I am aware of Sugata’s experiments and I did consider the fact that children teach themselves. This is exactly the reason why I have created such a process in our model.

@Rabi,
You are right. Rural children need that mentoring support. That is exactly our objective is.

@Nikhil,
I wrote you a mail and please reach me on that!

Thanks for sharing your thoughts. Coming to video based learning, it is true that multimedia is much more effective in learning. However, we need to look at future aspects when children will be around completely stuffed with too many videos.

In my early childhood (1980’s), I never came across audio recording or photography (partly because we were very poor and lived in a village). These things seemed to me exceptionally attractive however, when I am grown up and have an opportunity to take any number of photos and so lost that crazy aspect towards those audio recordings or the photos.

Similarly, just think about this. When you were watching your first video (shot on yourself) how crazy you were and after having more than a hundred videos shot on yourself, your interests on the 101th video.

Moreover, fundamentally there is one weakness with respect to video-based learning. It lacks interactivity which is one of the most important aspect in learning.

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/sugata_mitra_shows_how_kids_teach_themselves.html

Speaking at LIFT 2007, Sugata Mitra talks about his Hole in the Wall project. Young kids in this project figured out how to use a PC on their own — and then taught other kids. He asks, what else can children teach themselves?

In 1999, Sugata Mitra and his colleagues dug a hole in a wall bordering an urban slum in New Delhi, installed an Internet-connected PC, and left it there (with a hidden camera filming the area). What they saw was kids from the slum playing around with the computer and in the process learning how to use it and how to go online, and then teaching each other.

In the following years they replicated the experiment in other parts of India, urban and rural, with similar results, challenging some of the key assumptions of formal education. The “Hole in the Wall” project demonstrates that, even in the absence of any direct input from a teacher, an environment that stimulates curiosity can cause learning through self-instruction and peer-shared knowledge. Mitra, who’s now a professor of educational technology at Newcastle University (UK), calls it “minimally invasive education.”

I completely agree that the current educational system needs a revamp and we need to introduce more ‘doing’ than ‘absorbing’. We have been subject to rot learning which made school mundane and didn’t encourage thinking out-of-the-box. May be, we could use examples of teaching styles in Western schools and implement them here.

I’d be glad to help in researching techniques and adopting them to suit Indian schools.