ALT makes YouTube top ten

15 Oct 2010

by: Margaret Snell

A talk by Sugata Mitra at the ALT annual conference at Nottingham University has proved to be a YouTube hit. The Association for Learning and Technology (ALT) says that its not-for-profit YouTube channel jumped to the 10th “most viewed” channel soon after the talk was published.

Professor Mitra gained world fame with his Hole-in-the-wall computer access project in the poverty-ridden back streets of India. In 1999 an Internet-connected computer was placed in a kiosk a wall in the Indian slums of Kalkaji, Delhi. Children, uninvited were allowed to freely use it – and they did, eventually in their hundreds. The experiment showed that kids could learn using computers without a teacher in sight in what Mitra calls Minimally Invasive Education (MIE). The experiment has since been repeated across rural India and elsewhere in the world.

Now Professor of Educational Technology at Newcastle University School of Education, Communication and Language Sciences, his entertaining and challenging conference talks are in high demand, and those who cannot get to see him in person can go to ALT’s YouTube channel, which for the past fortnight has been one of the five most viewed not-for-profit YouTube channels in the UK, and one of the top 100 not-for-profit channels globally.

Seb Schmoller, chief executive of the ALT, said: “Video on the Web is often perceived as trivial and transient. The popularity of our channel, which features leading thinkers from the technology in learning world, giving one hour or thirty minute talks, proves this perception wrong.”

 

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