Back in July, I got to speak at TEDxCapeTown. It was a fantastic event, thanks to the tireless work of its amazing organising team. Here’s my talk. (It’s online only now because it was held back while the TED Talent Search was on.) I posted the text of the talk here a while ago.
So you’ve decided that that many people can’t be wrong: it’s time to get an ereader. But which one? The industry of ereaders and other mobile devices is filled with big and small companies promising you the world, and you don’t trust half of it.
The cruel truth is that no one can tell you exactly what’s best for you. Everyone’s preferences are different. You simply have to figure it out for yourself, and this might be an expensive journey. That said, if you’re going to take the plunge, here’s my two cents’ worth. It might help you dodge a few bullets along the way. Continue reading
When you’re a tech-oriented person, people assume you think tech solves problems. Tech doesn’t, it’s just a useful and flexible tool.
At Education Week recently, acclaimed ICT Educator Sarietjie Musgrave explained that, for her: technology + poor teaching = expensive poor teaching. I couldn’t agree more.
I recently revisited a now famous Wired interview with Steve Jobs from early 1996, in which he talks about this, too:
I used to think that technology could help education. I’ve probably spearheaded giving away more computer equipment to schools than anybody else on the planet. But I’ve had to come to the inevitable conclusion that the problem is not one that technology can hope to solve. What’s wrong with education cannot be fixed with technology. No amount of technology will make a dent.
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Lincoln did not have a Web site at the log cabin where his parents home-schooled him, and he turned out pretty interesting. Historical precedent shows that we can turn out amazing human beings without technology. Precedent also shows that we can turn out very uninteresting human beings with technology.It’s not as simple as you think when you’re in your 20s – that technology’s going to change the world. In some ways it will, in some ways it won’t.
I’m no Jobs fanatic, but he hits the nail on the head here. More importantly, he goes on to talk about the need for educators and parents to foster creativity as the real engine of progress:
Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people.
Unfortunately, that’s too rare a commodity. A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences. So they don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.
It’s been over sixteen years since Jobs made those observations, which in Internet time makes them important lessons from distant history. We now have all the technological tools Jobs talks about, and yet many of the societal problems, too. That’s why I’ll never argue that technology solves our problems. Technology just helps us to solve them ourselves.
Over the last several months, TED has been running its global TED Talent Search (#TEDTalentSearch), an effort to draw on a wider pool of speakers than ever before for TED2013 in Long Beach, California. In fourteen cities around the world, 290 speakers did their best to explain their idea worth spreading. I got to talk in Joburg.
A key element of the Talent Search is public opinion, so on each video, viewers can Recommend, Vote, and Comment. A kind of intellectual Pop Idols. The TED team will be guided by that when selecting about 25 speakers for TED2013. The public voting ends in five days, so if you have a favourite speaker, get your vote in now by going to the Talent Search site (the quickest way is to hit the Facebook Recommend button below a video). Naturally, I’d love to see votes for me and my fellow southern Africans! Continue reading
The more I talk to people in education and publishing about what we’re doing at Paperight, the more I hear fascinating stories. My uncle David Attwell is an academic, teacher and writer who has worked and travelled around the world. He tells me:
The most innovative bookstore owner I ever met ran an operation from a garage in Rabat, Morocco. He would order books on appro by the BIG NAMES in criticism and theory, from all the global English and French publishers, then send them back having photocopied them. Then, the genius move, he would RENT his photocopies to students, for less than a dollar a week in most cases. (There was no way the students in Morocco could ever afford books published by the likes of Routledge.) I found some of the most informed students I’ve ever met, in Rabat, who used this service. Paperight would sort all this out.
This is exactly the kind of entrepreneur I referred to broadly in a TED Talent Search talk recently. Another favourite is this image and story snippet from Travlr on Flickr, who got a photocopied New York Times on his doorstep in Djibouti every morning. Where reading matter is inaccessible, because of cost or geography, people will make a plan, one way or another, to get it anyway. It’s time to help them do that easily and legally.