Education has been a growing theme at TED. It's one that seems to strongly resonate across the community, from techies to creatives to entrepreneurs to big business C.E.O.'s. One idea that is gaining popularity is around the notion that education has to encourage and reinforce kids' natural curiosity. Unfortunately, conventional education does a very efficient job of beating kids' natural curiosity out of them. This year's TED prize winner, Dr. Sugata Mitra—the first to step up to $1 million in prize money—tackles this issue head on.

Dr. Mitra, an educational researcher and professor of educational technology at Newcastle University (UK), wishes to design the School in the Cloud—a learning lab in India, based on his vision for Self Organized Learning Environments (SOLE). The school draws inspiration from Mitra’s “Hole in the Wall” experiments, in which he observed children both learning and teaching on their own and without any guidance or intervention.

Watch Mitra's inspiring talk here and learn more about his plan for the School in the Cloud here.

(Posted also on my LinkedIn Thought Leader blog)