Hole+in+the+Wall+Experiment

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=Introduction= Welcome to Educational Psychology! Whether you are going to be a teacher or not, this course will help you learn how you, and everyone else around you, learn. Knowing this can help you to teach children, create effective ways of training colleagues and new staff, figure out how to address client needs in social service organizations, help patients to learn what they need to do in order to better their health, understand your own children and those of your friends, and come up with effective solutions when someone, for whatever reason, just isn't getting it.

=Hole in the Wall= To begin with, I offer you a challenge and that is the work of Sugata Mitra in the slum regions of India:

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By the way, the author of Slum Dog Millionaire was inspired by this project.

Human beings are learning organisms from the moment they are born (and there is some evidence they begin learning before they are born) to the moment of death. Mitra's work shows one way in which people volunteer to learn very challenging concepts.

=Things to Think About= A central question here is exactly how are these children learning? Other related questions include: Why is this learning working? What is the nature of the motivation in this kind of learning? How can this kind of learning be supported in educational institutions and settings? How is this learning different from or similar to the learning experiences within educational settings?

By the end of this semester, you will have your own answers to these questions as well as your own answer to "what does this project mean to you in your career?"

=Learning Activity= As your introduction to this course, consider the questions above and provide your preliminary answers, given what you know right now and the many years of learning experiences you have already had.

=Graduate School Preparation= In high school and many undergraduate classes, you may learn about the ideas and writings of others through textbooks which describe these things and may quote small parts of them. In graduate school, you will probably be reading fewer textbooks and more books and articles that are primary sources, such as original historical documents, original research, and so forth.

The purpose of "Graduate School Preparation" is to provide you with supported experiences that will help you get ready for graduate school so that by the time you get there, you will not become intimidated by the readings you will do for your classes.

When you have time left over from the main activities of each unit, spend some time on the Graduate School Preparation materials; you can read them and you can also just glance in them or look at the parts that interest you. Even if you have five minutes left over, merely glancing at this material will benefit you in the long run because it jump starts your brain in that direction.

The graduate school preparation for the Hole in the Wall project is one of the research studies completed by colleagues of Sugata Mitra: