Minimally Invasive Education

The concept of Minimally Invasive Education is one that I find especially fascinating.  The basic premise of MIE is where a learning environment is created that is intended to generate the impetus that learners need to induce learning.  In short, it is educating learners with as little interference or intrusion as possible, and was borne out of experimental work conducted in India by Dr. Sugata Mitra. 

The results of Dr. Mitra’s “Hole in the Wall” experiments may cause one to wonder, as I did, whether the advancements in technology will one day eliminate the need for teachers.  While I do not believe that we will ever get to that place, what I do know is that the presence of technology has indeed brought about definite shifts in the way teaching and learning take place.  There is therefore much to learn from Mitra’s work. 

I believe that as teachers, we sometimes ignore the fact that our students are in possession of many of the skills - technological and otherwise - that they need to investigate and discover for themselves.  Consequently, we fail to tap into their potentials, and we lose them in the process. 

Thankfully, however, all is not lost, as we can work diligently towards changing the way we do things in order to maximize the use of ICT in our modern classrooms, bearing in mind the lessons learned from Mitra's experiments.