- Posted by sondreb on September 13, 2008
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Today I want to take some time to tell you about TED talks. There are still many people who haven't heard about TED, which is an amazing resource where you can tap into the minds of some incredible individuals. You can watch talks on all kinds of themes, ranging from technology, arts, global issues and more. While the technology talks are always interesting, there are interesting new thoughts and ideas regarding education and how we actually go about in our daily lives and how we learn new things. Just as you might learn something by reading my blog and watching these talks right now.
http://www.ted.com/
First video I would like to share with you is a talk by Kevin Kelly titled "Predicting the next 5,000 days of the web". In an evolutionary perspective from the beginning of the universe, our solar system, planet and life on earth, 5,000 days is absolutely nothing. But when you look at the web today and what we've archive in these few thousand days, it does blow your mind when you stop for a second and consider it. The wealth of information and data that's readily available for you, just a single search and click away - it's mind boggling that everything actually works. The computer that is the web is actually always online and have seen no downtime so far.
So from Kevin Kelly's talk, I came across one from july 2005 by Clay Shirky. The talk discusses the difference between the institutional model and the collaboration model which has spawned up to become bigger than ever with the birth of the Web. Wikipedia, Open Source, Creative Commons, and so forth are examples on how the collaborative model prevails on the older institutional model. He actually uses Flickr to illustrate one of his points and searches for mermaidparade. What is interesting is comparing the difference from 2005 until today, september 2008.
Clay found 3,100 photos.
I found 46,115 photos.
That's an increase of almost 15 times more photos in a little more than 1100 days. Which is actually a little more than 39 photos a day of mermaids in parades.
You can easily spend hours and days just watching through the interesting talks on TED, and I hope you do so. By educating and enlightening individuals, we will bring positivity into the society and local communities. Education and knowledge is very important, the normal and historical educational system that we've had for a while now does seem to work for some people, but it also fails miserably with others. I come from a background of little educational knowledge, but rather, I have a genuine interest in knowledge and information. So I spend a lot of my off-work hours to actually read books and the web, being involved in online forums, e-mail discussions and so forth. I can't seem to feed my hunger for new information. If it weren't for the computers while I was growing up, I'd probably be diagnosed ADHD.
So while schools through it's institutional model has it's value, I believe we will soon see new ways of actually educating people (children) and having processes in place in the society to fulfill the individual needs of every one. There are always people that doesn't cope with the normal school, it's built around a model that makes everyone equals. The current system fails on on individuals on both ends of the extremes.
So my next video is by Jonathan Drori, which explains why we don't understand as much as we think we do.
Jonathan mentions that in some countries, before going to school, kids actually knows better how magnetism and gravity works. His last takeaway is: Fiddle with things ... mentally and physically.
I could sit here writing all day and showing you some great videos, but you will probably be able to find interesting talks on your own. But before we end this, I want to focus on Sir Ken Robinson's talk on how schools might kill creativity.
Ok, one final video, I'm sure all of you have seen the videos on YouTube with Johnny Lee and how he used his creativity to create cool stuff with the Nintendo Wii remote. It actually ended up getting him on TED.
And don't forget Paul Rothemund's talk on how to build stuff by manipulating the DNA structures. So a question for my readers, how quickly does your computer complete a protein folding sequence on the Folding @ Home network? There is actually a GPU-accelerated version available, so go check it out: http://folding.stanford.edu/
Are you still reading? Go on to http://www.ted.com/!