Sir Ken Robinson : Creativity and Education
his talk was very entertaining - he's quite funny!, and he raised some good points and examples of how modern education system is designed towards getting people jobs, since it was formed since the introduction of industrialisation. as we don't know what will happen in the future, how can we educate children correctly to prepare for the future. and how creativity has a lesser importance in the education system of today. I liked a couple of comments he raised - listed below. the full transcript is on the TED blog page
"creativity now is as important in education as literacy, and we should treat it with the same status"
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]]>Sir Ken Robinson : Creativity and Education
his talk was very entertaining - he's quite funny!, and he raised some good points and examples of how modern education system is designed towards getting people jobs, since it was formed since the introduction of industrialisation. as we don't know what will happen in the future, how can we educate children correctly to prepare for the future. and how creativity has a lesser importance in the education system of today. I liked a couple of comments he raised - listed below. the full transcript is on the TED blog page
"creativity now is as important in education as literacy, and we should treat it with the same status"
...
kids will take a chance. If they don't know, they'll have a go. Am I right? They're not frightened of being wrong.
Now, I don't mean to say that being wrong is the same thing as being creative. What we do know is, if you're not prepared to be wrong, you'll never come up with anything original. If you're not prepared to be wrong. And by the time they get to be adults, most kids have lost that capacity. They have become frightened of being wrong.
And we run our companies like this, by the way, we stigmatize mistakes. And we're now running national education systems where mistakes are the worst thing you can make.
And the result is, we are educating people out of their creative capacities.
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Now our education system is predicated on the idea of academic ability. And there's a reason. The whole system was invented round the world there were no public systems of education really before the 19th century. They all came into being to meet the needs of industrialism.
So the hierarchy is rooted on two ideas: Number one, that the most useful subjects for work are at the top. So you were probably steered benignly away from things at school when you were a kid, things you liked, on the grounds that you would never get a job doing that. Is that right? Don't do music, you're not going to be a musician; don't do art, you're not going to be an artist. Benign advice -- now, profoundly mistaken. The whole world is engulfed in a revolution.
And the second is, academic ability, which has really come to dominate our view of intelligence because the universities designed the system in their image. If you think of it, the whole system of public education around the world is a protracted process of university entrance. And the consequence is that many highly talented, brilliant, creative people think they're not, because the thing they were good at at school wasn't valued, or was actually stigmatized. And I think we can't afford to go on that way.
he's written a book called "Out of Our Minds: Learning to be Creative" and is writing another now called "Epiphanies" which is about how people discovered their talents.
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Paul Stamets : 6 ways mushrooms can save the world
Paul Stamets talked about mushrooms - mycelium and how they are nature's internet and the present day internet is a similar model based on nature's creation. also about different uses for mycelium eg regenerating soil, solving oil accidents, medical uses and renewable energy solutions.
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Al Gore : New thinking on the climate crisis
Al Gore gave a new presentation speaking about democracy and how people have to help the climate crisis at home, but also in larger scales by forcing their government and media to raise more awareness to assist with the consciousness change required in helping to save the planet
]]>it's on http://postmoderntimes.com also - which is also a great video / online magazine
here's the blurb from youtube about it :
episode features four underground hip hop artists -- Naada, Propaganda Anonymous, 2HL, and iLL SpoKKinN -- and producer euphAmism in an animated music video packing lyrical and graphical punch in a call for global awakening.
Please go to www.iclips.net/2012 to see the rest of the episodes (more)
]]>it's on http://postmoderntimes.com also - which is also a great video / online magazine
here's the blurb from youtube about it :
episode features four underground hip hop artists -- Naada, Propaganda Anonymous, 2HL, and iLL SpoKKinN -- and producer euphAmism in an animated music video packing lyrical and graphical punch in a call for global awakening.
Please go to www.iclips.net/2012 to see the rest of the episodes (more)
]]>'Oldest' wall painting looks like modern art
"French archaeologists have discovered an 11,000-year-old work of art in northern Syria which is the oldest known wall painting, even though it looks like a work by a modernist.
The two square-metre painting, in red, black and white, was found at the Neolithic settlement of Djade al-Mughara on the Euphrates, northeast of the city of Aleppo.
"It looks like a modernist painting," said Eric Coqueugniot, the team leader. "Some of those who saw it have likened it to work by (Paul) Klee. Through carbon dating we established it is from around 9,000 BC."
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The dating makes the designs at least 1500 years older than wall paintings at Çatalhöyük, the famous 9500-year-old Turkish village, among one of the first towns. Cave art dates back much further but it was not until the so-called Neolithic Revolution that people began marking up human-made surfaces.
Scientists are fascinated by the birth of art because it marked a decisive point in our story, when man took a critical step beyond the limitations of his hairy ancestors and began to use symbols. The modern mind was born."
related articles :
The birth of our modern minds ...
Two pieces of ochre engraved with geometrical patterns more than 70,000 years ago, were recently found at Blombos Cave, 180 miles east of Cape Town. If the current dogma is accepted, this means people were able to think abstractly and behave as modern humans much earlier than previously thought.
Lord Renfrew would argue that art, like genetics, does not tell the whole story of our origins. For him, the real revolution occurred 10,000 years ago with the first permanent villages. That is when the effects of new software kicked in, allowing our ancestors to work together in a more settled way. That is when plants and animals were domesticated and agriculture born.
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Lord Renfrew puts his faith in "cognitive archaeology". This is not "thinking prehistoric thoughts" but has a more modest aim of revealing how ancient minds worked by studying what they did - how they counted, made flint tools or used measures.
Intriguingly, he argues, in his book Figuring it Out, that contemporary art also provides insights into how proto-societies grappled with the material world.
Cave find dates dawn of creativity
TWO pieces of ochre - a form of iron ore - engraved with geometrical patterns more than 70,000 years ago reveal that people were able to think abstractly and behave as modern humans much earlier than previously thought.
The discovery in a South African cave suggests that humans have created art for twice as long as suggested by previous discoveries, notably by cave paintings from France that have been dated to less than 35,000 years ago.
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While genetic and fossil evidence suggests that humans were anatomically modern in Africa before 100,000 years ago, scholars are not yet able to agree on whether human behaviour and physique developed in tandem.
Some believe that modern behaviour arose relatively late and rapidly, 40,000 to 50,000 years ago, while others believe that it evolved earlier and more gradually.
The diversity of views reflects the lack of agreement among scientists on what behaviour best defines the difference between modern humans and their earlier ancestors.
But there is a general consensus that a clear marker of modern behaviour are the cognitive abilities that would be used, for example, to create abstract or depictional images.
"Archaeological evidence of abstract or depictional images indicates modern behaviour," Prof Henshilwood said. "The Blombos Cave engravings are intentional images."
Stone Age masterpieces shed new light on the origins of art
EUROPE'S oldest cave paintings - a menagerie of lions, rhinos, bears and panthers drawn at least 30,000 years ago - are so sophisticated that they may force scientists to think again about the origins of art.
New radiocarbon datings of the Chauvet cavern paintings in Ardeche, France, have confirmed that their Stone Age creators were as skilled as painters 15,000 years later.
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"Prehistorians, who have traditionally interpreted the evolution of prehistoric art as a steady progression from simple to more complex representations, may have to reconsider existing theories of the origins of art."
The caves have challenged the conventional theory of the evolution of art which states that it had crude beginnings in the Aurignacian period followed by gradual progress over thousands of years.
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