10 talks on making schools great

via TED Blog by Morton Bast on 10/9/12

With just over a month to go before the 2012 presidential election in the US, eyes around the world are on the contest between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney. The election may well come down to a few key issues. So what matters most to Americans? The TED Blog read this Gallup poll from late July on issues that citizens want the next president to prioritize. Conveniently, these are topics that speakers often address on the TED stage. So, every week until the election, we’ll bring you a playlist focusing on one of the top-rated issues.

Among the most important questions in the upcoming election is, “How can we improve the nation’s public schools?” — 83 percent indicated that improving schools is “very important” or “extremely important.”

To get you thinking, talking and voting, here are 10 talks from speakers with some very big ideas about how to reshape our school environments.

Sir Ken Robinson: Bring on the learning revolution!
Sir Ken Robinson gave the most watched TEDTalk of all time at TED2006, “Schools kill creativity.” In this followup four years later, Robinson shares how schools should approach the education process — with personalized learning, where students are encouraged to explore their own interests and talents.

Emily Pilloton: Teaching design for change
Education challenges can be met with design solutions, says Emily Pilloton. In one of rural North Carolina’s poorest counties, she created Studio H, a modernized, humanitarian shop class that’s “growing creative capital within the next generation.” She shares her story at TEDGlobal 2010, showing how a whole community was transformed by a little design thinking.

Stephen Ritz: A teacher growing green in the South Bronx
Inveterate educator Stephen Ritz saw his students getting more unhealthy by the year, so sprang into action and created The Green Bronx Machine. At TEDxManhattan, he makes it clear — a passionate teacher and a fresh idea can improve kids’ physical and emotional well-being, not to mention their prospects for the future.

Daphne Koller: What we’re learning from online education
Universities should not be closed-door institutions, says Daphne Koller. At TEDGlobal 2012, Koller explained Coursera, a website where anyone can take real college courses for free. But while providing a unique service, Coursera also has a larger purpose — mining a wealth of data about how students learn.

Ann Cooper talks school lunches
It isn’t only in the classroom that students are struggling; in the lunchroom, there’s a shortage of healthy, sustainable things to eat. School meals are an opportunity to nourish and to educate, says food activist Ann Cooper, and we need to seize it now. (Read the TED Blog’s Q&A with Martha Payne, who blogs her school lunches.)

Taylor Mali: What teachers make
This must-see three minute slam poetry piece tells it like it is – teachers are undervalued in every sense of the word. At the Bowery Poetry Club, Taylor Mali raises his voice in protest and pays homage to the educators who make a daily difference.

Dan Meyer: Math class needs a makeover
No problem worth solving comes in a simple formula, says math teacher Dan Meyer. He insists that conversation is key, and that real-world thinking skills require the kind of complexity not offered in most textbooks. At TEDxNYED, he shows how math can be “the vocabulary for your own intuition.”

 

Diana Laufenberg: How to learn? From mistakes
Diana Laufenberg knows that her students aren’t going to love American history as much as she does — unless she gets them involved, making movies and holding mock elections. At TEDxMidAtlantic, she praises an approach to learning that doesn’t just ask for right answers.

Shimon Schocken: The self-organizing computer course
Great educators don’t have to teach — they can provide a context for self-guided learning. Shimon Schocken and Noam Nisan noticed that their computer science students didn’t have the most basic understanding of how computers work. So they developed a course for students to build a functioning computer, from the ground up. The two put the course online — giving away the tools, simulators, chip specifications and other building blocks — and were surprised that thousands jumped at the opportunity to learn.

Ken Robinson: Changing education paradigms
With the help of RSA Animate’s vivid illustration, education visionary Sir Ken Robinson explains the industrial-strength problems with our model of education. We are anesthetizing our children through their schooling, he warns, and it’s imperative that we update immediately.


Let’s have a conversation about mental health: How Sarah Caddick see it..

via TED Blog by Emily McManus on 10/10/12

Sarah Caddick at TEDGlobal 2012

On the TEDGlobal 2012 stage this summer, guest curator Sarah Caddick hosted the session “Misbehaving Beautifully,” a deep dive into a near-taboo subject: mental health and mental illness. Today, Oct. 10, happens to be World Mental Health Day, and TED.com is premiering the final talk Sarah curated for the stage, Ruby Wax’s “What’s so funny about mental illness?” As this final talk becomes available for viewing, we asked Caddick to reflect on creating the session — as well as on the conversations that happened afterward. Below, a note from Sarah. And after the jump, watch the talks from this wonderful session.

It’s a wrap …

Mission: create a story that is compelling and challenging, that takes people on a journey while ensuring each piece is significant enough that it can be sent out alone into the vast expanse of the world to tell its own tale. Not exactly a walk in the park, especially when the story I chose to tell in just 105 minutes was how our brains dance along a fine line between beauty and devastation.

And now each story from within the journey is out there, the last making itself known loudly with funny sketches, a colorful soft clay brain and a serious message.

Every speaker bought into the whole play, performed their part and embraced the slightly quirky path I asked them to travel, and their notes to me and each other afterwards had me in tears, which for a person who rarely reaches that state is quite something! But it was the overwhelming response from the audience at TED, the individuals who came up to me after the session and throughout the rest of the meeting, that broke my heart but gave me hope.

I couldn’t know that I would open up a tear in the fabric of the usually upbeat TED vibe, with people telling me of their own “misbehaving neurons,” the depression, mania or any other flavor of disorder that you can imagine. Their relief and happiness that we had let the cat out of the bag and talked about what many shy away from. For many of them it was the first time they had publicly owned up to the frailty of their brain and mind, but they did so knowing that those same misbehaving neurons could underpin the things they have achieved in life, the beauty they experience and the social fabric they are woven into.

I wasn’t expecting this, but it reinforced why I had picked this topic, why I wanted to unpick a little bit of the brain for the audience, to get them to see that mental disorder is not so black-and-white, and that we need to talk about it and figure out how we want to see it, how to rewrite the story.

Science, inspiration, love, despair, horror, illusion, make-believe, beauty, movement, humor and so much more, all embedded in the most ultraconnected piece of technology known to man.

I hope everyone enjoys the six talks that are now all live, and takes from each what they want. I feel honored to have been given the opportunity to capture the TED community for a brief period, and to have a group of individuals who signed up for the challenge and the fun!

And now the TEDTalks from Session 6: Misbehaving Beautifully:

Read Montague, Behavioral Neuroscientist, “What We’re Learning from 5,000 Brains”

Elyn Saks, Mental Health Law Scholar, “A Tale of Mental Illness”

Ruby Wax, Comedian and Mental Health Activist, “What’s so funny about mental illness?”

Vikram Patel, Mental health care advocate, “Mental health for all by involving all”

Wayne McGregor, Dancer, “A choreographer’s process in real time”

Robert Legato, Visual Effects Guru, “The art of creating awe”


FIRE: @MeekMill – Burn (Ft. Big Sean)

via illRoots by cliff on 10/10/12

Directed by: DRE Films
Source: Complex
Previously: Meek Mill – The Making Of ‘Dreams & Nightmares’ [Part 4]

Meek Mill drops a new visual for arguably one of the hottest songs of the year with ‘Burn’ featuring Big Sean. Watch this DRE Films-directed clip above. Meek’s debut album Dream & Nightmares in stores October 30th.

Behind The Numbers: Marvel’s ‘More Diverse’ Avengers


By Arturo R. García

All three covers for Marvel Comic’s “Avengers” #1. Via Newsarama.com

While Marvel Comics seems intent on doubling down on racefail within the X-Men titles, the new writer guiding portions of the company’s Avengers line has been promising a more diverse line-up.

As Kendra noted in her New York Comic-Con preview, Jonathan Hickman has gone on record as saying he wants half of his eventual 24-member cast to be comprised of PoC or women.

“One of the first things we all agreed on is that the roster should look more like the world,” he told Comic Book Movie.com. Looking at the line-up thus far, that “or” is a troubling distinction on what would otherwise be an admirable effort to follow through on his pledge.

Let’s start with the three covers shown above, which can be seen in more detail here. From left to right, the PoCs shown on the roster are:

  • The shadowy figure in the back of the left-hand cover has been confirmed to be Eden Fesi, an Aboriginal hero who appeared in Hickman’s Secret Warriors book.
  • Moving to the cover in the middle, not only has team stalwart The Falcon been added to the mix, but Sunspot, a core member of the New Mutants, has been promoted, along with Cannonball (seen in flight on the left-hand cover).
  • There do not appear to be any POC on the cover on the right-hand side, even though Iron Man’s armor there looks a lot like War Machine’s. 
  • It has also been confirmed that Shang-Chi will eventually be added to the cast.

Notice any group not represented?

That’s right. There’s as many white women as there are PoC in that triple cover. But no characters who are PoC and women, a wound that rubs deeper when you see Carol Danvers continue to get fast-tracked to the company’s movie platform, Monica Rambeau be damned. So counting Shang-Chi, Hickman’s math currently stands up–barely. Here’s to hoping things turn for the better for women of color–not to mention LGBT characters–under Hickman’s pen, because the situation seems bleak in at least two more Avengers books.

The Black Panther (left) in Marvel Comic’s “New Avengers.”

Right now T’Challa, now established once again as The Black Panther, appears to be the only PoC character in Hickman’s New Avengers series, which will focus on the latest iteration of the secret super-cabal known as the Illuminati.

Joining him as diversity stand-ins will be both The Beast and The Sub-Mariner, the latter of whom most recently seen drowning a third of the population of T’Challa’s home, Wakanda, in the critically-panned AvX cross-over, which pitted the Avengers against the X-Men for the purposes of…well, who the hell knows at this point. So, that will probably be awkward.

That said, it’s still a better representation than Rick Remender and John Cassaday’s Uncanny Avengers, a title spawned directly from AvX:

Characters from Marvel Comics’ “Uncanny Avengers.”

Brunettes! Blond white guys! Canadians! Smell the diversity, amirite?

Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie’s upcoming take on Young Avengers seems to get back on the right side of things:

America Chavez (top left) and characters from Marvel Comics’ “Young Avengers.” Via Comic Book Resources.com

That’s former teen villain America Chavez, a.k.a. Miss America, at the top of the cover above, joined by same-sex couple Wiccan and Hulkling. So far so good, other than this interview with the creative team where Chavez is continually called “Miss America Chavez” and described as having “a temper.” Well, of course. One more reason to worry: should one of these characters need to become cannon fodder, how secure is Chavez’s position compared to Hulkling/Wiccan, Noh-Varr and the reincarnated Kid!Loki? (Although there is the possibility that Loki will be returned to his adult persona in order to maintain corporate synergy with his movie counterpart.)

In a bit of sad irony, though, Hickman’s public embracing of diversity suggests a wider field of awareness than the company’s recent handling of the X-Men, which doesn’t appear to be letting up soon, seeing as how the company’s big move on that front is doting on a version of the five original X-Men…the ones from 1963.

It’s either cynical or hopelessly optimistic that they’re being featured in a book called All-New X-Men, but writer Brian Michael Bendis is playing the “Because You Demanded It!” card.

“That’s the thing X-Men fans always say they want,” he has said. “You go anywhere–’Bring back Jean Grey!’ But they don’t want a reincarnated Jean Grey, and they don’t want a dug-up Jean Grey. They want Jean.”

I’m willing to bet a fair number of fans also want Storm–and not just chained up on the cover of Wolverine’s latest series. Luckily, Sam Humphries and Ron Garney seem to have picked up on that, based on the cover to the relaunched Uncanny X-Force:

Storm (center) and characters from Marvel Comics’ “Uncanny X-Force.”

Here we see Ororo at the center of a cast that’s almost entirely comprised of cisgender women, with the male members being Puck, who is a dwarf, and Bishop, the time-bending PoC and former X-Man. (Psylocke, of course, is problematic in her own right.)

So while it’s still early, and there’s definitely gaps in his Avengers roster, Hickman’s statements at least represent a potential change of pace from the company’s past takes on diversity as “contrived.” But the key question moving forward then becomes: how many of these PoC characters will Hickman and the company be prepared to promote on multimedia platforms?

Writing your very first screenplay

via johnaugust.com by Stuart on 10/9/12

In the spirit of Looper, Craig and John take a journey back in time, looking at the first scripts they read, the first scripts they wrote, and the common pitfalls of many first screenplays.

Not only that: they share and critique the first three pages from the very first scripts they wrote.

Does John’s romantic tragedy from 1994 show potential? Would Craig keep reading his high-concept comedy from 1995? You can be the judge, because both samples are linked below.

LINKS:

You can download the episode here: AAC | mp3.