Thanks to a Filmmaking Award from the Sundance Insititute and TED, I’ve started making a film about the work of 2013 TED Prize winner, Sugata Mitra. Since the mid 1990s, Sugata has pioneered the development of ‘self-organised learning environments’ (SOLEs) with children. He began with an experiment installing a computer into a wall of a slum adjoining his workplace (an idea which became the inspiration for ‘Slumdog Millionaire’). Check out his TED talk for the story of how that work developed into his current project, The School In The Cloud, in which children teach themselves via cloud-based computing overseen by a global network of mediators.
Mitra is a fantastic subject for a documentary – articulate, funny and provocative. I proposed a film which explores his work from the bottom up, focusing on the stories of those whose lives it is changing, in rural India and north east England.
The film will be produced by Al Morrow and Dan Demissie at Met Film Production, my hard-working partners on Town Of Runners.
JERRY ROTHWELL 