Thanks to Sheridan Brull, I learned of the educational scientist Sugata Mitra's amazing experimental work via his TED talk on http://www.ted.com/talks/sugata_mitra_the_child_driven_education.html .

I was originally thinking about how to improve student retention of the material they learn in class, especially in regard to 8th grade history classes that I taught earlier this past spring.  We were covering the Roman empire, and as I was new to the school, I asked them what they had learned in 7th grade history. When they answered, "Oh, Greek history and mythology and stuff," I excitedly prompted them, "That's fantastic!  Do you remember the name of the man who stole fire from the gods?"  After meeting with silence, I then asked them, "What about the guy who kept having to roll a boulder up a hill, which would just fall down once he got to the top?"  After 1 boy uttered an, "Oh!  Yeah, didn't his name start with an S..."  another frankly admitted that they didn't remember much of what they'd learned at all that year.  

Even though these students already use 1-1 laptops, and are all diligent students who are no exception to the Chinese culture around them, caring a lot about their grades, it was clear that they were only studying for the sake of each test.  

So, when I saw the wonderful effects of Sheridan's research, which is based around the idea that "Education is a self-organizing system, where learning is an emergent phenomenon,” it was astonishingly inspiring.  The keys to his experiments' success are not only in having high student motivation, despite their learning tasks ranging from biotechnology to improving their accent when speaking a foreign language, but in having students work together in small groups with one computer.  Language and technology boundaries posed to no obstacles to them, whether they were elementary school children finding computers for the first time in the streets, (strategically placed there by Sheridan), or students in traditional settings who were simply left with a computer filled with specialized knowledge in another language for 2 months and told that they probably wouldn't be able to make heads or tails of it.  With time and little encouragement, they eventually achieved the same test scores as students with trained instructors in another posh school.

The most compelling piece of evidence for me was that when elementary school students were given GCSE (gen cert 2ndary ed) questions to solve in groups of 4 with a single computer amongst them, they not only used their knowledge to search the answers and score 76% on tests given to them shortly after, but when tested on the same material 2 months later, their scores remained just as high.   This really said something about the power of self-motivating learning and collaboration combined!  I really feel like there's a significant difference between live discussion while learning and the more static texting or emailing that happens so often with online collaboration.  Anyways, this system could save schools a lot of money who were originally thinking of switching to the 1-1 laptop ratio!