TED-ED

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Logan Smalley (of Darius Goes West and TEDxAtlanta-RE:SOLVE) and TED recently launched TED-ED and the TED-ED Brain Trust. Because of my good fortune to serve part of my five-week sabbatical at Unboundary, I was able to participate in a conference call with Logan, as well as Tod Martin and Jenn Graham of Unboundary. Today, I made my first extended exploration of the TED-ED Brain Trust, via the Forum. WOW! Through the power of crowd-sourcing (the idea that WE are smarter than ME) and an incredible set of discussions happening on virtually countless threads – all woven together by the myriad ways that TED and education can help advance and enhance one another – the community is shaping the birth and emergence of TED-ED. Below are a teaser video and Logan’s e-mail explanation of the TED-ED Brain Trust. I am thrilled to be a participant in and contributor to this community, and I am beyond excited to add TED-ED to my daily ritual and routine of reading and research.

Dear TED-ED early registrants,

When we announced the TED-ED Brain Trust from the Long Beach stage, we expected a few hundred of you “TEDucators” to express interest in this new initiative. We hoped for 1,000. Your impassioned response to this announcement, however — your collective desire to guide TED in enriching education around the world — exceeded our wildest expectations.

In a little more than one week, over 10,000 of you — educators, students, filmmakers, animators and creative professionals from around the world — pre-registered for the TED-ED Brain Trust. We believe the collective expertise of this burgeoning community is capable of revolutionizing education.

We are so grateful for your personal interest in guiding the creation of TED-ED, and today, we are pleased to invite you to officially join the TED-ED Brain Trust.

What is the TED-ED Brain Trust?
It is an online forum where we ask you, the TED-ED community, to congregate and help shape and accelerate TED’s push into the realm of education. Your input will define this initiative’s trajectory.

We have some budding ideas of how TED content (both existing and new) can be used to enhance formal and informal learning experiences — and you can see these set out very clearly on the homepage, and in various other areas of the site. But in these early, formative stages of TED-ED, we are equally interested in hearing how you, the experts, believe TED can best serve learners around the world.

You’ll find that we’ve populated the TED-ED forum with specific questions on TED’s potential in education. On a programmatic level, finding consensus on these topics is a crucial step in the initial development of TED-ED. You will also find a free-range discussion area in the forum. We hope that you, as a community, will use this area of the TED-ED Brain Trust to express (and improve) your own ideas.

A Soft-Launch — Setting the Tone
We are opening the Brain Trust to all 10,000+ pre-registrants. When you re-register, you will likely find an open and somewhat empty forum. We ask that you swiftly employ your expertise to answer or participate wherever you feel qualified! The comments you make will not only be read by all of the incoming TED-EDsters, but they will also help set the tone of this entire endeavor.

You are the founders of TED-ED. This is your community. If you know someone whose voice needs to be heard in this forum, we encourage you to invite them to join.

We look forward to reading all of your fantastic ideas. Thank you for helping us launch the TED-ED Brain Trust.

Registration link: http://education.ted.com
(You will need to re-register to participate in the forum.)

All the best,
Logan Smalley – TED-ED Catalyst
Chris Anderson – TED Curator

Flying in a Flock

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A particular line from an email I received recently keeps coming back to my mind and making me reflect (the full email can be found in my post from March 15 – “Dumber or Just Different?“):

We have even seen some of our faculty peers engaging in technological multi-tasking by tweeting each other during presentations (so-called “back-channeling”).

If you are a teacher, educator, or school person, do you believe in note taking? Do you encourage, or expect, or even require that your students take notes? Do you assume that note takers are dutifully engaged and processing the information? Do you think that the notes can be used later to remind and refresh the thinking of the note taker? Do you sometimes ask a student who is not taking notes, “Hey, don’t you think you should be taking notes on this stuff?” Perhaps you even use a stronger prompt to elicit a note-taking response. Have you ever considered that note taking is “multitasking?”

Well, tweeting is just a form of note taking! Dare I write it…”21st Century Note Taking!” However, tweeters leverage technology to enrich their notes and interaction with whatever is the source of discussion on the “so-called ‘back-channel.'” Do you ever wish, or have you ever wished, that you could see someone else’s notes? Just a peek, so that you can calibrate your note taking and discover what the other person thinks is interesting, important, or needs-to-be-remembered. Now you can! Just join the hashtag of the back-channel and explore what other engaged note takers are thinking, asking, responding to, contemplating, etc. Perhaps there are too many people in the room for everyone to have a fair shake at audible-voice air time. No worries. Now more people in the room have a voice. One does not have to concentrate on injecting one’s thoughts into the audible conversation, but of course one can do both – tweet and discuss out loud. In fact, in my experience the two forms of participation complement and expand and encourage each other.

Note takers have always been multi-taskers. Now, many are simply “smarter” about it. The connected note takers realize the value of shared, collective, collaborative notes. WE are smarter than me.

Maybe the tweeters understand the advantages to flying in a flock, rather than flying solo.

Creativ!ty on the Ides of March

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“Beware the ides of March.” In this case, though, the ides of March brought no foreboding to Julius Caesar, but a hopeful foreshadowing of “warning” about what we need more of in schools (my direct and personal  interpretation and application). And the triumvirate in this case is – openness, process, and persistence. What in tarnation am I talking about? On March 15, I enjoyed the privilege of being a TEDxAtlanta: Creativ!ty attendee! If you are not familiar with TEDx events, I encourage you to get familiar. This was my third live TEDx event, and I tune in regularly to live streams from other TEDx venues. The events at TEDxAtlanta just keep getting better and better! Here is an outline of the Tuesday’s TEDxAtlanta: Creativ!ty (with some added hyperlinks for further exploration)…

Check-In/Lunch
12:00 PM — 12:25 PM
Unboundary

Session 1
12:25 PM — 2:30 PM
TEDx: Opening Video
India.Arie & Idan Raichel: Open Door
Tod Martin: Welcome
Victoria Rowell: The Mentor
Bonnie Cramond: To the Different Ones
Michael Ouweleen: The Day I Became Funny
Sally Hogshead: How to Fascinate
Q&A with speakers

Session 2
3:00 PM — 5:00 PM
Margaret Baldwin: The Power of Dialogue
Elizabeth Turk: The Construction of Emotion
Armin Vit: Think Stupid
Viktor Venson: No Right Brain Left Behind
Q&A with speakers
Linton Hopkins: Creativity vs. Chaos

If you are a Twitter user, you can review the tweets from the event by searching the hashtag: #Creativity2011. And videos by Definition 6, capturing the speakers and their messages, will be posted to TEDxAtlanta.com ASAP. They are ALL worth the watch.

In fact, while each TEDx talk was remarkable in its own individual right, the “magic” of a TEDxAtlanta event, and I imagine the magic of other TEDx and TED events, is the interconnectedness of the talks. Magic because the talks are not coordinated in a prior fashion – beyond being of a common topic, in this case “Creativ!ty.” Throughout the day, the ideas of openness, process, and persistence echoed louder and louder for me. Many of the speakers touched on or focused on the importance of being open to ideas and diversity of perspective. What one person labels as “weird” or “strange” can just be a mis-label for creativity (see also Sir Ken Robinson’s The Element). Yet the connotations of the labels are vastly different. We need to be cautious, skeptical in fact, of placing labels on people. We are complex creatures with the potential for a rich diversity of thought and being. We should nurture that diversity of thinking and shun the human tendency to place people in boxes of “strangeness.”

All of the speakers were woven together by the thread of process. FAILURE is expected…a good thing even. Stupid ideas should be pursued, bad jokes should be made, poor writing should fill our pages and pixels. For out of experimentation comes progress and development. Prototyping creates the opportunity for buds of ideas to become blossoms of great possibility. We have to fall down to learn to walk. We have to get bruised and scraped to learn to ride a bike. We have to talk gibberish to learn to talk. But we will learn, if we concentrate on the process of getting better…of practicing…of persisting.

Persistence is required for creativity. We are ALL creative. We were born creative. However, many of us lose sight of this fact when we let others label us as weird or strange. Others lose sight of this when we think that drawing or painting or writing is a God-given talent alone. That which we practice, we improve upon. That’s the key to creativity. Staying open to ideas and saying YES to possibility rather than NO to crazy-sounding stuff…valuing the process as the art – even more so than the finished product or results…and persisting through failure, which is simply a name for early and consistent attempts at improvement.

On Tuesday, TEDxAtlanta: Creativ!ty was a FORUM for THE GROWTH MINDSET! Want to be creative? Commit to and develop a growth mindset. That’s it in a nutshell. Like most things, creativity is about learning, much more so than about already being. It’s about learning!

A few more Mindset resources:

Dumber or Just Different?

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This week, a colleague at school circulated the email below to a large number of faculty. The content of the inquiry has caused me to really think about some things. Here are a few of them:

  • Kudos to this educator for soliciting dialogue about an important learning issue! I love that instincts were to create a space for discussion and collaboration.
  • Thanks to this educator (and others who designed the PD day) for identifying a way to use in-service time for self-identified interests and innovations!
  • Could the texts we are asking students to read be part of the issue…rather than the length of the texts?
  • Years and years ago, was a similar message part of a tribal campfire discussion? “Villagers, we are having a harder and harder time getting children to tell stories around the campfire. Their oral memories are terrible! They want to look at these things called books. What should we do?” [please excuse the reductionist, less-than-accurate historical detail here]
  • Don’t people who write long books do so by examining small dollups of thinking? Don’t writers of long texts do so by writing smaller dollups of writing?
  • I read a lot of “sound bites” that I categorize with modern day tools so that I “study” an issue intensely from a number of different, inter-connected perspectives. When we think about a printed, long text, isn’t that exactly what we have access to via the words that the author decided to record – all the synthesized thinking that went into the recording of the text?
  • Why do we educators sometimes assume that just because the “kids don’t do it in school, they must not do it?” I am certain that our students are choosing to read and immerse themselves in some longer, richer texts…not because they are assigned in school, but because they are interesting outside of school.
  • Let’s search for the “both/and solution.” Students – all learners – should be able to do both/and…learn in sound bites and backchannels, as well as in longer, deeper texts, as well as…

Dear Colleagues,

Some of you may have seen Bob Ryshke’s recent posting of Mark Bauerlein’s article on thoughtful reading, “Too Dumb for Complex Texts.”  In a similar vein, I offer you a short blog post called “Are We Really Becoming More Stupid?”  Make sure you read the response, too:

http://www.prelude-team.com/blog/2010/10/05/are-we-really-becoming-more-stupid

The post and the response encapsulate neatly two different arguments about the way we (or some of us?) read today. 

My own experience in class over the last 2-3 years has been that of an increasing student unease with spending time with texts or even passages, and I have been wondering whether it is some way related to a rapidly emerging digital culture that privileges sound-bites, personal opinion (not informed judgement), and multi-tasking.  We have even seen some of our faculty peers engaging in technological multi-tasking by tweeting each other during presentations (so-called “back-channeling”).

I would be very interested in participating in a collaborative discussion with some of you about encouraging our students to read slowly and deeply — to give complex texts enough time to breathe.  The next in-service day looks like the perfect time to do this.  Let me know if you’re interested, and let’s start working on a reading list and/or an agenda for the day.

Finally, I thought of this TED talk…

Thanks to Michaelangelo

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Yesterday, when I got home, I asked my six-year-old about school. “What was your most fun thing today?” He answered that they had seen some slides of a guy who painted, sculpted, designed architecture, messed around in math, and read a lot of books. I asked if he remembered who the “guy” was. My son said, “No, but he painted some chapel ceiling.” I said, “Michaelangelo.” My son said, “Yeah, that’s the guy.”

I am not entirely sure why I love all of the categories (and more!) that my son listed, but I do. I hope someone, someday, will describe me as a Renaissance person. I hope my sons – both of them – seek to learn about the full range of things in the world. Specialization is overrated. I hope my sons find ways to stay integrated in their thinking. PJ found no disconnect that that “guy” did all those things. For now, I am thankful that my kindergartener had an interaction with a Renaissance person today…through his teacher. Thanks, Michaelangelo.