On Spreeblick I found the link to the video streams of this years TED conference. So far I have watched the available presentations of Lary Brilliant, Al Gore, Sir Ken Robinson, and David Pogue.
They were all very interesting and often given in a quite entertaining style (even the one about smallpox and bird flue by Larry Brilliant) and I really recommend watching them or to listen to the audio only versions. Larry Brilliant's talk was pretty important as well and I hope his vision of INSTEDD becomes real.
And I do agree very much with what David Pogue and Sir Ken Robinson talked about. While the complexity of computer interfaces and the problem of creating easy understandable ones is a daily experience (in usuage as well in my own projects mainly at work), I wasn't aware of what Robinson talked about: the loss of creativity caused by our current educational systems. And looking at my "career" it seems to fit well. Arts, or being creative at all, isn't very important at school and university (l just begin to explore my creativity in photography now). But learning fixed rules is important for a very long time.
Later you learn, that many of these rules art not so fixed at all and that it is good to be creative and think in unconventional ways often. Unfortunately many students will have lost quite a bit of their potential because of the education which taught them to “unlearn” this…
But is this going to change (soon)? I don't think so. The surveys of the recent years (PISA studies) just make this worse and focus on sciences and fixed rules may even become more important (though I have to admit that it might be very hard to teach the uncertainties in science to pupils in schools, e.g. in physics). It is important to teach sciences and all these other things (foreign languages esp.) but I more and more think that the basic system of learning and teaching at school has to be changed to keep and develop creativity! Maybe some of he alternative school models are better at this…
Sorry that this is more or less a stub of random thoughts caused by looking these videos, but: If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original at all.
