Do You Believe in Magic? (TED talk #5)

Based off of the TED talk by Keith Barry: Keith Barry does brain magic

After watching the TED talk Keith Barry does brain magic, I feel even more perplexed and amazed about the human brain and what feats we can do. The brain is such a complicated organ that it is hard to say any one thing about it, which means that everything that we are learning has some truth to it, but it is never one way or the other. It will always be a combination of what the future will need and what we have had in the past. Keith Barry starts out by having the audience perform a stunt with their own hands (you must cross your arms a certain way, and then uncross them, which no one can do). After spending a couple of minutes trying to figure out what he did, I was stumped. He made a very interesting comment which was that people only saw what he wanted them to see. This relates to many other things in life as well. If someone is being bullied, or doing things that they should not be doing, they can manipulate their parents to see what they want them to see, which is that everything is fine. I have heard of too many stories where friends and family think that everything is OK, but in reality it is not, because they are only showing what they want people to see. Everyone hides secrets about themselves that no one knows because they do not want people to know them. Sometimes it just takes someone to really dig deep and find what that person is hiding, just like with a magician: you must really look to learn their secrets.

Keith Barry then goes on to show a movie clip where he is driving blindfolded with a stranger in the passenger seat. He never crashes, but he claims that he was seeing through the eyes of the girl in the passenger seat. Now I have never really believed in this magic voo-doo type of stuff, but it was pretty crazy to watch him drive a car blindfolded but to seem to know where he was going. I caught myself making up numerous explanations for how he was driving: the car was automated, the blindfold was see-through, he had traveled this road a hundred times before, he was lucky, there were bumps on the road to guide the car, and on and on. After understanding what I was thinking, I realized that all of these explanations were pretty crazy and could never happen. Afterwards, he makes another interesting comment, which is that most people try to come up with explanations for things that they do not understand. Our brains do not see the logic in magic, and so we try to come up with things that we can make sense of. This reminds me of the left-side right-side argument about the brain. Since the right-side is more creative and the left-side is more logical, I wonder if people who are more right-brain dominant would have an easier time accepting this stunt. Right-brainers think more outside the box, and they are also probably the more extremists. For left-brain people, something has to make sense, or else they are skeptical. I would consider myself more towards left-brain, and I am having a really hard time believing that what he did was for real. Since society as a whole has grown up thinking, teaching, and living basically left-brain, that could explain some of why magicians and voo-doo practitioners have been shunned from society as crazy.

To prove his point, Keith Barry then held other experiments. I had a hard time believing these demonstrations of magic, and I think that part of that was from personal experience.  I have had a couple of magic kits before, and even when the tricks seem impossible to explain, there was always a clever way to explain how they were doing the tricks. Some types of magic are like a big problem-solving puzzle that you just need to figure out the answer to. I love those problems that are seemingly-impossible to solve and have a very clever answer, and once you do solve them you feel so accomplished. Magic tricks are like that because when you finally figure out the trick behind the magic you immediately say ah-ha and then smile at the trickiness of it. But even if it was set-up beforehand there was no denying that they were pretty cool. I wonder how he came to be a magician, and what his lifestyle is like. No doubt, that would be a fun job.

I found Keith Barry’s TED talk to be extremely fun and exciting to watch. He incorporated some of his thoughts about magic with some actual magic tricks. He had a movie to show in the beginning to capture the audience’s attention, and to help explain what he was all about. He actually used the audience in his presentation, which was fun because it made the audience feel a part of the show. Audience participation is a plus! Having interesting, intriguing, and most of all cool activities to do definitely highlight his TED talk, and made it a memorable one. He had a sly sense of humor, and even if something did not go as planned in his talk he was able to play it cool and go along with what happened.

Some things are hard to believe in life because they do not have the science and absolute proof behind them, but this is where faith comes along. I can see magic tying in with religion because none of them are 100% hard evidence, and so it is up to the person to believe what they want to believe. Faith is all about accepting things that we cannot prove, and so if people around the world want to believe in the type of magic that Keith Barry does, then that is fine. It is all about people’s own decisions of what is real and what is fake.

Cognitive Surplus (TED talk #4)

Based off of the TED talk by Clay Shirky: How cognitive surplus will change the world

Clay Shirky gave a mind-blowing TED talk about cognitive surplus and how cooperation with each other and human generosity will end up prevailing in the world to come. Using the first example of Ushahidi, an online map that takes information from multiple sources and combines it into one easy place to get information, Clay Shirky illustrates how one person had a problem (one person not being able to keep up with a mass amount of information), 2 other programmers heard about it and decided to help, and with the technology that is possible today they made a tool that helps society. Using this idea, Clay Shirky introduced the idea of cognitive surplus-the ability of the world to come together and contribute into collective knowledge to do good in the world. What is interesting is that the problem of not being able to keep up seemed complex and almost as if it didn’t have an answer, but then the solution was so simple. Sometimes the answers to our problems are just in front of our face, and all it takes is a little thought and creativity to come up with them. To me, cognitive surplus sounds a lot like Communism, in the sense that everyone is coming together to share their knowledge, but in a good way. After just learning about the Cold War in Social Studies and the fear of Communism, I can’t help but wonder how the world will understand and treat this idea of cognitive surplus. Since the reaction of the people to Communism was not all that great, I wonder if the people will accept it or reject it. This reminds me of what the class discussed with Cory Doctrow and Little Brother: people fear the unknown and change. Implementing cognitive surplus might be a long and slow process.

According to Clay Shirky there are two parts to cognitive surplus: technology and human generosity. It takes technology to solve the problem, and the human generosity to manipulate the technology to solve it. The reason we have not seen a rise in cognitive surplus until now is because technology like todays has not been available until now. People did not want to sit around and be couch potatoes, they wanted to be creative. It is just that up till now people really did not have a way to be creative. Using this idea of cognitive surplus, websites like Wikipedia were created, where someone wants to know some information, and so someone else spends their time giving it to them. This is civic value. Ushahidi and Wikipedia are created not only to help the participants, but to help society as a whole. But if I am doing a research paper, one of the first things the teacher says to the class is, “you cannot use Wikipedia”, or something along the lines of that. I understand that Wikipedia sometimes isn’t always reliable, but if mass amount of information are being pulled together just to help me, or someone else, then I should be able to use them. We are never going to be able to implement Clay Shirky’ s ideas if we cannot use the websites that are being created from his idea. Tools like yahooanswers.com or answers.com are exactly what Clay Shirky is talking about, but high school students are not allowed to use them. Problem? I think so.

The other type of cognitive surplus is called communal value. This is creating something by the participants for each other, just because. LOLcats is a great example of communal value. They are a branch of creativity that is created mainly for laughs, but it is the idea of someone spending their free time to make something for someone else. YouTube allows people to make videos because they want to and share them with others. Even though LOLcats are probably the stupidest act of creativity, they are still an act of creativity. Is it still worth it to do something creative, even though it is stupid? Yes, it is, since at least whoever is making the LOLcats is trying to do something. Whenever you try something, you are bound to get better at it. Like everything else in life, you are bound to get some of the practical and purposeful (Ushahidi), along with some of the just for fun (LOLcats). Ushahidi has a purpose, which is to gather information, while LOLcats is really just to please people and make them laugh. This slides right in with what Dan Pink is trying to say; he believes that there will be a jump from more people wanting practical to more people wanting pleasing. Products’ design is going to have to compete for who can be the best. But what do these purposeful and pleasing items have in common? They both are designed by people because they want to.

Motivation also plays a key role in making cognitive surplus work. Intrinsic motivators are becoming more popular and important. Cognitive surplus works because people want to help others, and they want to be creative. If a boss told someone that they had to write answers to people’s questions on answers.com or make a video for YouTube for entertainment, the work would immediately become a burden and the quality would decrease. Why? Because since it is work, people think that it does not matter as much. The idea is that people take their own free time and help someone else because they want to, and that is what they enjoy doing. As soon as the word work is involved, people feel that they do not owe the person as much, since it is work and they have to do it. Taking the thought of human generosity- that people will help other because they want to-immediately makes the time spent on it longer, the quality better, and the project more meticulously created. People are spending their own free time on this, so why not make it the best?

Clay Shirky utilizes many effective speaking techniques. He never says um or like or any other pause that would take away from the presentation. He uses the screen to illustrate some of his points and to back them up more. Perhaps some of the most effective techniques were his ability to incorporate humor into his presentation. The LOLcats were funny and unexpected, yet they fit in perfectly with his points. He talked about them as if they were something as serious as the weather. He also had many examples and outside sources to back up his points. Using the Ushahidi example, the outside study done on daycare centers, the LOLcats, and quotes from other leaders, he brought more validity to his argument, and made it easier to understand.

What matters? That we utilize the want for us to share and help others to create a better world. Cognitive Surplus.

   

The Truths Behind Motivation (TED talk #3)

Based off of the TED talk by Dan Pink: The surprising science of motivation

Dan Pink gave an interesting, surprising, convincing TED talk about what motivates humans. He started off with using an activity scenario about a candle, a box of tacks, and a match. The goal is to get the candle to stick to the wall so that no wax drips down (the solution is to take the box that the tacks came in and use that to make the candle stick to the wall).The point of this activity is to asses a person’s ability to think creatively and out of the box. When rewards are added for people who can solve the problem, they actually end up taking longer to solve the problem, which is not what some would expect. Why? Dan Pink’s theory is that there are two types of motivators-internal and external. The external motivators would be the ones such as a reward (money, candy, etc.), but the internal motivators are what people do not take into account for. Some internal motivators include autonomy (urge to direct our own lives), mastery (the desire to get better and better at something that matters), and purpose (the yearning for something larger than ourselves). It is hard to believe Dan Pink, because I (and I am sure most Americans) though before is that rewards were always the way to go. If you want something done, give an incentive for it and then it will be done. Rewards still work, but they only work for certain types of problems. For example, if you offer a reward for solving an equation in math, you would find that the reward would help people solve it faster. But if you wanted to try to get someone to figure out why a formula worked and offered them a reward for it, they would spend more time trying to figure out the answer than someone else offered no reward. Rewards narrow focus (and creativity)and work well for simple, straight-forward tasks. However, because of the changing world, society is experiencing a decline in this type of thinking. Getting into Dan Pink’s other book A Whole New Mind; left-brain (solving straightforward questions) thinking is going to have to move over for right-brain (solving out-of-the-box questions) thinking. Hence, the rewards that worked so well for left-brain thinking are not going to work for this new age of right-brain thinking.

Dan Pink then goes on to explain that instead of rewarding people (which, thanks to science, has been proven to not work), we need to focus on those intrinsic motivators. People want to do stuff because they like it, enjoy doing it, and it brings happiness to them. Something very interesting is that when a person wants to do something they will do it; but as soon as someone says that it is required, they want to do it much less. Having things that someone must do immediately makes the task less appealing. I am not sure exactly why this is, but I think that it is because people want to things that they like, and they do not want to do things that they do not like. Going off of this idea, he details how some companies are starting to implement procedures such as FEDEX days (days where people get the day off of work to create whatever they want) or ROWE days (people can work whenever they want, just as long as they get their work done) where creativity is encouraged and people get to do what they want to do. These types of days end up helping a company much more with willingness, new ideas, and work ethic, mainly because people get to choose what is best for them and make their own decisions. However, many of these suggestions for a better reward system seem very eutopian to me; if work has no structure to it, then would people really get things done? Sure, that is great that during “free time” everyone would work, but in reality, I doubt that that is the case. As more and more buisnesses start to lead off in this direction of work ethic, society will have to see if this method ends up working or not.

After watching this TED talk, I could not help but notice that the school system is set up in this same way of the if then reward. So far it seems to have worked, but the world is changing, and since the world is changing the types of thinking have to change, and since the types of thinking have to change that means the way we motivate that thinking must change too. Maybe if schools started using motivators such as creative days much like the FEDEX days instead of grades, students would start to become more creative, which then means better prepared for the future. Dan Pink also mentions carrots and sticks many times (carrots-reward people with material objects, sticks-punish them with sticks). He has talked about how the carrots do not work, but I wonder if the sticks work. How is punishment as a motivator? If you don’t do this, then this is going to happen to you. I am curious if that affects the left brain or the right brain. Material objects do not work as motivators, but what about the threat of being bad or being punished?

Part of the reason that Dan Pink’s speech was so successful was because of his speaking techniques. He used a slideshow to show important quotes that really make the points of his argument. He spoke with a clear voice, not saying any ums or having any awkward pauses. His entire speech was almost like an analogy to a court case, which was funny and unique. He used humor to make it even more interesting, and by having many outside examples and sources he provided validity to his speech that was very convincing. Throughout his entire speech he made his points clear and concise.

After watching this TED talk there is clearly a mismatch between what society knows and what business does. It is also clear that the types of motivators that we have now are outdated and are not going to work in the future. The world must change its ways in order to be successful in the science of motivation.

Kids Deserve more Credit (TED talk #2)

Based off of the TED talk by Adora Svitak: What Adults can learn from Children

Adora Svitak, a 12 year-old girl, gave a fantastic TED talk about how the world needs more childish thinking from adults, and how kids need big expectations that start with a reciprocal learning relationship between adults and children. One of her first points is that adults need to be more like children: thinking more positively and believing that anything can be done. I completely agree with this. Adults too many times give up on ideas or creativity because it seems too unrealistic or too unpractical. All new inventions come from a dismissed and seemingly-impossible notion. Like Sir Ken Robinson said, “creativity is educated out of people”, and since creativity brings so much to the world, it is imperative that adults start learning how to be more like kids. Children have much to offer the world. If a kid tries to speak up, sometimes the response is, “oh-that’s childish” or “you’re only a child!”. One of the points that she is trying to make is that kids need to be heard and not ignored. Adora Svitak is living proof of that. She is only a 12 year-old girl, and yet she is talking about world-problems that some people her age would not even understand.

She then gives an analogy about how a teacher should not just stand at the head of the class telling students what to do, but that the students should also teach the teachers. This reminds me very much of Mrs. Smith’s class. Multiple times Mrs. Smith says that she hates standing at the front of the class and lecturing. She believes in discussions and a more open learning environment, because then she learns from the students as well. Children have diverse perceptions to offer to the world, but most often they do not ever receive a chance to share them.

The next point that Adora Svitak makes is that children’s expectations are too low. When adults underestimate kid’s abilities they never rise to their full potential. A great point that she says is, “When expectations are low, trust me, we will sink to them”. It is the parent’s responsibility to take a chance and trust their child with high bars, and then see where that leads them. Children need someone to push them in the right direction, to help them become great. That is a tricky road though, since it is easy to control their path too much. Kids still need to make their own decisions, but sometimes what are best are high expectations so that we can rise to them.

Kids are the future. We are the generation that will be taking care of the current adults. We are the ones that will be making political decisions and coming up with new inventions, so isn’t it important that we are raised in the best possible way? Progress happens because each generation grows and develops, and learns something from the previous one. Opportunities are key, and are what really matters for the future.

Adora Svitak has a very successful presentation, and in the most part it was because she was prepared. She knew what to say (even though she had notecards) and connected all of her ideas together by relating it back to her opening paragraph. She told personal stories, which made it more interesting to listen to. She also did not use any ums or likes in her speech that would have detracted from the message trying to get across. She did use a Prezzi in her presentation, but it was not the main focus. The Prezzi just added to the presentation by giving the audience a visual image to go along with the talking. However, she talked very fast. Sometimes it was hard to understand her, and it would have helped if she had paused more in between transitions. At parts her speech sounded a little too rehearsed. By utilizing some humor she made some parts funny, but the majority of it was serious. Even though she was only 12, Adora Svitak had a presentation worthy of an old wise scholar because of the professionalism and rehearsal that was obvious when she gave her speech.

A Look at Education and Speech-Giving (TED talk #1)

Based off of the TED talk by Sir Ken Robinson

Sir Ken Robinson gave an excellent TED talk on how schools are killing children’s creativity. He made a valid point about an ever-increasing problem with education. His first point that stood out to me was when he said, “We don’t grow into creativity, we grow out of it.” This got me thinking about why there are not more creative people in the world, and why kids in school are discouraged to be creative. I think that part of the reason is because before, the world did not need creative people, but now with technology increasing and jobs decreasing, creativity is becoming more important. But I think that another part of the reason is because of people’s peers. Kids are not allowed to be creative, and they are looked down upon if they are. Another point that stuck with me was when he said how people are afraid to be wrong. Society has drilled in us how being wrong and making mistakes is not ok, but in fact being wrong is one way to be creative. If people aren’t brave enough to take risks, then they don’t try new things and come up with new ideas. In his TED talk Sir Ken Robinson also talks about the point of education. He thinks that the point of education is to produce people like university professors who think one certain way. While I do partially agree with this statement, I do not all the way see his point of view. I believe that another point of education is to give kids the skills to succeed in the future. Like Sir Ken Robinson mentioned, it is hard to teach kids for the future because no one knows what the future will look like. Instead, we can just give students the tools to be prepared for what they might do in their lives. However, instead of just teaching them the one standard left-side way that everyone knows and uses, why can’t we just teach them the tools that they will need, but do it in a way where the right-side creative kids benefit too? They can still be learning the same concepts, just in a different way. Now I don’t know what this would look like or how it would be done, but I do think that it is worth thinking about, because the world is changing, and like it or not education is going to have to change with it.

Sir Ken Robinson uses many effective speaking techniques that make his speech entertaining and enjoyable. Right off the bat he utilizes humor to ease the audience into his presentation and to make it more fun to listen to. He tells stories that are personal, which allows the audience to connect to his points and makes it more personal and interesting for them. He has one main point, then he strays off topic and makes another point, but then he connects them together. This makes his speech more complex and relevant. Instead of just listening to him go on and on about one topic, he states the point and then moves on with something else. All of these techniques make his speech stand out, and makes listeners want to listen for more. Body language is also key for giving a successful speech. He seems immediately comfortable in front of the audience, and is not afraid to maybe slip up or laugh at what he says. It is important that when the audience laughs, the speaker stops and waits for it to get quite again.

What I took away from this video (aka what matters about it) is that the world is in a process of academic inflation. The standard bars for education keep getting higher and higher. One alternative route is that instead of trying to be the best in the old academic world of left-brain, people could start in on a different approach (creativity). What matters is that the world accepts and realizes that everybody has different ways of learning and different strengths and levels of intelligence. The world needs every type of learner and thinker, and so instead of stereotyping groups of people into ‘creative is not as smart’ or ‘learning math and science will get you a job’ , the whole system of education needs to concentrate on better ways to teach kids the skills they need for life. They need to encourage them in every type of job profession, and stop being so biased towards one type of person. There is a great saying that no two people are alike, and students are still waiting for the day when educators realize it.