India gets its first ‘School in the Cloud'!

The dream of Sugata Mitra, Newcastle University professor for educational technology, to bolster learning in communities where there's a lack of access to basic education, has finally come to life. In his attempt to end schooling as we know it, Mitra's ambitious ‘School in the Cloud' has opened its first branch in New Delhi. The concept here is simple: minimally invasive education that allows kids to ask and answer questions for themselves!

"Working in small groups, children can competently search for answers to ‘big questions', drawing rational, logical conclusions. This is far ahead of what is expected of them in their school curriculum and is a kind of learning activated by questions, not answers," Suneeta Kulkarni, research director for the School in the Cloud project was quoted as saying. Mitra's fascination with the cloud began back in 1999 when his ‘Hole in the Wall' experiment brought computers into rural Indian villages. ‘School in the Cloud' is simply an extension of the same concept.