Education, creativity, the wonderous brain

TED talks, my Internet crush, has introduced me to Sir Ken Robinson. I want to make the leadership at the University where I work watch this and apply it to transforming our mission and how we do things.


Two things I take away from this as a teacher that underpin his lecture: he establishes contact with his audience ("how are you?" "amirite?" "do you?"). He uses jokes and stories to make his points, which he then also spells out clearly and concisely. It's a lot harder than it looks to do this!

And also "The whole purpose of public education is to produce University professors," and as a University professor who has studied teaching and learning styles, I think he's right.

His bio on the TED site says:

A visionary cultural leader, Sir Ken led the British government's 1998 advisory committee on creative and cultural education, a massive inquiry into the significance of creativity in the educational system and the economy, and was knighted in 2003 for his achievements. His latest book, The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything, a deep look at human creativity and education, was published in January 2009.

If you like this, you should also watch the amazing talk by Jill Bolte Taylor, a brain scientist who talks surviving about her own stroke. She, like Sir Ken, talks about the corpus callosum, but on the most profound, fundamental level.