Granny Cloud

You may have heard the story of the Indian slum children who taught themselves how to use computers when someone embedded a computer in his Delhi office wall for them. It proved so successful that all around the world the same experiment was repeated and each time, children taught themselves complex tasks easily – with little supervision.

But, and here is an even more interesting fact, they did even better when a ‘granny figure’ stood behind them offering encouragement – not teaching them, but just positively encouraging them and engaging with what they are doing.

So an encouraging and positive older person standing behind children who were working out how to do something themselves made them achieve more. Does that sound familiar? It is a pretty good description of good parenting and particularly in parent engagement in education.

The granny figure was not a specialist teacher, or a computer expert but an adult whose job was just to stand and encourage young children in what they were learning – just like a parent or any involved family member would. The man who came up with the original idea for the ‘computer in the wall’ in Delhi is Professor Sugata Mitra and he has taken the concept even further now and added to it with the concept of the ‘Granny Cloud’.

Professor Mitra is proposing an idea for schools called SOLE or Self Organised Learning Environments. These learning environments consist of a computer with a bench big enough to let four children sit around the screen. “It doesn’t work if you give them each a computer individually,” he is quoted as saying.

Professor Mita is now professor of educational technology at Newcastle University (UK) and has also been a speaker on the TED stage

The children are then backed up by a “granny cloud” – 200 volunteer grandmothers who can be called upon to video chat with the children and provide encouragement. He has tested the spaces successfully in the UK and Italy, and now believes they should be tested more widely. Infact, during an earlier stage of his experiments, Indian children actually asked to be read fairy tales by UK grandmothers via Skype! Professor Mitra, who now lectures at the University of Newcastle in the United Kingdom, told the TED Global (Technology, Entertainment and Design) conference in Oxford in the UK:”I think we have stumbled across a self-organising system with learning as an emergent behaviour.”

And all of those grannies are clearly helping too. Long term research in the UK has proved that the existence of one older person in a child’s life who has a passion for the child and wants them to do well in their education is enough to ensure they make the most of their schooling, regardless of the quality of their school or their economic circumstances.