From Ewan McIntosh:

In the classrooms in which I work, students explore the twenty or so themes upon which our planet really depends, immerse themselves in the ideas and information their teachers, peers and whole communities can impart, find the problems they feel are worth solving, theorise which ones will work and then try them out in a prototype.

In their world, we don’t just write an essay or create yet another wiki or blog to describe what our idea is, but we actually build the solution to the problem with our own hands – in this case, these seven year olds built the world’s youngest TEDxKids event, and talked about their research and solutions to some of the world’s most pressing – or simply most interesting – problems. Do animals talk? Do babies have a secret language? Which cancer should we invest in curing first? Why do slugs needs slime?

• Excerpts from TEDxLondon: The Problem Finders
• Ewan McIntosh’s Education Blog
• TEDxSunderland
• Rhiannon | Do Animals Have a Secret Language?

Ewan McIntosh is a teacher, speaker and investor. He was Scotland’s first National Advisor on Learning and Technology Futures and a member of the Channel 4 New Media Education Advisory Board.

From YouTube:

‘Every teenager has a spark — something inside that is good, beautiful, and useful to the world. Sparks illuminate a young person’s life and give it meaning and purpose…

‘Just ask a teen: “Tell me what it is about you that gives you joy and energy? What’s going on in those moments when life feels the richest and the fullest, with purpose and hope. What is your spark? I’m dying to know.”‘

Peter L. Benson (1946-2011) was one of the world’s leading authorities on positive human development. Dr. Benson was the author or editor of more than a dozen books on child and adolescent development and social change, including, most recently, Sparks: How Parents Can Help Ignite the Hidden Strengths of Teenagers…

• TEDxTC: Peter Benson on Sparks
• Psychologist broadened Americans’ view of teens
• Biography – Sage Publications
• What are Sparks? at the Search Institute

From the Burlington Free Press – 9/23/2011

Sir Ken Robinson by Sebastiaan ter Burg

[Sir Ken Robinson's] early career focused on bringing more arts education into British schools and from there he became an internationally known authority on the value and power of creativity. He’s advised governments around the world on arts education and innovation…

Robinson challenged the audience to create schools that are more personal and give students rein to explore topics that match their aptitude and passions. Too many people don’t like their jobs, and it shouldn’t be that way, Robinson said. “If you’re doing something you love, an hour feels like five minutes,” he said.

He urged educators to stop teaching subjects in isolation — algebra I, chemistry, American literature and so on, and instead bring history, science, math and art together — just as they mingle in real life. Remove architectural barriers that put the English faculty in one wing, the math people in the other, Robinson said. Principals, he said, are the heart of education and they need to be allowed to lead.

And while he conceded that there are forces blocking the path to more creative schools, Robinson said there is more room for innovation in contemporary schools than some might think. He reminded the crowd that Shakespeare managed to write very fine poetry without veering from traditional sonnet form.

“There is much more freedom in the system than what we choose to exercise,” Robinson said.

• Excerpts from Educator calls for flexibility in schooling
• Rowland Conference on High School Transformation
• Changing Education Paradigms – RSA Animate
• Sir Ken Robinson on Wikipedia
• Photo by Sebastiaan ter Burg via Flickr Creative Commons

From Brain Pickings:

Creativity is combinatorial, that nothing is entirely original, that everything builds on what came before, and that we create by taking existing pieces of inspiration, knowledge, skill and insight that we gather over the course of our lives and recombining them into incredible new creations…

In order for us to truly create and contribute to the world, we have to be able to connect countless dots, to cross-pollinate ideas from a wealth of disciplines, to combine and recombine these pieces and build new castles…

The more [LEGO] building blocks we have, and the more diverse their shapes and colors, the more interesting our castles will become. Because if we only have one color and one shape, it greatly limits how much we can create, even within our one area of expertise…

Much of Buddhist philosophy centers around [the] balance between what’s being phrased as “intention” and “attention” – our intentional curiosity about knowledge and growth, and our choice of where to focus our awareness, what to pay attention to.

So that, I think, is the role of information curators: They are our curiosity sherpas, who lead us to things we didn’t know we were interested in until we, well, until we are. Until we pay attention to them — because someone whose taste and opinion we trust points us to them, and we integrate them with our existing pool of resources, and they become a part of our networked knowledge and another LEGO piece in our combinatorial creativity.

• Excerpts from: Networked Knowledge and Combinatorial Creativity

From TED on YouTube

The goal is not to turn kids into your kind of adult, but rather better adults than you have been, which may be a little challenging considering your guys credentials.

But the way progress happens is because new generations and new eras grow and develop and become better than the previous ones. It’s the reason we’re not in the Dark Ages anymore. No matter your position of place in life, it is imperative to create opportunities for children so that we can grow up to blow you away.

Mashable interviewed Adora at the conference.

Adora organized the TEDxRichmond event yesterday. Can’t wait to see the videos.

TEDxRedmond is a TEDx event organized by students, for students After speaking at the annual TED conference in Long Beach, California, twelve-year-old teacher, speaker, and author Adora Svitak wanted to bring a TED-like experience home to Redmond, Washington. “I had such a great experience during my first time at TED, but I realized that not everyone had such an opportunity,” she explained. “Through TEDxRedmond, I’m hoping to share the magic of TED in an independently organized event.”

• Excerpts from: Adora Svitak: What adults can learn from kids, TED transcript, Interview with Adora Svitak

From Steven Rosenbaum via Nieman Reports:

…Today, the idea of journalist as curator is front and center, as the tools to make and tell stories are now in the hands of anyone with a cell phone, laptop or desktop computer.

The old barriers to entry—the cost of a printing press or a broadcast tower—have evaporated. Of course, this change doesn’t come without a price….

People are clearly overwhelmed by the growing volume and weight of digital content and messaging that they feel compelled to process….

The solution is not to be found in faster computers or smarter algorithms. The best place to look for a remedy is in the power of the human mind and tapping its capacity to find, sort and contextualize information and ideas. As this happens and it already is starting we will think of this time as being the dawn of the human filtered Web — the curated Web….

Skillful sharing of information through channels of community filtering and personal recommendations will fulfill people’s sense of digital identity as content curators. And this leads to a different kind of content consumer, one who will do less surfing of the Web and instead turn to curated content delivered by trusted sources.

Journalism isn’t going to be any less important. In fact, as information gets messier and noisier, those who possess the skills to recognize important stories, find themes, provide context, and explain the significance of pieces of information will be critically important. Instead of reminiscing about the good old days—as we long for the relative quiet and lack of disruption we had then—let’s take what we know how to do as journalists and find the best way to use these skills to tell stories and provide essential information.

• Excerpts from: Nieman Reports
• Image by Edward from Flickr Creative Commons

John Hunter

From John Hunter via TED Talks

John Hunter puts all the problems of the world on a 4′x5′ plywood board — and lets his 4th-graders solve them. At TED2011, he explains how his World Peace Game engages schoolkids, and why the complex lessons it teaches — spontaneous, and always surprising — go further than classroom lectures can.

Musician, teacher, filmmaker and game designer, John Hunter has dedicated his life to helping children realize their full potential. His own life story is one of a never-ending quest for harmony. As a student, he studied comparative religions and philosophy while traveling through Japan, China and India. In India, inspired by Ghandi’s philosophy, he began to think about the role of the schoolteacher in creating a more peaceful world.

As his online biography says: “Accepting the reality of violence, he would seek to incorporate ways to explore harmony in various situations. This exploration would take form in the framework of a game – something that students would enjoy. Within the game data space, they would be challenged, while enhancing collaborative and communication skills.”

In 1978, at the Richmond Community High School, Hunter led the first sessions of his World Peace Game, a hands-on political simulation. The game has now been played around the world, on a four-tiered board. It’s the subject of the new film World Peace and Other 4th-Grade Achievements.

• Video from TED
• Speaker profile from TED
• World Peace Game Foundation

Thank you for the tip, Argy!

From Maria Popova via the Nieman Journalism Lab:

New tools in general, and Twitter in particular, greatly challenge the binary dichotomy of attention as something that is either given or taken away, distracted. Instead, these tools allow us to direct attention to destinations where it can be sustained with more concentration and immersion.

They offer a wayfinding system that is, on the whole, the polar opposite of traditional media’s: While “old media” fought against the scarcity of information, new media are fighting the overabundance of information….

[Twitter allows] people to discover the most relevant, interesting, and impactful information, in any medium, and then relate it to other information in a networked ecosystem of meaning that helps us better understand the world and each other….

If information discovery plays such a central role in how we make sense of the world in this new media landscape, then it is a form of creative labor in and of itself. And yet our current normative models for crediting this kind of labor are completely inadequate, if they exist at all…. Finding a way to acknowledge content curation and information discovery (or, better, the new term we invent for these fluffy placeholders) as a form of creative labor, and to codify this acknowledgement, is the next frontier in how we think about “intellectual property” in the information age….

Ultimately, I see Twitter neither as a medium of broadcast, the way text is, nor as one of conversation, the way speech is, but rather as a medium of conversational direction and a discovery platform for the text and conversations that matter.

• Excerpts from Maria Popova via the Nieman Journalism Lab
• Image by Marc Wathieu via Flickr Creative Commons

From the Lewiston Sun Journal

[In 2001] Maine legislators approved — after months of doubt and debate — Gov. Angus King’s proposal to give every seventh-grader in Maine a laptop….

Ten years later, each seventh- and eighth-grader in Maine public schools and every grades 7-12 teacher has a laptop paid for by state taxpayers, at an annual cost of $11 million. And, through the Maine Department of Education, 60 percent of Maine high-schoolers have laptops, paid for by local property taxpayers. That’s a total of 72,000 laptops, according to the DOE….

Teachers, students and administrators interviewed for this report said laptops are giving several kinds of return on that money.

Laptops make learning and schoolwork more interesting, students and teachers said. “When kids are engaged, you can teach them anything,” said Jeff Mao, who oversees instructional technology for the Maine Department of Education….

In the years since thousands of laptops have been given to students and teachers, they’ve become such a part of classrooms that teachers often underestimate how much they use them, Mao said.

“They’ll say, ‘I don’t do too much with laptops,’” he said. “But you watch them in class, and you see teachers with classroom Web page where all kinds of information — homework, class work, recommended sites — is available. Teachers e-mail students and parents. They give out assignments on laptops. It’s become so common it all seems mundane now.”…

Maine is recognized as a “world leader” for technology in classrooms, King said. Delegations from Sweden, Denmark, Canada, Israel, Peru, Australia and Ireland, among others, have visited Maine to learn about laptops. While some cities and counties have given out laptops, Maine is the only state with a statewide program….

One of the most important reasons for the laptop program was establishing equity. That’s been achieved, King said.

“How many Maine families could have afforded to buy laptops for eighth-graders? Yet every single kid has one,” King said. “We put this tool in the hands of thousands of kids who otherwise wouldn’t have it.”

“I’m as enthusiastic as ever,” King said. “We did the right thing at the right time. It’s been tremendously successful.” Maine has a digitally literate group of students, he said….

• Excerpts from the Lewiston Sun Journal
• Image from the Maine Department of Education