Group items tagged

I listened intently sure that the secret formula for creating a TEDster would be revealed to me. And I listened with a sense of urgency because my future TEDsters are, at this very moment, sleeping in back row of Life Science class, skipping third period Algebra, and lighting fires in the second floor bathroom.

They are students for whom school is devoid of relevance, assignments lack purpose, and grades fail to motivate. Students who slide by or fail out develop a preservational mode called I don't care – an especially effective meme prevalent in under-served urban schools.

My future TEDsters need instead to be active participants co-creating their learning experiences around global issues that lend real-world relevance to their schooling.

Bring your game-changing message to the celebrated conference that is changing the world. Engage with leaders and ideas shaping media, business, communication, technology, education and participation in the connected society.

What is the role of education when learners have unprecedented access to information and conversations outside of the control of faculty and institutions? What changes are required for universities and colleges to leverage, rather than combat, these new opportunities for learner control and engagement?

In the past few years, the playing field of American intellectual life has shifted, and the traditional intellectual has become increasingly marginalized. A 1950s education in Freud, Marx, and modernism is not a sufficient qualification for a thinking person in the 1990s. Indeed, the traditional American intellectuals are, in a sense, increasingly reactionary, and quite often proudly (and perversely) ignorant of many of the truly significant intellectual accomplishments of our time. Their culture, which dismisses science, is often nonempirical. It uses its own jargon and washes its own laundry. It is chiefly characterized by comment on comments, the swelling spiral of commentary eventually reaching the point where the real world gets lost.