Amanda Palmer: The art of asking

TED2013. Long Beach, CA. February 25 – March 1, 2013. Photo: James Duncan Davidson, MODIFIED: VisibleProcrastinations

Art, music, connection, trust

http://www.amandapalmer.net/news/ted/

Schools as we know them are obsolete. They aren’t broken. They are outdated.

“Schools as we know them are obsolete. They aren’t broken. They are outdated.” – Sugata Mitra, winner of 2013 #TEDPrize.

… “The Victorians created a global computer made up of people. It’s called the bureaucratic administrative machine,” says Mitra, in the bold opening of his talk. “In order to keep that running, you need lots and lots of people. They must be identical to each other … So they created a system, called school, to make parts [for this human computer]. They must have good handwriting, they must be able to read, and they must be able to add, subtract and do division.”
But these skills aren’t as necessary with the advent of computers.“It’s quite fashionable to say education system is broken,” says Mitra. “It’s not, It’s wonderfully constructed — it’s just that we don’t need it anymore. It’s outdated.”
We can’t imagine the technology of the future, and thus we can’t know what jobs we’ll need the skills for. So Mitra suggests that education should be about developing the ability to learn anything on one’s own. …
– A school in the cloud: Sugata Mitra accepts the TED Prize at TED2013 [TED]

* Sugata Mitra’s talk, in cartoon form

[TED] Jack Horner: Building a dinosaur from a chicken

Renowned paleontologist Jack Horner has spent his career trying to reconstruct a dinosaur. He’s found fossils with extraordinarily well-preserved blood vessels and soft tissues, but never intact DNA. So, in a new approach, he’s taking living descendants of the dinosaur (chickens) and genetically engineering them to reactivate ancestral traits — including teeth, tails, and even hands — to make a “Chickenosaurus”. [TED]

Next step? The skeleton of a rare Malaysian dragon – from chicken bones!

[TED] Sugata Mitra: The child-driven education

From TED Global 2010;

About this talk
Education scientist Sugata Mitra tackles one of the greatest problems of education — the best teachers and schools don’t exist where they’re needed most. In a series of real-life experiments from New Delhi to South Africa to Italy, he gave kids self-supervised access to the web and saw results that could revolutionize how we think about teaching.
– TED

Sugata Mitra’s new experiments in self-teaching

A teacher that can be replaced by a machine, should be.
– Arthur C Clarke

If children have interest, then education happens.
– Arthur C Clarke

SOLEs: Self Organised Learning Environments

I think this is more ‘directed discovery’ than child-driven education, but this is very much the way we approach our JOTI/JOTA activities.

The hole in the wall project
This video was recorded during Sugata Mitra’s conference at UOC UNESCO Chair in e-Learning Fifth International Seminar: Fighting the Digital Divide Though Education.

[TED] Gary Flake: is Pivot a turning point for web exploration?

About this talk
Gary Flake demos Pivot, a new way to browse and arrange massive amounts of images and data online. Built on breakthrough Seadragon technology, it enables spectacular zooms in and out of web databases, and the discovery of patterns and links invisible in standard web browsing.
– TED : TED2010, Filmed Feb 2010, posted Mar 2010

Kiran Bir Sethi teaches kids to take charge [TED]

Kiran Bir Sethi teaches kids to take charge

Kiran Bir Sethi shows how her groundbreaking Riverside School in India teaches kids life’s most valuable lesson: “I can.” Watch her students take local issues into their own hands, lead other young people, even educate their parents.
– TED India 2009 [TED]

Julian Treasure: The 4 ways sound affects us

Playing sound effects both pleasant and awful, Julian Treasure shows how sound affects us in four significant ways. Listen carefully for a shocking fact about noisy open-plan offices.
– Julian Treasure: The 4 ways sound affects us [TED]