I see how this could happen, but I also see students say things like, Chat GPT writes it better, and looking to replace their own work with whatever AI produces. I worry about that mentality. And with regards to art, so many value the aesthetic and the price, not the thinker or creator behind the work, meaning that trends indicate that many will choose AI-art over that produced by a human.

Beyond AI, the takeover (and monopoly?) of companies like Valley and HUMC has resulted in an attempt to streamline patient interactions, which really means working on a timer and likely more AI, less communication and thought. No time for pausing to think or reflect.

Makes me wonder what I would immerse myself in! Somewhat along the lines of our project for this class.

I like the idea of using these questions to focus my presentation for class and reflect on the process.

1. Write a series of vignettes from your life.
2. Choose one or all and reflect on the lesson(s) learned from these moments.

I also wonder about the distance needed to determine “which experiences that are absolutely worth sharing.” Adult writing assignment idea: go back and write the college essay that you should have written, now that you have time and perspective for reflection.

Who decides that? Are TED talks really for all? I wonder if there is a rubric somewhere used by a TED talk panel with the column “something worth saying” – and what they’re looking for. How much does it connect to the audience and what notable speakers have come before?

I also love the definition of an “idea” and the design thinking approach to how to develop it for another person to be able to use it in some way.

I love this comparison. Never thought of it this way, but now I can imagine it.

Like our inquiry groups! Without fail, I felt this spark each and every time we met.

Sometimes I think that the brilliant people themselves (ourselves) don’t know how their (our) work connects to everything else. I think part of the point is the intercommunication so that we have the opportunity, at the very least, to recognize the connections if they exist. If we’re not communicating, we are definitely NOT going to discover the connections.

Creative Synthesis

You said it, Amy!

changing minds takes time. it takes listening as well as speaking

This same problem — with scientists speaking to the public — came up during the pandemic with masks. To scientists, what they were saying made perfect sense to them, about the probability of catching the disease with or without a mask on, etc. Most people just wanted to be told a “straight answer” of do we or do we not have to wear them. They can’t handle the complexity of percentage risk.

So many items on this list shout “INFLUENCERS” to me

what I like about this idea is that speaker and audience embark on this journey together. It’s a little more like a conversation than a lecture. Okay, the audience is not really talking back, but you as the speaker also don’t want to just talk AT your audience. You want them to feel included, not alienated. As I read the whole TED book, I thought a great deal about how much ACTING goes into a good TED Talk — and how much ACTING goes into good teaching, too.

I think Anderson is mostly talking about avoiding jargon here — using language that your audience will understand if they’re not “insiders.” But that requires having a bit of information about your audience, too. It’s like NOT using a whole bunch of educational acronyms during your Back to School Night presentation to parents.

We’re trying to get our public school district to grant us one half day every other month. Once a week would be a dream.

I love these questions. I think they could be useful to kids in classrooms, too, to help them think about what they love, what they find interesting, what other people find interesting about what they’re doing, too

There’s an amazing children’s book called I Am a Story by Dan Yaccarino that shows human history as a series of stories being told among human beings. It fascinates me — how it seems like storytelling is something we humans particularly love, whether telling or listening.

this reminds me so much of juniors and seniors trying to figure out what to write for their college application essays. They often want to know / want to write about “what the admissions officers want to hear” rather than what makes them who they are

what’s interesting to me about students is that they’re often trying to figure out who their authentic selves are. Maybe we all are to some extent, but I think middle and high schoolers and first-half of college-years college kids — they’re all working on that with much more intensity than many adults. So they have a more challenging task here, I think

Same idea with interdisciplinary learning in schools. One of my students told me today that the AP Lang class is difficult because so much of what we read is influenced by the historical context in which it was written — it’d be SO GREAT to teach this class alongside a history teacher, really co-teach it

I think he means that TED is bigger than just the person who started it. Like — he was nervous about taking over from the prior CEO (or whatever title he had) because he had been the founder, so Anderson was nervous that people would think TED was “over” because the founder was retiring and maybe Anderson couldn’t handle the role. But then Anderson had this epiphany that TED was truly something beyond the person who had founded it; it had become a force of its own, and all he had to do was steer it a bit.

Oh yes
I also love laughing like that while reading. If an author can make me laugh that much, it’s amazing. A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson has done that. Also, the end of Stanley Tucci’s memoir Taste did it — I was crying while laughing so hard that I had to stop reading because I could read through the tears in my eyes.

With my seniors in the Sci-fi/Fantasy class I’m teaching this semester, they are having loads of fun teaching me about video games. We’re reading Ready Player One. I’m not really acting, but I play dumb about a lot of the video gamer stuff in the book so that my students can teach me what they know/ how they relate to the book. They love knowing more than I do!