TED Blog 6

Dave Eggers describes his journey of creating an educational environment for youths in San Francisco in his TED talk, “Once Upon a School.”  He begins by presenting the struggle to provide a more personalized, one-on-one approach to an education in English.  Eggers comes up with the idea that a group of authors could work during the day and in the afternoons, they help out kids with English homework.  He describes the struggles to figure out how they should run the program.  Through the many challenges, Eggers and his crew successfully open the writing center for the youths there and help countless individuals.  As the success in their company grew the demand for similar assistance programs increased.  Soon they were opening more study centers and helping more and more children who need it.  Eggers closes with his TED wish that people would get involved with a public school near them and help it out with their talents in educating or other areas.  

Dave Eggers speaks on the issues of the lack of personalized education offered to children in the TED talk, “Once Upon a School.”  His points are good and well organized but his speaking is not as strong.  Eggers came out onto the stage and informed the audience of his nervousness, which opened up the audience to be more understanding about his situation.  His nervousness was obvious in the distracting nature gestures he made and the countless hesitations in his speaking.  He did use humor which made his speech more entertaining.  In his presentation, Eggers used pictures of the actual places he described in action so the audience can connect and gain a better understanding of what an impact is being made in the communiy and lives of children he works with.  By calling to the attention of his audience the issues of lack of personal education, Eggers calls upon the audience to, “Find a way to directly engage with a public school in your area and that you’ll then tell the story of how you got involved, so that within a year we have 1,000 examples — 1,000 examples — of transformative partnerships.”  

TED Blog 5

Erik Brynjolfsson describes the key to economic growth through his idea to utilize technology rather than struggle to compete with it in his TED talk, “Race With the Machines.”  He begins with using the industrial revolution as an example, describing the introduction of electricity and comparing its productivity rates.  Although they had incorporated new technology, their productivity remained at a similar rate because they had not updated the factories to take advantage of the benefits of the new technology.  General purpose technology is meant to drive economic growth by encouraging innovation to produce spin offs of it to make it better.  A modern example for this current age is the computer.  People believe that innovation is slowing to a stop because of the illusion caused when jobs and productivity disassociate from each other.  Brynjolfsson calls this, instead, the New Machine Age.  It is an age in which knowledge and creativity and ideas are more valuable than physical production.  The digital quality of the New Machine Age makes information easily attainable and easily replicable.   Innovation in technological aspects have become exponential instead of linear.  Combinatorial innovation creates opportunities for new innovations through others.  With all the technology being created or improved, so many people are being left behind to lose the race against the machine.  Jobs are being taken by programs leaving less for working-people.  Brynjolfsson argues that instead of trying to be better, we have to cooperate with the machine.  He says that together, humans and technology are better together and are unstoppable against eachother idividually.

In, “Race With the Machines,” a TED talk by Erik Brynjolfsson, the idea that technology and people have to cooperate in order to form a more advanced society with healthy economic growth is discussed.  In his speech he used stories to prove his points and convey meaning on a deeper level than facts can deliver.  He uses constant hand motion but it is not distracting enough to take away the audience’s attention from what he is speaking about.  In his speaking he does not use as much humor as others have but his topic is interesting enough that makes that humor unnecessary.  Similarly to Dan Pink’s book A Whole New Mind,  Brynjolfsson talks about jobs being turned over to automation instead of people because of cheapness and accurate quality.  They also both hit the topic of abundance.  Pink writes about how this world is a world of abundance and society as a whole doesn’t have to worry about running out of food or clothes or people.  Brynjolfsson connects abundance to the economy and as an effect of digitalization in current technology.  He closes in challenging his audience to find ways to incorporate technology into the audience’s lives in a way that increases the advantages and that we find a way to race with the machines, not against them.  

TED Blog 3

The effectiveness of different types of motivations are discussed by Dan Pink in his RSA talk “Drive.”  Pink begins his talk by stating two principles of motivation.  He says if you reward an activity you will get more of it and if you punish an activity you will get less of it, however, a study at M.I.T. proved his principles inaccurate in a way.  They are true when it comes down to physical tasks but when the same people were tested on comprehension and memorization tasks the results were inversed.  As the reward increased, the performance significantly decreased.  Although the extrinsic motivation of money is not as effective when it comes to mental tasks, intrinsic motivations can make a significant difference.  The desire to direct oneself, the aspiration to become better, and the feeling of what they do has a meaningful purpose are the main intrinsic motivators that Pink calls attention to.  He concludes with the idea that those three motivators are the strongest source of motivation there are.  

RSA chose to set Dan Pink’s talk “Drive” that talks about methods of motivation and where they work best to animation.  The animation is put together in a way that provides illustrations to better explain the exact point Pink is trying to make and words stand out more to give them a greater measure of impact on the audience.  Unlike the past talks that we have watched, Pink did not use humor as often.  I think it would have distracted from the main idea too much and it would have not have had as much impact on a serious level.  He does speak informally to his audience which makes his ideas seem more realistic, conversational, and comfortable to hear as it is a topic that is on the difficult side to grasp. Pink speaks a small portion on his theory of “carrots and sticks” as motivational tools in the talk and further explains that portion more in depth in “Seven Reasons Carrots and Sticks Don’t Work.”  He examines intrinsic motivators like autonomy are surrendered when “if - then” rewards are offered because it can turn fun into work and drains enjoyment out of it.  It also can easily be a solid motivator for the short term but in the long run they will lose interest.  Dan Pink’s talk on the truth about motivation sheds light on the subject allowing it to be more widely understood by the audience and then the world.

TED Blog 2

Brené Brown discusses the important qualities of vulnerability in her TED talk “The Power of Vulnerability.”  She lays out the key items that compose vulnerability that make it effective and important.  Connection is the purpose of why people are here and that a person has to  really let their true colors show before they can really connect with others.  Brown also states the way connection and courage to be imperfect and compassion to oneself all cooperate to form the definition of vulnerability.  Brown uses her natural talent in storytelling and  knowledge from her studies of vulnerability to deliver a strong message to her audience to completely explain its importance.

Brené Brown speaks on the points that make vulnerability so key in the TED talk titled “The Power of Vulnerability.” In her speech, she uses a slideshow to accompany her words that emphasize important phrases or points.  Brown moves around the stage just enough to catch the audience’s attention that she was moving, as well as using effective gestures that are not too distracting to the audience.  Her speaking style includes elements of humor and a strong use of storytelling that captures the audience as she tells her stories.  Brown’s points are effective in the world so that people can understand how to form an even closer society through connecting with others and being yourself.  Her study provides validity to her points about people and how they feel about topics like worth.  Brown speaks on input that she received from people around the world on worth and deserving affection.  

TED Blog 1

Sir Ken Robinson describes how in present day the focus on areas that people do not necessarily excel in are required and the areas that some do are not valued so people are discouraged from pursuing what they love in the TED talk titled “Schools Kill Creativity.”  He speaks about creativity’s importance by saying it should be treated with as much gravity as literacy.  The youth of this current generation are being educated for the future.  Nobody knows what it truly holds so educators are forced to take an educated guess at what needs to be given to the youth to give them the keys to excel and improve the world’s future as a whole.  Robinson conveys his point’s seriousness by continuously looking out into the crowd.  By sprinkling the element of humor occasionally throughout his speech, he contrasts the gravity of the topic with a lighter feeling and provides a deeper level of interest for the listener.  The combination of his speaking style and consequential subject encourages the urgency of including more arts in education and it would be what brings us into the future.

In the TED talk “Schools Kill Creativity” Sir Ken Robinson correctly called attention to the matter of the lack of creativity in learning because education will be what takes us into the future.  He says a lot about the large capacity children have for learning.  In “Changing Education Paradigm,” a video made by Robinson, he speaks about how people do not believe their potential because they are being measured to the standards from the industrial revolution based on the enlightenment period which only focus on intelligence rather than creativity.  This greatly discourages children because the fear of failing to match those standards would mean the would fail to succeed in the system that people from the past have created.  There was a study about creative thinking where kindergarten children were asked what they could do with a paperclip and they were tested again ten years later.  Robinson says “... They’ve become educated.  They’ve spent ten years being told there’s one answer...”  Being fed this idea for ten years of their lives it becomes what they know so they lose the aspect of creativity in their thinking.  Creativity is important for the future as well as intelligence in math and sciences, however our societies around the world are being driven into an age where it takes more than just math and science to succeed.  The future will require both creativity and intelligence to thrive.  Daniel Pink provides an abundance of information supporting that idea.  Pink talks about how important each side of the brain with both types of thinking are independently but also how crucial they are to each other.  Recognizing the importance of the human capacity for creativity and maintaining it for the future is Robinson’s charge to his audience and to the world.

PLN 4 - Aspen Golding

Summary

On February 17, 1775 in a letter, Benjamin Franklin wrote that people “that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither freedom nor safety.”  Franklin communicates his opinion of people giving up freedom when they feel like it is right but if they believe it is right that they lose that freedom, then they probably should not have had that freedom in the first place.  

Response

Benjamin Franklin is accurate in saying that a man that “can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither freedom nor safety” because once you release a little freedom it becomes so effortless to give up more in order to feel the illusion of safety.  Throughout history, nations have fought to become independent and finally gain the freedoms that they have always wanted.  Although it might seem like a good idea to start off with, people can unknowingly give up the freedoms that they work so hard to gain in small increments.  People are so swayed by fear that they begin to be willing to give up the freedoms just for a false sense of security that one might wonder why they even were given that freedom to begin with.  So often society consciously gives privacy away in the form of cell phones and computers without a real reason.  Even though Franklin’s words were centuries before our time their validity still stands so that everyone can learn from them before it is too late and all personal rights and freedoms have been restricted.  

PLN 3

     Dr. Michael Wesch communicates his opinions of the how the digital world is evolving in the short video The Machine is Us/ing Us. Wesch describes very early in the video how our idea of technology has changed over time and that it continues to transform who we are, how we use it, and how it "uses" us. When the web was young, people designed codes to control the structure of a web page but we evolved it to do more. Since form and content could not be separated in that format, computer scientists created XTM. It allowed form to be manipulated in any way the author desired. It became much easier for the user to upload data to the Internet. At one point in the video, Wesch effectually states that with everything we do on the Internet or with technology, it learns. He is trying to get the point across that everything we do to simplify technology for us also makes it more complicated internally and if we are not careful, it can turn bad for us. In conclusion, Wesch got his point across in a way that described in a detailed way, how we drive our progression in technology and that we are truly The Machine.

     The video The Machine is Us/ing Us by Dr. Michael Wesch confused me a great deal because I did not know the context in which I was supposed to view it and since I do not know very much about computer technology I was lost half of the time. Watching the video gave me the impression that the author knew a lot about the topic of the video which relieved my distrust from not knowing what he was doing. In the video, near the end, he shows a paragraph that describes technology with a Machine that is learning with everything we do and ultimately that we are what drives the machine. I agree with his concept. I feel that if we do create a computer that is so technologically advanced that it can exceed the power of the human brain like Karl Fisch’s video Did You Know?, then we would eventually end up teaching it what we care about and what is important to our society and let it learn how it could sneak in and destroy us. We would just be the cause of our own fall. This video had an eye opening effect on me because while I realize the rate at which technology is advancing, I had not realized that people were the driving force of the dangers of technology.