www.ted.com is incredibly addictive, but tends to set my brain on fire in the best sort of way. Thus I require a break to allow for absorption.
My favourite for today is Charles Leadbeater:
Leadbeater noticed the rise of “pro-ams” - passionate amateurs who act like professionals. Prominent examples range from the mountain bike to the open-source operating system Linux, from Wikipedia to the Jubilee 2000 campaign, which helped persuade Western nations to cancel more than $30 billion in third-world debt.
TedTalks are so short. Snappy. And those 3, 5 or 10 minutes spark more neurons and emotions than weeks in ‘normal life’ can do. Perhaps that is why I cannot seem to handle medium or large size doses.
In a riveting 18 minute 58 second overview of ‘Education innovation in the slums’ he talks about education that ‘pulls’ rather than ‘pushes’ - successfully attracting a 16 year old drug dealer in South America, girls from the slums of India, children playing in the construction sites of India.
Skills, abilities, knowledge transferred through computers, projects, and my favourite, asking questions. How inspiring would it have been to go to school and start off the day with a question [‘What is god?’] and then spend the rest of the day exploring history, psychology, religion, philosophy, science trying to answer the question.
Knowledge truely is administered to us as the ‘cognitive greens’ which we must endure before we are allowed the freedom to question and think for ourselves at our own pace.
