This is a MUST-listen! A friend mentioned this story to me and after much searching I've found it to post to excite and amaze.

A fantastic story of Sugata Mitra, a physicist and computer scientist turned teacher education researcher who put computers in slums with no instruction and came back after a couple of months to find that children had taught themselves how to use them. It's the first 14 minutes of a much longer show about human learning, also worth listening to.

Some gems from my listening:

"In an irritated voice they said, "You've given us a machine that works only in English, so we had to teach ourselves English in order to use it." That's the first time as a teacher I'd heard the phrase "teach ourselves" said so casually."

It's now "make learning happen" but perhaps "let learning happen."

http://www.npr.org/2013/06/21/179015266/how-much-can-children-teach-themselves