feel that although the two talks have different content, the things they advocate is similar, which is to allow kids to be the ones learning and discovering possibilities.

For kiran’s talk, basically it is about a school in India which is spreading a contagious notion of ’ I can’. the school is getting children to be proactive and start their contagious spread of ideas and turning them into actions. One example mentioned was that the pupils were made to experience child labour themselves; and after experiencing it, they could put themselves into the shoes of children subjected to child labour. The children of riverside went to the adults and start to educate them about child labour. This reminds me of an article i read before when i was studying media studies. There is program that i read before that a child laptop is distributed to each child in a remote village and it had great impact on learning as the children begin to teach the adults there how to read. I think it is similar to Kiran's case where the children start to be the ones to spread their ideas to the adults which as mentioned. is a contagious thing.

Another talk by Sugata is amazing as his experiment showed how children can self learn themselves without any supervision in the remote areas. They managed to learn English in order to use the computer in the wall. Many a times i feel that we would try to make relations to resources like what Sugata did but he found out that there is no relation between the facilities available and the academic grades. He feel it is the teacher's enthusiasm which is the most important factor as he mentioned most teachers in remote areas prefer to teach in cities. He feel that a teacher which can be replaced by the computer should be replaced and also showed via his experiment how they managed to learn computer and english words by themselves. Perhaps his method would be useful in remote areas that do not have any teachers at all. However, i have questions as to how much can the children learn by themselves. How effective is this method in the long term? If everything is self directed with no adult supervision, how would people know how much and what have the children learnt using the computer?