Here is the second part of
my notes from the TEDxBoston that occurred yesterday. I have heard a lot about
TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) but have not attended before so I was
pleased to see how it worked. Here are my notes from the second group of
sessions. These
are live notes, only slightly edited, so please excuse typos, etc.
Cesar Hidalgo from MIT began this segment by covering global economic development. He said that one of the issues is that diversity is not spread evenly. He introduced several principles to address global economic development. First how many capabilities does a country possess, rather than resources. He used legos to represent capabilities in his visuals.
Here is more on Cesar’s lego theory of development thanks to Eric Andersen. Typically, GDP is seen as a function of just a few inputs (i.e. different types of putty using Cesar’s imagery). These are capital, labor, and some kind of technology input. The types of labor and the types of capital are more or less interchangeable (just as putty is). Of course, economists know this is a massive simplification of the world, but it is useful in helping describe an extremely complex reality.
Cesar proposes a new approach that will help take into account a bit more of the complexity that's out there in the world. He calls it the "lego" theory of development. If we look at those countries that are wealthy, we see that they produce products that require many different types of inputs or legos. Further, wealthy countries don't specialize in one or two products (in contradiction to a simplistic interpretation of comparative advantage) they export many different types of goods. If a product is very complex, it can be best produced by the few countries that have all the requirements. You need to match capabilities with product requirements for growth. How do you accumulate capabilities?
Another principle is having the capabilities centralized. The industrialized countries have a great concentration of capabilities in a centralized manner. He showed how this increased concentration of capabilities occurred in Malaysia as the economy grew. Cesar feels that diversity of capabilities predicts growth more than traditional inputs. This would argue for increasing the diversity of capabilities through effective education.
Felice Frankel, a photographer, provided a session titled more than pretty pictures. Felice covered three main ideas. She said the process of making a visual representation clarifies an idea. This process requires decisions that encourage reflection. Second, the process of making a representation should be collaborative. Third, the process of making a representation teaches. This third principle is her real passion. I certainly agree with her points and there has been a lot of research on this concept. Muhan Zhang next very movingly performed a Mongolian instrument.
John Werner and MacCalvin Romain covered learning out of the box. MacCalvin told us how his creativity was criticized in elementary school. However, he was shown that his interests could turn into a career through Citizen’s Schools. John discussed how US education is following behind the rest of the world. He discovered that schools tried to keep the community outside of the schools. Fifteen years ago he and others started Citizen Schools to help expand the resources that students are exposed to. John gave examples of bringing business teams into the schools to create more learning opportunities. He said there is a lot of potential for people to help. Eight million people do jury duty each year, What if there was education duty? If we just two percent of the scientists helped we would double the amount of science teachers available to our kids. Good ideas.
Bill Walczak shared more good ideas on education. His group started a charter school in a community health center in Dorchester. They involve students in the health care professions there. He said that Boston ninth grade students who do not go to one of the three prestige Boston public high schools have a 7% chance to graduate from high school. At the school in the health center they have achieved an over 70% success rate through the involvement in the community health center operations. This is a great model for integrating high school with the community and a growing professional field. Now it was time for lunch. More to follow in the next post.
This TEDxBoston session provided access to a diverse set of themes, some are not directly related to the major themes of this blog but I wanted to share with you how a TEDx session flows. The common theme is thinking outside the normal and creating innovation. I felt that the message across most of the sessions was that innovation becomes effective when it involves innovative way people are engaged with new ideas and technology. I think this is very related to this blog. I was pleased to attend and will be looking at the TED site for more.
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