From TED:
Beau Lotto’s color games puzzle your vision, but they also spotlight what you can’t normally see: how your brain works. This fun, first-hand look at your own versatile sense of sight reveals how evolution tints your perception of what’s really out there.
Information designer Tom Wujec talks through three areas of the brain that help us understand words, images, feelings and connections. In this short talk from TEDU, he asks: How can we best engage our brains to help us better understand big ideas? (link here)
(Also archived under the “Arts, Learning & Talks” tab above)
“Barry Schwartz makes a passionate call for “practical wisdom” as an antidote to a society gone mad with bureaucracy. He argues powerfully that rules often fail us, incentives often backfire, and practical, everyday wisdom will help rebuild our world.” (also here on TED)
Get wise!
My Notes:
A wise person knows how to make the exception to every rule, knows how to improvise and knows how to use moral skills in the pursuit of the right aims (serve other people rather than manipulate them). A wise person is made and not born. Wisdom depends on experience. It takes experience to learn how to care for people. You don’t need brilliance to be wise. Without wisdom, brilliance isn’t enough.
Rules and procedures are dumb but they spare us from thinking. Often these rules are imposed because previous officials have been lax. When things go wrong, we reach for two tools to fix them. One tool is rules (better ones and more of them) and the second tool is incentives. This may make things better in the short run, but they create a downward spiral that makes things worse in the long run. Moral skills gets chipped away. We are deprived of the opportunity to improvise and then learn. Morals will also be undermined by these incentives.
Do we trust the judgements of teachers by forcing scripted curricula? These scripts are insurance policies against disaster but what it also does is ensure mediocrity. Too many rules will prevent us from improvising, resulting in us losing our gifts. Incentives only allow us to ask “What serves my interest?” Incentives can be subverted by bad will and demoralises activity. We also lose morale and then the activity itself loses morality.
We need to re-moralise work! Celebrate and acknowledge moral exemplars. Get motivated by doing the right thing. Know the people in your community. Get support behind you. Encourage and nurture moral skill and moral will. As teachers, be the moral exemplars. Remember we are always teaching; the camera is always on and someone is always watching.
Kids need to learn character. Do our school structures and organisations enable us to develop wisdom or rather have it suppressed?
Recent uploads to TED.
A pioneer in research on play, Dr. Stuart Brown says humor, games, roughhousing, flirtation and fantasy are more than just fun. Plenty of play in childhood makes for happy, smart adults — and keeping it up can make us smarter at any age.
Jacek Utko is an extraordinary Polish newspaper designer whose redesigns for papers in Eastern Europe not only win awards, but increase circulation by up to 100%. Can good design save the newspaper? It just might.
In this talk from 2003, design critic Don Norman turns his incisive eye toward beauty, fun, pleasure and emotion, as he looks at design that makes people happy. He names the three emotional cues that a well-designed product must hit to succeed.
20 years ago, Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web. For his next project, he’s building a web for open, linked data that could do for numbers what the Web did for words, pictures, video: unlock our data and reframe the way we use it together.
From TED:
MIT grad student David Merrill demos Siftables — cookie-sized, computerized tiles you can stack and shuffle in your hands. These future-toys can do math, play music, and talk to their friends, too. Is this the next thing in hands-on learning?
I’ve been meaning to post this for a while and completely forgot it was in my drafts folder. Most of you bright ones have probably seen it already from the TED site or have seen it posted in other blogs. For those who haven’t, “dozo.”
From TED:
Elizabeth Gilbert muses on the impossible things we expect from artists and geniuses — and shares the radical idea that, instead of the rare person “being” a genius, all of us “have” a genius. It’s a funny, personal and surprisingly moving talk.
From TED:The powerful link between creativity and play
At the 2008 Serious Play conference, designer Tim Brown talks about the powerful relationship between creative thinking and play — with many examples you can try at home (and one that maybe you shouldn’t).
Basically, playfulness in the workplace and in schools can help us be more creative and productive.
