Sir Ken Robinson

I've taken a lot of time to ponder the first video we watched in seminar class. Sir Ken Robinson touched on a lot of good points on education and why we as a society cannot get the most out of people. So I decided to do my second blog on the man who created everything we watched, Mr. Robinson.

http://www.ted.com/speakers/sir_ken_robinson.html

The link above is a brief biography on Ken Robinson from TED talks. This man is both an author and an educator. I feel as though the class wasn't as focused as they should have been on this movie. This was a great movie and a great chance for people to really think about their own education.

The one thing that stuck out to me was the challenge put forth to children in kindergarten with the paper clip. Now to say that as you grow older you become wiser and thus think of more ways to use a paper clip would make sense. However, that is not how the study went as many of you know. As people grew older, they found less and less ways to use that very paper clip. Interesting if you ask me.

The other major thing that stuck out to me was the part about distractions. So often teachers sit at the front of the room and read from their lecture notes, or read from a powerpoint they seem to have just put together before class. They assume we will keep quiet and listen to every word they read directly from the slide, and not focus on our computers, our cell phones, our iPod's, our friends. There are too many ways for people to gather the same information without having to listen to a teacher talk non-stop. Maybe that's where Ken is going with this, maybe the teaching needs to be changed.

Anyways, Ken Robinson is a brilliant man, and has several more TED talks videos if people have the same interest as I do. Feel free to go to ted.com and have a look, you won't be disappointed.

Noah Crowley