Sam Richards with a new interpretation of Empathy

Take Aways

Sam Richards pointed out that sociology is basically the study of empathy or as he also puts it, the study of something really hard to see. He says that empathy is the ability to place yourself in someone else’s shoes and feel how they would in any given situation. I also took away that an extrinsic motivator plays it’s part in how people feel empathy. For example in the Middle East the need for oil eclipses the fact that what Americans are doing there is quite difficult for the native people. Repeating some of Dan Pink’s ideas Richards demonstrates that the need for oil creates almost a cop-out or an excuse. He also mentioned that depending on people perspective different pieces of information is taken into account or not. Like if you were an Iraqi citizen then you would notice that Americans live in big houses, drive big cars while you are living in poverty. But if you were American then you would just say “Well we all don’t drive big cars” and brush it off and not think much of it.

Speaking/Presenting Techniques

One of the best aspects of Richard’s speech was his effective story telling techniques. To start his speech he asked the audience to step into the shoes of an Iraqi citizen and then for the rest of his speech asked them to imagine certain situations. He also told a fictional story about china taking over the US for coal to show that people empathize better with themselves. To augment the realism of empathy Richards constantly displayed images of war-torn villages and fear stricken people to help people visualize. His speaking throughout the whole speech was urgent and distressed towards the audience. Which I thought was very fitting for the serious topic he was speaking on.

Application to Education

I think that this speech would be most useful as a resource to teachers. Because it teaches them the basics of empathy and also compares different types of empathy and which really hits home with people. It also sets a great example of good story telling because he told a seemingly realistic story at the beginning of his speech that in truth was totally fictional.

Connections

There were a ton of connections to what we are talking about in class and what comes up in our fishbowls for AWNM. First of all he is talking about empathy which is a quite obvious connection to what Daniel Pink is saying. Many of the things that Richards brings up about empathy match what Daniel Pink says. But then you can also see clear connections being drawn to design and some of the other themes in AWNM. He even specifically mentions design, when he is talking about someone else coming into a country for resources. He said that they have a design for those resources and that is a hard thing to combat. Connecting to Story, his whole presentation was practically a story, building on itself so that the audience can concentrate on the raw feelings coming from stepping in someone else’s shoes. He also mentions that citizens in the Middle East see military every day and they become accustomed to it, kind of like it is becoming part of their story. Symphony had some not as obvious connections but it is like seeing an event/situation from a country/personal view as opposed to a world view since symphony is seeing the specific picture and the whole picture.

Carlo Ratti redesigning pixels and architecture

Take Aways

I took away from Carlo Ratti’s TED Talk that our world is very reliant on sensing what is around us and will eventually help us gain a better understanding of it. This is already being achieved in networks monitoring city’s call density and concentration. I also learned that cities occupy only 2% of the earth’s crust but consume 75% of it’s energy, emit 80% of it’s CO2 emmisions, and house 50% of the worlds population. I learned that tasks can be categorized into sensing and actuating.

Speaking/presenting techniques
Carlo had some very effective techniques including showing alot of visual aids on the screen. He talked very clearly and made sure to connect everything back to his original point and his main focus. On the screen he was displaying video representations of his ideas and innovations because they were very hard to understand without actually seeing the implementation. He also talked in sync with the video, while the video was playing he was bringing up descriptions and stories that directly dealed with what was playing on the screen at that moment. He also talked with pace, he didn’t speed up or slow down drastically at all the whole duration of the speech. The only thing distracting from the quality of the speech could perhaps be overuse of the slides on the screen. The non-video slides were for the most part extraneous but otherwise his speech conveyed it’s point with zero error.
Application to education/me
His idea not as much as the creativity it took to get there is what could shape education in the future. He looked at digital pixels on a screen and saw so much more potential. He then had the forethought to innovate and design his own never before thought of 3-D pixels. He thought that the pixels themselves could move and thought of new mediums(like water). This kind of repurposing is what will really become necessary in a world of changing needs as it transitions into the conceptual age.
This was very interesting because most people want pixels to become smaller and smaller and restricted the term to small crystals in a computer screen. He had the mind to challenge what other people had established as the way it had to work and came up with architecture that changed the way many people thought about art and architecture. This needs to be a important part of the conceptual age because it will be implemented in everyones lives where they can see it everyday. I think that this could expediate the shift for some reluctant people. The only way that some people will accept that times are changing is to surround them with it in their lives and make it seem normal.

Dave Eggers Recreating Education

Take Aways
I take away from this video that there is a gap between teachers and students. Teachers have hundreds of students and would have to almost double their work hours and double the teachers to have just one hour of one-on-one time with each students. Even when Dave created his place for students to connect with one-on-one tutors they had trouble having enough kids coming. I also noticed that students were much more interested in school when they went to the tutoring and got the human contact. The environment around them made them keep coming back and kept everything new.
Speaking/presenting techniques
Dave Eggers was a very effective and natural speaker. He didn’t go out of his way to make his speech humorous which I think was the downfall of some of the other speakers I have seen. He told a story about his program for the majority of the speech and let humor naturally fall into it’s place. As far as presenting went *** used a lot of slides of pictures of students from his tutoring and the tutoring environment. For almost all of his speech he was telling his story or similar stories and for the final segment challenged the video audience. His challenge was brief and straight to the point so that it was clear how the whole speech applied to you.
Application to education/me
I think that this TED Talk is a quite obvious applier to education since that was the base of the speech. But I think that another application is having one on one time with students be on a smaller scale. Instead of having teachers of classrooms with the one on one time there could be parents, or even students teaching each other. This way more and more kids could be receiving one on one teaching and they would be at the same level so they could help each other at the same time.
Connection
I think that Dave Eggers’ speech connects to the overall design of education similar to the design chapter in AWNM. Eggers challenged the appearance of education by creating an outside source for editing and helping students. He used a story (the design of the actual tutoring area) to attract kids and enthrall them with their learning.

Bruce Schneier On the Mirage of Security

Take Aways

There were some interesting things that I found were very untouched on. He illustrated that every day we make tradeoffs with our own security in mind. We quickly balance the price/ risks and make a snap decision on how that will affect our actions. According to Schneier these decisions are mostly based off our sense of security as opposed to the real level of security. Also these decisions are subconscious for the most part and a large part of being a human so very few people think about these decisions as they are doing them. But there is one thing that mediates between our feelings and reality and that is a model. This made me see how much people look to the people and things around them when making decisions for their own safety and how scary this could be if the model is far from the reality of security. But Schneier says that the model will typically follow the real level of security closer than people’s feelings so if people take the model into account then their feeling of security will be closer to the reality of security. Because people will always be able to see their perceived security and never be able to see the real security but if they can look at the model of security then they will be much closer to how truly secure they are.

Speaking/Presenting Techniques

In my opinion Schneier had some of the blandest speaking techniques of all of the TED Talks yet far. He stood on the stage and kind of walked in a disorienting circle while speaking in monotone his speech with his eyes on the floor and occasionally looking past the audience into the back of the room. He did not put any slides up on the screen to help illustrate his speech so I constantly had to pause and rewind the video to understand what he was saying. He also didn’t come back to what he had stated earlier so it was hard to connect all of his ideas together.

Application to Education/Me

This applies to almost every student in the United States because the false sense of security is within each student but the teacher is like the model because they know what the world is like. Students don’t know if they really are secure because school is like a little world but the world changes constantly around it.

Connection

This is very similar to Little Brother and 1984 because the citizens felt secure in the grasp of the government and were too naïve to see that the real threat was the government themselves. In Schneier’s video he also mentioned that people fear the rare threat and this can cause them to overlook the common threats that are more serious in their everyday lives. For example lots of people are afraid of flying but aren’t afraid of driving. Driving is statistically more dangerous than flying but it isn’t common to people so they fear it. This can be seen in 1984 because the people are scared of whoever is attacking Oceania but in doing so overlook the oppression of their government for the most part.

Clary Shirky TED Talk about Cognative Surplus

Take Aways

What I take away from Clay Shirky’s TED Talk is that there are multiple paths for media abundance and that both are a form of creativity. He brought up the examples of LOL Cats and Ushahidi, which is a data mapping website, and compared their use to society. He illustrated civic and communal media abundance. Communal compares to when there are little clicks where the information is relevant. Civic is created by a community but can be enjoyed by a bigger group. What distinguishes something from nothing is also a little tidbit that I thought was very interesting. This implies that it is better to do something seemingly meaningless is better than doing nothing at all. This I was kind of intrigued at because in AWNM Pink didn’t even mention that you may not even think that your addition is not worthy to the world.

Application to You and to Education

These ideas are applied to education because he compares the value of communal information and civic information. In education there needs to be more civic information in my mind because if there is a focus on the communal then everything that us as students learn would only be applicable in education and its own little “community”. This most affects students because when they leave school to continue to college or start a career they need to be able to adapt to the real world and not be accustomed to sharing information inside a little community. Students will also need to be able to distinguish between the beneficial creativity and the unbeneficial (LOL Cats). Also affecting us is the fact that there is an abundance of information out there and no one person can harvest it. This is already taking place in our learning today, for research there is no way anyone could pull together all of the information straight from the sources; they always need to use a middle man like a textbook or a website. This is an example of Clay’s Civic information.

Speaking/Presenting techniques

Clay Shirky in my opinion had the weakest try at humor of all of the TED talks I have watched so far. He did however get his point across effectively and simply. He tried to incorporate humor into his speech but he made it too obvious and made it look like he was going out of his way to try to please the audience. But he was straight to the point otherwise and I was able to easily understand what his bottom line. For speaking techniques he talked slowly and paused while he was presenting his slides. This pausing with the slides was slightly awkward and hindered the forward movement of his talk. He did well outlining his plan though with three main sections. The first being specific stories.

Clay brings up the idea of cognitive overflow. This is the idea that there is too much information in the world and no one can keep track of all of it. This makes me ask myself, “will there ever be an instance when the world misses information because it just gets overwhelmed?” Would there ever be raw information that just gets lost in the masses of overload, and does this already happen? With all this information it sounds like it would be easily for some information to just be forgotten or overlooked by the whole of society. And a look into the future will there be any way to fully automize the spread of information. Would automation make more people more places be able to do more with their thoughts? Or would automation separate ideas from their origin and distort them?

Daniel Pink's TED Presentation Analysis and Elaboration

Speaking and Presenting Techniques

Daniel Pink, compared to the other TED talks I have watched, has used much more humor than the others and uses this to get his point across to the audience. He even started out his TED talk in a humorous manner, making fun of his law school past. Then to present the rest of the speech he pretended like it was a court case and he was making his case about motivation to the audience. He then engages the audience with a mental puzzle about a candle. He uses this audience interaction to demonstrate how an incentive narrows their field of view and dulls their creativity.

Summary

Daniel Pink was trying to explain to businesses all over the United States and all over the world that current motivation tactics are simply ineffective now. According to multiple tests and studies that Pink used to prove his motivation science theories, motivation needs to transition from external to internal. He refers to these motivation techniques as the carrot and stick method. In short, good behavior is rewarded with a payoff/reward (the carrot) and undesirable behavior is met with a punishment (the stick). Pink argued that this was an outdated motivational strategy and supported it with study results. He proposed a motivation system that allowed employees to reach the goal however they felt fitting and this would create internal motivation as opposed to external motivation.

Take Away

What I take away from this TED talk (and article we read) is that Motivation 2.0 just isn’t going to cut it if society wants to keep improving economically and culturally. Motivation 2.0 refers to the "carrot and stick" method of motivation. People need to be a bit more open to the fact that what worked a few years ago won’t necessarily work today and will almost certainly not be close to satisfactory in the future. I also got quite clearly how the carrot/stick motivation focuses the mind well, which is great for single dynamic tasks where steps are apparent, but hinders in more complicated tasks. Internal motivation instead leaves the blinders off and allows people to see the bigger picture and not be so focused on completing the steps. This difference is most noticable when the steps are not quite as apparent, here the internal motivation has a huge advantage. Daniel Pink highlighted that internal motivation in the workplace was expressed by enjoyment of the job and doing the job because of that enjoyment rather than for the salary.

Application to Education

Many of the ideas presented in Daniel Pink’s speech can be easily applied to education. Since business and education are similar, both have a management figure (teachers/boss) and then the working class (students/workers). The current system for grading for example closely follows the carrot/stick theory; students do what the teacher tells them and if they do it right they receive good grades and if they don’t, they receive bad grades. If the internal motivation system were to be implemented into the classroom I have a feeling it would look more like an open exchange of centered ideas rather than a lecture. This would also prepare High School students for college better because in college a person needs their own motivation to follow through with their plans. Even further down the road this motivation would help former students find jobs because they will search based on what they would enjoy doing as opposed to which one has the best “benefits”.

How do we apply it to Education?

There are two main approaches to tackling entwining this type of motivation into schools: remove the “carrot” but still put specific guidelines on the students, or put basic parameters on the schoolwork and grade the students on how far out of the box they take it. Both of these will require self-motivation. With specific guidelines the student needs to find a way to finish what they start since there is no external reward for finishing. Basic parameters require internal motivation because they need to come up with the subject and what they will do with it and they will enjoy their subject because they picked it. I am going to ask for people opinions in the comments section and I will keep a running vote of who thinks to incorporate internal motivation there should be specific rules but no reward, and who thinks there should be just basic parameters with no reward. There is no right or wrong answer so any comments are welcome.

Marcin Jakubowser's TED Talk

Marcin Jakubowski presented a TED talk about how open source could transition from software to hardware, and his personal open source hardware wiki. He started by explaining his personal wiki that he created to help common people build their own equipment. Him and his team had created a list of 50 machines that were would be hardest to live without. His list started with a tractor because without that it would be exponentially harder to harvest food and other laborious tasks. He built the prototype for the tractor by himself and then published the list of the other 50 machines and showed his tractor as an example. Increasing numbers of people visited the wiki and helped develop prototypes and designs for the other machines.

My personal thoughts that I take away from watching this TED talk mainly include the idea that open source doesn’t have to be confined to the internet and open source will benefit larger numbers of people and help spark creativity in some. Marcin’s wiki’s benefits wouldn’t just spread where the internet is available because hardware is easier to transfer to remote areas than software. Then the people in those areas would be able to expand on those ideas even without access to the internet. These hardware innovations are nothing new but they are cheaper to build, repair and longer lasting alternatives made with scrap metal and common items. Also the blog gives a wider variety of people the opportunity to express their ideas and contribute. Since it is open source, many people could work on the same project at the same time without every meeting each other but still being able to express themselves and help the overall image.

Marcin’s focus was less on his face to face speaking to the audience but instead more at directing the audience’s attention to the screen behind him. He displayed many images and time lapse video to demonstrate his progress on his project and the progress of hardware open sourcing as a whole. He talked slowly and precisely using simple language and personal words. This created an environment in which the person watching the video/audience could feel like they could easily connect to Marcin. He also talked in a way that anybody you meet could understand, enhancing the idea of open source being open to anyone.

This concept could easily be applied to education and is actively present the world around us (students). Open sourcing would be a very applicable education because as students their work is not usually accepted but open sourcing is open to anyone. This theory could also be applied to education to promote creativity in school classrooms and assignments. Openness would keep creativity from being “forced” on students. It could also encourage student collaboration and the willingness to work together.

You can see the full list of Marcin’s ecology prototypes and list of expected prototypes in the near future HERE. This does make me wonder, how much effort would it take for a group of high schoolers to start an open source project similar to this. Looking at the TED talk you can see a graph showing the progress of his project and once it had a few followers it gained ground exponentially and eventually he got invited to a TED conference. But looking at the transition from software open sourcing to hardware open sourcing it doesn’t seem to fit the trend of the conceptual age that Daniel Pink illustrates. It almost reverts back to the industrial age with the common man making his own tools, and the tools illustrated by Marcin are, for the most part, not new but rather more makeshift versions of existing ones. So do you think open sourcing will be part of the conceptual age? If so please specify whether it you think it would be more software, hardware or maybe neither?

Ken Robinson made one large point in the duration of his speech and elaborated with personal and news stories. I take away the fact that creativity is not given enough room to flourish. Schools are more focused on drilling information at students and creativity is viewed as unproductive. I also see how Ken views creativity as an augmentation to the left side of the brain but since not many people realize that he wants to show them how important it is. To make his point very apparent yet simple and straightforward, Ken Robinson used personal stories and created hypothetical situations to help illustrate. He also talked slowly and paced himself pausing and speeding up when he felt it necessary. This also makes him seem educated and well prepared. To present Ken tried to create personal appeal with the audience so he sounds less foreign to them. Hence the information he is giving them sounds practical and applicable to their lives. This matters because in every students lives they control very little of it and the teachers (adults) make all of the learning decisions. Implementing creativity into this makes those adults look critically at what education is really achieving. Then further down the road student’s education will affect their careers and lifestyles. But Ken Robinson never voiced his opinion on how he thinks creativity should be incorporated into education. So would it be better to just open up the curriculum and allow students to insert their own creativity or would the teachers pick “how to be creative”? Because with the second option the whole creative aspect is sucked out of the learning and is actually not being utilized. Another issue is whether or not the teachers or students can predict better where the future is going. Ken Robinson pointed out the issue of the unknown of the future but didn’t throw any solutions out. The younger generation might have a better understanding of the future since it will be the people around them that create it.