This year, Bulgaria holds the presidency of the European Union, I was invited to Sofia to be a panel speaker at one of the associated conferences, Educate to Create. The conference was billed as “an opportunity to bring attention to the pressing need to raise digital skills and competence levels across Europe and to support…
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Yesterday this link arrived at my twitter channel via @ewanmcintosh. (isn’t twitter fab? đ ) Another great talk by Sir Ken Robinson. I didnât expect it to be less than true inspiration after the last talk I had watched from him as part of the TED conference.
Yesterday evening, I finally was able to play the talk on my laptop. It was not only inspiring, it was extremely encouraging and thought provoking. The main message was, in my opinion, not to change the educational system, but rather to come up with a new one that will actually meet this ageâs essence: individuality and diversity; customization and creativity.
Sir Robinson speaks about us aiming at the wrong challenge. It is not how we can make something better, as it is not about constantly reforming a system that was designed for a different age; It is about forming a new, or rather, new ways of helping us discover our natural talents. Our âgeniusesâ are being oppressed by education â isnât it a pure antithesis of what we think education should be granting us?
And this brilliant speaker goes on with a brilliant thought I truly believe in: people do their best when they do what they love… when they are in their element. Isnât it so true? Does it happen to you too? It does to me and it has always been so in school, at work, in everything I do. For instance, I hated when I had to memorize things I didnât understand. My head would spin just to think about the electrons, atoms and molecules that, according to the teacher, were there up the air but whose point I always missed to see âŠso abstract it was, and so little skill the teachers had to explain it in a way it would make sense to ME. And as apparently it made sense to the others, I felt I should just shut up and set my mind to spend boring weekends at my desk trying to memorize words and sentences I couldnât make out, but which would grant me a passing mark. On the other hand, I liked languages. I tried to understand the grammatical structured, examine the exceptions, observe how people expressed themselves, analyze how language is cultural and experience related, how it also influences the way we think, etc. I was always fascinated by it. Learning languages is an ongoing challenge. And I always enjoyedit. As I did enjoy computer classes too. I therefore relate truly to the thought that when people discover what they can do, they become someone else, they transform, they bloom, they exceed what they thought to be their limits.
Trying to meet the future with ideas of the past is not the answer. We have to look at nature and learn from it. We need for once and for all to move from the industrial to an organic paradigm that will help provide the appropriate conditions to seed the right learning environments. Environments in which each learner will be valued and able to develop his/her genius in a creative way. And then I loved the way Sir Ken Robinson describes creativity: Original ideas with added value.
And he finishes with this amazing quote from Benjamin Franklin âAll mankind is divided into three classes: those that are immovable, those that are movable, and those that move.â
So, Letâs MOVE people! Itâs about time.
Cyborg patented?
Forbes reports that Microsoft has obtained a patent for a âconversational chatbot of a specific personâ created from images, recordings, participation in social networks, emails, letters, etc., coupled with the possible generation of a 2D or 3D model of the person.
Racial bias in algorithms
From the UK Open Data Institute’s Week in Data newsletter
This week, Twitter apologised for racial bias within its image-cropping algorithm. The feature is designed to automatically crop images to highlight focal points â including faces. But, Twitter users discovered that, in practice, white faces were focused on, and black faces were cropped out. And, Twitter isnât the only platform struggling with its algorithm â YouTube has also announced plans to bring back higher levels of human moderation for removing content, after its AI-centred approach resulted in over-censorship, with videos being removed at far higher rates than with human moderators.
Gap between rich and poor university students widest for 12 years
Via The Canary.
The gap between poor students and their more affluent peers attending university has widened to its largest point for 12 years, according to data published by the Department for Education (DfE).
Better-off pupils are significantly more likely to go to university than their more disadvantaged peers. And the gap between the two groups â 18.8 percentage points â is the widest itâs been since 2006/07.
The latest statistics show that 26.3% of pupils eligible for FSMs went on to university in 2018/19, compared with 45.1% of those who did not receive free meals. Only 12.7% of white British males who were eligible for FSMs went to university by the age of 19. The progression rate has fallen slightly for the first time since 2011/12, according to the DfE analysis.
Quality Training
From Raconteur. A recent report by global learning consultancy Kineo examined the learning intentions of 8,000 employees across 13 different industries. It found a huge gap between the quality of training offered and the needs of employees. Of those surveyed, 85 per cent said they , with only 16 per cent of employees finding the learning programmes offered by their employers effective.
Our Wikispace for teaching and learning
Join our Sounds of the Bazaar Facebook goup. Just click on the logo above.
We will be at Online Educa Berlin 2015. See the info above. The stream URL to play in your application is Stream URL or go to our new stream webpage here SoB Stream Page.