Adam Leipzig: "How to know your life purpose in 5 minutes" @ TEDxMalibu

As the academic year trickles away, our seniors are beginning to adopt moony faces.  Their heads fill with longings for the future, and they begin the arduous process of bidding Kildonan farewell...with not a small amount of sadness and loss.  For months they have concerned themselves with administrative tasks concerning post-Kildonan life:  filling out applications for colleges, internships, and scholarships, writing essays, securing financial aid packages and living conditions, etc.  But now, as the spring renders us daft, once more they embrace the stirrings that led them to this process in the first place.

To help them center themselves, we would like to offer the preceding TED Talk (@TED Talk).  Author, educator, CEO of Entertainment Media Partners, former senior executive at Walt Disney Pictures (@DisneyPictures), and supervisor of some 25 films, Adam Leipzig (@adamleipzig) reminds us that we should not wait to we actualize our passions.  Through a sequence resembling a guided meditation, he encourages us to cement our dreams by considering five questions:  (1) Who are you?, (2) What do you do?, (3) Who do you do it for?, (4) What do those people want or need?, and (5) How do those people transform as a result?

One of the most difficult things that happens when you meet people for the first time is they ask you this question:  'So what do you do?' And, if you're like some of us, that's a really challenging question sometimes.  Particularly if you're in these moments where you're between things, or you're feeling vulnerable, or it isn't defined.  Or what you seem to do isn't what you really do, or what you're paid to do isn't how you define yourself.  So when people ask you this question, 'So what do you do?,' ... here's what you do:  you just say the very last thing you called out.  How what you do changes the people you do it for.  For example, you might say, 'I give kids awesome dreams.' ... Or you might say, 'I help people look and feel their best.' ... Or you might say, 'I help people get great work into the world.' ... And then, that little snippet that you just said becomes your personal elevator pitch.

What did you think of Leipzig's presentation? Please post in the comments section below.

Ramsey Musallam: "3 rules to spark learning"

 
As we enter the spring, the last months of the academic year hang blissful and ominous before us.  Will we have the energy to endure? Will our students succumb to senioritis?

Fortunately, an answer has come from our personal learning network in the form of Ramsey Musallam (@ramusallam).  Chemistry teacher at Sacred Heart Cathedral Prep in San Francisco, CA, Ed.D. recipient, and manager of the Cycles of Learning blog, Musallam has had time to consider this question across fifteen years of teaching.  In a TED Talk delivered in 2013, Musallam critiques contemporary trends in education and argues that teachers must assign themselves a very specific purpose:  cultivators of curiosity.

You know, questions and curiosity like Maddie's are magnets that draw us towards our teachers, and they transcend all technology or buzzwords in education. But if we place these technologies before student inquiry, we can be robbing ourselves of our greatest tool as teachers: our students' questions. For example, flipping a boring lecture from the classroom to the screen of a mobile device might save instructional time, but if it is the focus of our students' experience, it's the same dehumanizing chatter just wrapped up in fancy clothing. But if instead we have the guts to confuse our students, perplex them, and evoke real questions, through those questions, we as teachers have information that we can use to tailor robust and informed methods of blended instruction.

What did you think of Musallam's presentation? Please post in the comments section below.

Clancy: Nanotechnology &​ Nanomedicine

Due to last week's unconventional structure, the IP team was privileged to meet with new (albeit temporary) iPeople from grades 8 to 12.  One of the students who graced our building was sophomore Clancy.  Currently engaged in the Personal Project, Clancy approached the IP team with an interest in the ethics of technology and nanotechnology (@Nanotechnology, #nanotechnology).  Throughout the week, he proved himself an expert on the subjects and an ideal candidate for IP.

Nanotechnology, Clancy explained, is essentially the ability to engineer matter at the atomic scale.  The instruments of nanotechnology are "nano," or tiny, devices that are programmed to solve many of the world's most pressing, most flummoxing problems.  Such equipment could remedy the ozone by simply following pre-programmed directions to "seal" up its hole.  According to Clancy, however, nanotechnology is particularly promising for its medicinal applications. This fledgling field is known as "nanomedicine," and its primary focus is upon "nanoparticles":  bio machines designed to target disease and deliver cargo consisting of medicine.

Clancy taught the IP team about nanomedicine using a #TED Talk by Dr. Jamey Marth given at the American Riviera Bank in Santa Barbara, CA.  Marth, the Director of the Center for Nanomedicine, shares his groundbreaking research into the discipline:

Now, to be able to treat cancer requires the addition of nanoparticles to the patient.  And this is the future. ... These particles are emitting light, so they tell us back - in the surgical table and research - exactly where they are going.  They're not binding to anything because they only will bind to diseased tissue.  ... Again, because it's not radiation, it's not chemotherapy, there won't be any collateral damage.  We can target these particles precisely to where they are supposed to go in the body.

...So they travel through the vasculature, and now we're outside of the vasculature just watching an animation of nanoparticles.  As they come in contact with the tumors, they light up the tumors.  Scientists have now figured out how to not only attach the nanoparticles but to get the drugs to travel completely through the tumor (which is really important).  And once these nanoparticles attach to the tumor, they release their payload.  Their payload, again, which includes therapeutics.  It includes toxins that will kill the cancer, but they won't touch the other tissue.

What do you think? Do you have a comment for Clancy? If so, please post in the comments section below.

Description of 1st image:  A graphic of nanomedicine.  Image located at adigaskell.org.  Kildonan and its IP program claim no ownership over the picture above.

Nikhil Goyal: "Why Kids Hate School?" @ TEDxBFS (2012)

At the age of 19, activist and author Nikhil Goyal (@nikhilgoya_l) has accomplished no small amount.  An activist and champion of self-directed learning, Goyal has spoken at Google (@google), MIT (@MIT), Yale (@Yale), Stanford (@Stanford), and the University of Cambridge (@Cambridge_Uni).  He has appeared on various news stations, has been named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 list, and has even authored the book One Size Does Not Fit All:  A Student's Assessment of School.  In this #TED Talk delivered at the Brooklyn Free School (#TEDxBFS) in 2012, Goyal begins by speaking about the shortcomings of school.  Although he is perhaps too strident and jumps from topic to topic using quotes, he does offer an organic vision of education that considers not only educators, administrators, and parents but also students themselves as its policymakers.

'Education is a process of living, not a preparation for future living.'  Let me say that one more time.  'Education is a process of living, not a preparation for future living.'  ... Because we have to get over this notion of education prep and move to life prep.  We have to create an educational society where learning is democratized and where kids are natural learners.  Where we're tinkering with the world.  Where they're changing things, they're pushing the human race forward.
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Around the world today we're watching millions of young people that are under the age of twenty-five collectively protest for self-expression, transparency, and the sweet taste of freedom.  What we're doing to them is we're not giving them a voice.  We're not letting them speak out.  We're putting them on the sidelines.  What I like to say about public education is that we have 'the kids table' and we have 'the adults table.'  At the adults table, that's where all the decisions are made.  It's like Thanksgiving; we're separated.  And really, that's how it is.  We need to have one table where we have kids and adults.  What we offer, most importantly, kids, is a fresh perspective.

Thoughts? Please post in the comments section below.

Sam Chaltain: "The Art (&​ Science) of Great Teaching" @ TEDxYouthBFS

 
Former educator, writer, and education activist, Sam Chaltain (@samchaltain) partners with schools and school districts "to help them create healthy, high-functioning learning environments" (passages taken from URL of Chaltain's talk).  In this #TED Talk delivered at the Brooklyn Free School (#TEDxBFS) in 2012, Chaltain highlights the recent changes to education and advocates the need for balance:  between teacher and student, art and science, and - most fundamentally - between understandings and applications of freedom.

...the biologists are telling us that life - whether it's an ecosystem or a public school system - is best organized by principles of ecology, not hierarchy.  The quantum physicists would tell us that change - whether it's a human being or a sub-atomic particle - is best understood by principles of relationship, not force.  And we should take heed that freedom - whether it's a teacher or a student - is best unleashed through simple, shared structures, not unbounded prairies.  This is the lesson that exists for all of us.  This is what the natural world reminds of us every day.  This is what Dewey was urging us to think about one hundred years ago.  And this is our road map forward:  art and science, individual freedom and group structure.

What did you think? Please post in the comments section below.

Rachel Smith: "Drawing in class" @ TEDxUFM (2012)

Senior Consultant and the Director of Digital Facilitation Services for The Grove Consultants Internationa in San Francisco," Rachel Smith is a visual facilitator, has led her own graphic design company, and continues to explore the intersection of education and technology (passages taken from the description of Smith's TEDx Talk).  As such, she proposes that visual note-taking - a record system consisting of pictures in addition to words - is an important learning tool...not for dyslexic students but for all children.  Smith elaborates upon her thoughts in a talk given at TEDxUFM (@TEDxUFM) called "Drawing in class":

Visual note-taking opens the door for more playful connections between information, for students to use their imaginations in an activity that can often be very passive (note-taking).  It also helps students to create a personal visual memory aid that they can study from later, that they can look at and [use to] tell themselves the story again.  When a teacher is teaching, what they're doing, really, is telling a story about something they're passionate about.  And when a student takes visual notes, what they're doing is making that story visible.

We're going to go over three simple steps that will get you set on this road, get you started.  And the first one is to choose a tool that works for you.  The second one is to start building up that mental library of images (that I talked about).  And the third one is to really practice listening and capturing the key points.

When you've done visual notes, the way that you tell if you did it right is if you can look at your notes and tell back the story that you heard from that speaker.  Then you did it right.  There's all there is to it.  There's no more than that.  Can you look at it and recall the story?

What do you think? Do you employ visual note-taking? Please post in the comments section below.

Description of 1st image:  A sample of Rachel Smith's visual note-taking strategies.  Photo located at nsanc.org.  Kildonan and its IP program claim no ownership over this picture.

Sugata Mitra: "School in the Cloud: What Happened after TED Prize 2013" @ TEDxUFM

Two years ago, Professor of Educational Technology at the School of Education, Communication and Language Sciences (@secls) at Newcastle University (@StudentsNCL) Sugata Mitra (@Sugatam) won the 2013 TED Prize.  In the following @TEDxUFM Talk (delivered at Universidad Francisco Marroquín, Guatemala), Mitra speaks about the progress he has made over the past two years:  "I made a project for TED. ... I would build seven laboratories, seven learning laboratories.  Five of them would be in India, and two of them would be in England."  His insights remain provocative, and his passion for self-directed learning proves as infectious as ever.

Well, there are reports from all around the world that children are not asking questions to people.  Or at least if they have to ask a question to a person, they do that after they have asked their phones.  Children don't want to learn how to multiply, divide, add, and subtract because they say they already know how to do that.  It's done with phones.  Children don't want to particularly learn to read because they say there are things that can read out things to them even if they don't know how to read.  At the moment, they don't like to write by hand because they want to know why they should learn to write by hand.  Will ever do it in the rest of their lives? So what happens in a world where reading, writing, and arithmetic are treated in such a cavalier manner?

...

In Killingworth, this is a room:  it just looks like a nice lounge with computers and an XBox (@XBox)  And the teachers, when I built it, they said, 'Sugata, this is a bit too much.  Do you have any idea of what they will do with that XBox? They will do nothing else except play with the XBox.'  So I said, 'Well, that's our challenge, isn't it?' If you've gone in there to teach Geography and the students are playing with the XBox, it means that Geography is more boring than the XBox.  Then we should re-look at Geography, chuck it from the curriculum, or put it into the XBox.  Somehow.

Description of the 1st image:  Mitra's SOLE learning laboratory in Killingworth, England.  Photo located at blog.ted.com.  Kildonan and its IP program claim no ownership over the above image.

For a post discussing Mitra's "The child-driven education," please click here.

For a post discussing Mitra's "Build a School in the Cloud," please click here.

Austin Kleon: "Steal Like an Artist" @ TEDxKC (2012)

During a windy snow day this past week, the IP faculty asked the iPeople (a term synonymous with "IPians," introduced by Khaled A.) to watch a video on "stealing" and art.  We, the IP team, hope that this talk will inspire our learners to not only form collaborative partnerships with one another but also to re-evaluate the notions of influence, plagiarism, and originality as they move forward in life.

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Writer, author, and New York Times bestselling author of Show Your Work! and Newspaper Blackout, Austin Kleon (@austinkleon) has spoken to young artists and at organizations such as Pixar (@DisneyPixar) and Google (@google).  In 2012, he delivered a talk at @TEDxKC, "Steal Like An Artist," after releasing a book of the same name earlier that year.  During his presentation, Kleon offers a list of ten ideas that all beginning artists should consider.  His talk amounts to a radical yet timely reinterpretation of creativity for the 21st century.

So not only was my idea idea completely unoriginal.  It turns out there was a 250 year-old history of finding poetry in the newspaper.  So what am I supposed to do? Instead of getting discouraged, I kept on.  Because I know something that a lot of artists know but few will admit to.  And that is:  nothing is completely original.  All creative work builds on what came before.  Every new idea is just a remix, or a mash-up, of one or two previous ideas.
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How does an artist look at the world? Well, first, she asks herself, 'What's worth stealing?' And second, she moves onto the next thing.  That's about all there is to it.  When you look at the world this way, there is no longer good art and bad art.  There's just art worth stealing and art that isn't.  And everything in the world is up for grabs.  If you don't find something worth stealing today, you might find it worth stealing tomorrow, or the month after that, or years later.

What did you think? Have you "stolen" anything notable lately? Please post in the comments section below.

Description of 1st image:  Kleon's visual representation of how artists see the world.  Photo located at sharingisliberty.wordpress.com.  Kildonan and its IP program claim no ownership over this picture.

Shelley Wright: "The power of student-driven learning" @ TEDxWestVancouverED

A teacher/​education blogger living in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, Shelley Wright (@wrightsroom) enjoyed a career-altering experience when a course on pedagogy opened her eyes to self-directed learning.  In a TED Talk delivered at TEDxWestVancouverED (@TEDxWestVanED) Wright relates that, one day, she created the space for her science class to independently launch a project.  They decided to raise money for a non-profit organization attempting to build schools for Ugandan refugees.  The goal of Wright's students? $20,000 in 45 days.

And so as I stood at the front of my room looking at my students, I said, 'If you could design school to be anything you wanted it to be, what would it look like? What would it sound like? What would I hear? What would I see? What would it feel like? What would you be doing?' And when they realized that I was serious, they began to write.
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That day I learned to believe in my students.  To believe in what really, deeply matters to them.  And to remove whatever obstacles I can to try to make that happen.  More importantly, my students learned to believe in themselves.  They learned that they can make a difference.  They had a saying the entire forty-five days:  'We are not the future.  We are right now.'

Donald Clark: "More pedagogic change in 10 years than last 1000 years" @ TEDxGlasgow

CEO and one of the founders of Epic Group PLC, Donald Clark (@DonaldClarke63) is committed to the idea that #technology does - and must - play a role in education (passages taken from Clark's bio).  Having spent "30 years experience in online learning, games, simulations, social media and mobile learning projects," Clark had this to say about technology in education during a 2012 @TEDxGlasgow event:

The real scalability in education comes with the Internet because it gives us a world of digital replication for free.  A world of digital abundance where some aspects of learning content are available for anyone, anywhere, at any time.  It absolutely frees us from the tyranny of time and location. ... And that's the trick:  freeing education from a place, from a specific time.

Now if - as is clearly the case - the Internet and #socialmedia can lead young people to change the tyrannical and corrupt governments, can we really say that social media will have no role in education? How do you think those kids in Tahrir Square (@3alTahrir) learned to avoid tear gas by using Pepsi Cola (@pepsi)? How do you think those revolutions arose first through blogging, then through Facebook, then through Twitter, then through YouTube, and the ubiquity of mobile devices? We'd be fools to ignore the pedagogic lessons that are right in front of our eyes, politically and in terms of education.

What do you think? How can we use social media outlets such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube educationally? Please post in the comments below.

Description of image:  Various social media channels.  Picture located at cdn.socialmediaexaminer.com.  Kildonan and its IP program claim no ownership over the above graphic.

Cameron Herold: "Let's raise kids to be entrepreneurs" @ TEDxEdmonton

Speaker, author of Double, Double:  How to Double Your Revenue and Profit in 3 Years or Less, and an influential source in increasing the revenue of 1-800-GOT-JUNK? from $2 million to $106 million in just six years, Cameron Herold (@CameronHerold) is - first and foremost - an #entrepreneur.  Four years ago, he delivered a TED Talk (@TEDTalks) at TEDxEdmonton (@TEDxEdmonton) during which he called upon parents and teachers to alter their rearing and educational practices in one fundamental way:  by instilling entrepreneurial skills in ALL children.  Herold, after all, "has been a entrepreneurial innovator since launching his first company at the age of 21" (passage taken from Herold's bio); he began acquiring business strategies at a very young age, so he understands the importance of nurture AND nature in developing an entrepreneurial mindset.

Herold goes on to frame a sort of psychological and educational profile of entrepreneurs.  Does this sound familiar...?

I just came back from speaking in Barcelona at the YPO global conference, and everyone that I met over there who's an entrepreneur struggled with school. I have 18 out of the 19 signs of attention deficit disorder diagnosed. ... Attention deficit disorder, bipolar disorder. Do you know that bipolar disorder is nicknamed the CEO disease? Ted Turner (@TedTurnerIII)'s got it. Steve Jobs has it. All three of the founders of Netscape had it. I could go on and on. Kids -- you can see these signs in kids. And what we're doing is we're giving them Ritalin and saying, 'Don't be an entrepreneurial type. Fit into this other system and try to become a student.' Sorry, entrepreneurs aren't students. We fast-track. We figure out the game.

Are our dyslexic students/​children predisposed to greater entrepreneurial prowess? Do you have a strategy, lesson plan, etc. to help our kids practice innovation in life and in the classroom? Please write in the comments section below.

Description of image:  Herold delivering his "Let's raise kids to be entrepreneurs" @ TEDxEdmonton.  Picture located at static.squarespace.com.  Kildonan and its IP program claim no ownership over the above photo.

Sir Ken Robinson: "How to escape education's death valley" @ TED Talks Education (2013)

More words from  English author, speaker and international advisor on education Sir Ken Robinson (@SirKenRobinson):

Not far from where I live is a place called Death Valley. Death Valley is the hottest, driest place in America, and nothing grows there. Nothing grows there because it doesn't rain. Hence, Death Valley. In the winter of 2004, it rained in Death Valley. Seven inches of rain fell over a very short period. And in the spring of 2005, there was a phenomenon. The whole floor of Death Valley was carpeted in flowers for a while. What it proved is this: that Death Valley isn't dead. It's dormant. Right beneath the surface are these seeds of possibility waiting for the right conditions to come about, and with organic systems, if the conditions are right, life is inevitable. It happens all the time. You take an area, a school, a district, you change the conditions, give people a different sense of possibility, a different set of expectations, a broader range of opportunities, you cherish and value the relationships between teachers and learners, you offer people the discretion to be creative and to innovate in what they do, and schools that were once bereft spring to life.

For a post discussing Robinson's "RSA Animate:  Changing Education Paradigms," please click here.

For a post discussing Robinson's "How schools kill creativity," please click here. 

For a post discussing Robinson's "Bring on the learning revolution!," please click here.

Max D.: The Neuroscience of Humor

 

Recently returned from viewing The Illusionists (@Illusionists7) on Broadway, Max D. is inspired to hone his routine further by exploring one key trait of magic:  humor.  I (Jonathan Bisson) write that humor is key because this argument comes directly from Max himself.  Every single trick, he emphatically emphasizes, consists of comedy; there are merely tricks that overtly use humor and those that do not.  

I was a little confused about what he meant, so I decided to delve further into the neuroscience of humor; this search seemed prudent, for Max was already exploring this subject himself.  

For anyone interested in conducting a similar search, I would immediately recommend Peter McGraw (@PeterMcGraw)'s "What Makes Things Funny?" at TEDxBoulder (@TEDxBoulder) (shown below).  In his talk, McGraw emphasizes that humor primarily operates in a situation characterized as a "benign violation."  Such a situation, he goes on, consists of an idea or perspective that threatens the way that you believe the world should be ("violation") made less threatening by distance ("benign").  He goes on to discuss stairs as a way of demonstrating his theory:  

Walking down a flight of stairs =​ No Violation =​ Not Funny.  Falling down a flight of stairs, but being unhurt =​ Benign Violation =​ Funny.  Falling down that flight of stairs and being badly hurt =​ Malign Violation =​ Not Funny.

But perhaps the greatest crux of McGraw's talk (for myself, at least) was when, only a minute in, he states that "humor influences your choices," that it fundamentally impacts the way that we conceive of the world and those elements to which we pay attention.  This seems to relate EXACTLY to the sleight of hand with which magicians divert an audience's attention.  Perhaps, then, for some magicians - like Max - humor becomes the greatest "trick."

For another TED Talk on neuroscience and humor, please click here.

Charles Bingham: "Why we should shred our diplomas" @TEDxSFU

Epistemenarchist, philosopher, and professor Charles Bingham (@bingbingham) offers an intriguing perspective on higher education (#highered) and the implications of a diploma.  Let these words be food for thought for all of our budding graduates:

I think the main way the myth of schooling continues is through a small piece of paper called the diploma.  The diploma has two lives, really.  On one hand, a diploma is that thing that we all know and love.  It's a sign that I graduated from high school, or college, or university.  On the other hand, with every diploma that's printed, the diploma says, 'Knowledge is scarce, and it's supposed to be obtained only at this or that school.'

Will Richardson at TEDxNYED (2011)

American educator, parent, author, speaker, blogger, and co-publisher of Educating Modern Learners (EML) Will Richardson (@willrich45) at @TEDxNYED.

For a post discussing Richardson's "Education Leadership" at TEDxMelbourne, please click here.

Will Richardson: "Education Leadership" at TEDxMelbourne

 
American educator, parent, author, speaker, blogger, and co-publisher of Educating Modern Learners (EML) Will Richardson (@willrich45) has been called "a trendsetter in education" by The New York Times.  He has spoken to tens of thousands of educators in more than a dozen countries about the value of online learning networks.  Two years ago, he presented at TEDxMelbourne (@TEDxMelbourne), an event that encouraged educators, parents, and students to think about the "changing nature of education and how technology can shape the future of learning" (passages taken from YouTube description of Richardson's talk).

Richardson raises some valid points that we in education must begin to discuss:

We have to start thinking differently about what school is. There's a great quote that I read by a guy by the name of Justin Reich (the Richard L. Menschel HarvardX Research Fellow, based in the Office of the President and Provost at Harvard University: @bjfr) who's a teacher at Harvard.  And he said, 'You know, the problem right now is that we're paying so much attention to the measurable part of learning that we risk neglecting the immeasurable part of learning."  And it's that immeasurable part that - right now, in a world where we have access to so much stuff - it's that immeasurable stuff, that hard-to-measure stuff that's much more important. It's that creativity, that gritty problem-solving, that persevering disposition that we have toward learning.  All that stuff that's really hard to measure? That's the stuff that our children need right now.

For a post discussing Richardson at TEDxNYED (2011), please click here.

Sugata Mitra: "Build a School in the Cloud" @ TED2013

 

One year ago, Professor of Educational Technology at the School of Education, Communication and Language Sciences (@secls) at Newcastle University (@StudentsNCL) Sugata Mitra (@Sugatam) won the 2013 TED Prize (@TEDPrize).  At TED2013, he delivered his wish that the world help him "build a school in the cloud."  He essentially called upon educators, parents, and students to assist him in designing a learning experience whereby all children - located all over the world - can interact with technology and pursue meaningful questions in environments in which adults merely support and encourage them.  He also addressed these same populations to implement Self-Organized Learning Environments (SOLEs) (@schoolincloud) and to forward him the data to serve as the raw materials for upcoming publications.

What results has Mitra's "wish" engendered far? SOLE Central (@NCLsolecentral) and the beginning of classroom-based implementation of SOLEs.  

The learning revolution begins.  Will we soon see SOLE-based classrooms at Kildonan...?

So what's happening here? I think what we need to look at is ... learning as the product of educational self-organization. If you allow the educational process to self-organize, then learning emerges. It's not about making learning happen. It's about letting it happen. The teacher sets the process in motion and then she stands back in awe and watches as learning happens. I think that's what all this is pointing at.

For our previous post on Sugata Mitra's "The child-driven education," please click here.  For a link to Mitra's TED Book, Beyond the Hole in the Wall, please click here.

(SOLE Central, pictured above.  Photo located at ncl.ac.uk.  Kildonan and its IP program claim no ownership over this image.)  

For a post discussing Mitra's "The child-driven education," please click here.

For a post discussing Mitra's "School in the Cloud: What Happened after TED Prize 2013," please click here.

 

Sir Ken Robinson: "Bring on the learning revolution!" @ TED2010

Four or five years ago, English author, speaker and international advisor on education Sir Ken Robinson (@SirKenRobinson) delivered a TED Talk in which he criticized the linear, factory model of education.  In such a system, Robinson explained, educators/​schools employ static curricula to lead students to a pre-determined "output" or skills base.  He went onto to assert that the world needs a supportive, agricultural framework of education that supports children as they organically formulate answers to their own questions using a personalized curriculum.

We have moved closer to Robinson's conception over the past five years.  BUT...have we enacted the revolution that he demands?

But, you see, there are things we're enthralled to in education. Let me give you a couple of examples. One of them is the idea of linearity: that it starts here and you go through a track and if you do everything right, you will end up set for the rest of your life. Everybody who's spoken at TED has told us implicitly, or sometimes explicitly, a different story: that life is not linear; it's organic. We create our lives symbiotically as we explore our talents in relation to the circumstances they help to create for us. But, you know, we have become obsessed with this linear narrative. And probably the pinnacle for education is getting you to college. I think we are obsessed with getting people to college. Certain sorts of college. I don't mean you shouldn't go to college, but not everybody needs to go and not everybody needs to go now. Maybe they go later, not right away.

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There's been a lot of talk about dreams over the course of this few days. And I wanted to just very quickly ... I was very struck by Natalie Merchant's songs last night, recovering old poems. I wanted to read you a quick, very short poem from W. B. Yeats, who some of you may know. He wrote this to his love, Maud Gonne, and he was bewailing the fact that he couldn't really give her what he thought she wanted from him. And he says, 'I've got something else, but it may not be for you.' He says this: 'Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths, Enwrought with gold and silver light, The blue and the dim and the dark cloths Of night and light and the half-light, I would spread the cloths under your feet: But I, being poor, have only my dreams; I have spread my dreams under your feet; Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.' And every day, everywhere, our children spread their dreams beneath our feet. And we should tread softly.

For a post discussing Robinson's "RSA Animate:  Changing Education Paradigms," please click here.

For a post discussing Robinson's "How schools kill creativity," please click here. 

For a post discussing Robinson's "How to escape education's death valley," please click here.

Peter Gray: "The decline of play" at TEDxNavesink

In following TEDx Talk, author, American psychologist, and research professor of psychology at Boston College (@BostonCollege) Dr. Peter Gray discusses play as well as our children's and students' access to it.  He suggests that, since the 1950s, there has been "a dramatic decline in children's freedom to play with other children" without the presence of adult supervision (passages taken from the YouTube (@YouTube) description offered by TEDx Talks).  He also notes a "dramatic increase in anxiety, depression, feelings of helplessness, suicide, and narcissism in children and adolescents" and hypothesizes that this trend is directly influenced by the decline of play.  Ultimately, he argues that "free play is essential for children's healthy social and emotional development."

The particularly chilling aspect of this talk is that Dr. Gray's message was delivered only six months ago.  Occasionally we are able to construct for ourselves a kind of barrier in which we are able to rationalize danger simply by measuring the passage of time.  For example, a person might be able to defuse the call-to-arms offered by a video concerned with antibiotic resistant strains of diseases merely because the video was released several years earlier.  Even if no measurable and substantial progress has been made, time in itself gives the viewer the illusion that things have improved.  But this video, so pivotal to the emotional states of our children and students as they learn in school right now, allows us no such buffer.  The question remains, then:  what can we do to change this? What plans can we immediately initiate to alleviate this problem and bring more unstructured free time back into the lives of young people?

Sir Ken Robinson: "How schools kill creativity" at TED 2006

Eight or nine years ago, English author, speaker and international advisor on education Sir Ken Robinson (@SirKenRobinson) delivered a #TED talk in which he called upon schools - especially U.S. institutions - to begin to divest themselves of those practices that limit creativity.  Instead, he urged, schools must begin to deliberately nurture the development of students' imaginative capacity.

What follows is a blurb from Robinson's talk as well as a link to the full speech.  Thank you, Trey, for locating this video and bringing it to the attention of the IP faculty:

Now our education system is predicated on the idea of academic ability. And there's a reason. The whole system was invented -- around the world, there were no public systems of education, really, before the 19th century. They all came into being to meet the needs of industrialism. So the hierarchy is rooted on two ideas. Number one, that the most useful subjects for work are at the top. So you were probably steered benignly away from things at school when you were a kid, things you liked, on the grounds that you would never get a job doing that. Is that right? Don't do music, you're not going to be a musician; don't do art, you won't be an artist. Benign advice -- now, profoundly mistaken. The whole world is engulfed in a revolution. And the second is academic ability, which has really come to dominate our view of intelligence, because the universities designed the system in their image. If you think of it, the whole system of public education around the world is a protracted process of university entrance. And the consequence is that many highly talented, brilliant, creative people think they're not, because the thing they were good at at school wasn't valued, or was actually stigmatized. And I think we can't afford to go on that way.

In the next 30 years, according to UNESCO, more people worldwide will be graduating through education than since the beginning of history. More people, and it's the combination of all the things we've talked about -- technology and its transformation effect on work, and demography and the huge explosion in population. Suddenly, degrees aren't worth anything. Isn't that true? When I was a student, if you had a degree, you had a job. If you didn't have a job it's because you didn't want one. And I didn't want one, frankly. (Laughter) But now kids with degrees are often heading home to carry on playing video games, because you need an MA where the previous job required a BA, and now you need a PhD for the other. It's a process of academic inflation. And it indicates the whole structure of education is shifting beneath our feet. We need to radically rethink our view of intelligence.

For a post discussing Robinson's "RSA Animate:  Changing Education Paradigms," please click here.

For a post discussing Robinson's "Bring on the learning revolution!," please click here. 

For a post discussing Robinson's "How to escape education's death valley," please click here.