timbuktu » TED

Sir Ken Robinson asks do schools kill creativity?

Thomas Elsted — Fri, 26 Dec 2008 05:21:45 +0000

Another great talk found at TED following after a conversation with Mark the other day about the way we think and perform education in the world today. Truth told, Mark did most of the talking as I was preoccupied with looking forward to my Guatemalan Christmas dinner, so I decided to do a bit of homework for next time. Mark and I’ve spent a good bit of time before discussing the way our educations are shaping us as individuals and socially responsible citizens, and if indeed they are doing a good enough job at that. We’re both in and out of school and self studies, and have had the opportunity to look in on our schooling from the outside, and we’ve begun a little side project, a curriculum that I’ll post about again when it’s up and on its way. In any case, in this video talk by Sir Ken Robinson, in which he says we need to radically rethink our view of intelligence, is a great viewpoint on how we have developed a global hierarchical educational system which scorns mistakes and stills creative development in children, stigmatizing talented people who don’t fit into the neat categories for useful citizenry, and a highly inspirational call to arms for a new educational strategy. Check it out no matter your education and whether or not you see your body as a form of transport for your head.

more below.

My contention is that creativity now is as important in education as literacy, and we should treat it with the same status. (…)
Creativity, which I define as the process of having original ideas that have value, more often than not comes about through the interaction of different disciplinary ways of seeing things.

(…) Kids will take a chance. They’re not frightened of being wrong. Now, I don’t mean to say that being wrong is the same thing as being creative. What we do know is, if you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original. If you’re not prepared to be wrong. And by the time they get to be adults, most kids have lost that capacity. They have become frightened of being wrong. And we run our companies this way, we stigmatize mistakes, and we’re now running national education systems where mistakes are the worst thing you can make. And the result is, that we’re educating people out of their creative capacities. (…) We don’t grow into creativity, we grow out of it, – or rather, we get educated out of it.

The truth of what happens is, when children grow up, we start to educate them progressively from the waist up. And then we focus on their heads. And slightly to one side. (…) So you were probably steered benignly away from things at school when you were a kid, things you liked, on the grounds you would never get a job doing that. (…)
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 what they were good at at school wasn’t valued, or was actually stigmatized.

TED.com > Talks > Sir Ken Robinson: Do schools kill creativity?

Jill Bolte Taylor at TED

Thomas Elsted — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 22:56:05 +0000

I watched the talk My Stroke of Insight by brain researcher Jill Bolte Taylor on TED and it is just an amazing presentation. In a “research opportunity few brain scientists would wish for” Jill experienced a “massive stroke, and watched as her brain functions — motion, speech, self-awareness –- shut down one by one.” An inspiring talk about the brain, left and right hemisphere functions, and the transcendent, nirvana-like state she reached during her stroke – and a vision of a peaceful world if we begin to understand and utilize the possibilities of our brain. If nothing else it’s one hell of a stage performance.

I just post the link to the talk here, as the TED website gives more options for viewing/downloading.

Big Questions

Thomas Elsted — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 17:35:24 +0000

Since I got hold of my laptop once again after its trip over the Atlantic Ocean, after a successful smuggling from Denmark into the, one would think, impenetrable UK (sorry luv, you can’t take yogurt onto the plane), and then via DHL (wankers) to a bureaucratic farce out of a Kafka novel at a remote warehouse near Ezeiza international airport, I’ve been very constructive and effective. I’ve also been drinking too much expensive coffee at cafés, even restaurants, because they offer Wi-Fi.
One of my favorite pastimes is looking stuff up. I have some not only effective, but just as important flashy sources of reference that are fun to use. In my web browser, which is Firefox 3, I have my little Google search form up there on the right. Now I can also use it to do the same search in Flickr tags, Delicious tags, Wikipedia, Amazon and so on. I recently rediscovered Delicious.com, the ‘social bookmarking’ site, and it’s super handy for finding articles and saving them for future reference (in my sidebar you can see my recently bookmarked stuff). I have a number of language references online especially for Spanish, but my favorite is this: the Oxford American Dictionary Widget. It’s adorable. I don’t need to be online, and it has both thesaurus, dictionary and encyclopedic entries. I just looked up ‘widget’ and it took be about three seconds. Recently I also looked up gadget, dictionary, lexicon, reference, enunciate, diction, look, onto, ontogenesis, and farce.
For me, one of the very interesting things about dictionaries is of course that they aim to be objective, but that definitions change over time, editions, language development, and the political climate – and these may contradict each other. But in my dictionary widget, ‘torture’ is still torture and hasn’t yet turned into ‘Enhanced Coercive Interrogation Techniques’, or even ‘Special methods of questioning’. It’s not even in the thesaurus.

I also have another widget, the IDEO Big Questions widget that I got from the TED website. It asks me a new question each day. Today it is asking me, “Is it beautiful? Does it matter?”

James Nachtwey and TED

Thomas Elsted — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 23:58:10 +0000

I’ve posted several links to TED, an organisation that brings together leading scientists, thinkers and designers committed to social change at an annual conference and a website where all the conference talks by are made available for free. I read about this today and thought I’d start off posting about the same thing. I’ve been checking out the work of photojournalist James Nachtwey the last couple of days, when I read about him at Lucas Mulder’s blog. The news are that James Nachtwey received the TED Prize last year. Aside from giving him a big chunk of money, as is often the case with such prizes, the TED prize more interestingly granted him a “wish to change the world.” His wish:

I’m working on a story that the world needs to know about. I wish for you to help me break it in a way that provides spectacular proof of the power of news photography in the digital age.

On October 3, TED and James Nachtwey will present his photographic news story “on LED screens on all 7 continents”. Here is the link to the story.

Update, October 6th
Nachtwey’s wish: Awareness of XDR-TB: Extremely Drug Resistant Tuberculosis

On October 3rd the story broke of XDR-TB (Extremely (some sources: Extensively) Drug Resistant Tuberculosis) that is now spreading throughout the world, “a new and deadly form of tuberculosis that is threatening to become a global pandemic.”

TB (tuberculosis) in its common form is a terrifying and deadly disease, but both preventable and curable. But due to insuficient treatment throughout developing countries, it has now mutated and taken on a new form for which there is no reliable cure. According to TEDBlog, wiping out normal TB before it mutates costs $20. Since you are more likely to catch TB if you are malnourished, living in crowded conditions or living in a refugee camp or shelter, or if you lack access to health care, TB is a disease of the bottom million – here is a link to a TED talk by Paul Collier entitled “4 ways to improve the lives of the “bottom billion”".

With the TED funds he received for his work documenting images of war, disease and political unrest across the globe for more than 25 years, James Nachtwey has covered the epidemic in countries across the globe including South Africa, Cambodia, Siberia, Rwanda and India, documenting the devestating effects of XDR-TB and the efforts to prevent it.

On being a witness and a photographer, James Nachtwey says:

Photographers got to the extreme edges of human experience to show people what’s going on. The believe your opinions and your influence matter. They aim their pictures at your best instincts: generosity, a sense of right and wrong, the ability and the willingness to identify with others, the refusal to accept the unacceptable.

My TED wish: There’s a vital story that needs to be told. I wish for TED to help me gain access to it and then help me come up with innovative and exciting ways to use news photography in the digital era.

The story is now out, but it needs to be spread to all corners of the world, so get updated, get involved, and spread the word.

Note: I tried embedding the XDRTB video here on my blog, but it seems it is temporarily unavailable on the youtube channel. I got the message that it is not available in my country, which puzzles me. I’ve written to XDRTB.org and informed them of the problem, so hopefully we will be able to watch it there and here soon. In any case, the video is available on the XDRTB.org site.