This February, over 80 enthusiastic TEDx’ers and TEDsters gathered together in downtown Zurich to bring TED2013 to them, as part of TEDxZurich’s TEDxLive event — what they called “an 8-hour TED festival.”
Locals and expats alike piled into the auditorium of the Hub Zurich, a well-known sanctuary for the hip, the techno-geek, the young entrepreneurs, artists, and emerging start-ups of the city to watch the big TED Conference, said TEDxZurich team member Kristina Koch.
“Shortly before the first talk of Session 4 was about to go live,” Kristina said, “Dania Gerhardt, face and host of TEDxZurich, welcomed the audience and kicked off what was to become an 8-hour TED festival — rich with riveting talks and idea-sparking discussions amongst all attendees.”
The night’s hosts provided provisions to satisfy cravings and stop total brain overload during the marathon TED-fest — Swiss pretzel sandwiches, peanuts and, as Kristina says, “naturally — cold beer.”
Conversation flared all night, with die-hard attendees still deep in discussion at 1:30 in the morning. “Our team couldn’t have asked for a more successful, pleasing, and, above all, fun turnout,” Kristina said, and she and the TEDxZurich team look forward to TEDxZurich 2013 this October.
Former textbook writer and TEDxBeaconStreet speaker Tyler DeWitt has ideas on how we should teach science — and they’re a lot different from how most do it now. During his first year teaching high school science, a moment came during a lesson on bacteria and viruses that made him realize that what he was asking his students to read wasn’t really teaching them science at all.
“The reading sucked,” said a student. “You know what, I don’t mean that it sucks. It means that I didn’t understand a word of it. It’s boring. Um, who cares, and it sucks.”
So — he taught his students the lesson in the way he’d like to be taught — as a story — and in his TEDxBeaconStreet talk, “Hey science teachers — make it fun,” Tyler breaks down how stories, images, and demonstrations can make science not only more accessible to kids, but more memorable for everyone.
From his talk:
The language in their textbook was truly incomprehensible. If we want to summarize [the story of viruses and how they attack], we could start by saying something like, “These viruses make copies of themselves by slipping their DNA into a bacterium.”
The way this showed up in the textbook, it looked like this: “Bacteriophage replication is initiated through the introduction of viral nucleic acid into a bacterium.” That’s great, perfect for 13 year olds…You know, I keep talking about this idea of telling a story, and it’s like science communication has taken on this idea of what I call the tyranny of precision, where you can’t just tell a story….Because good storytelling is all about emotional connection. We have to convince our audience that what we’re talking about matters…
I’m currently a Ph.D. student at MIT, and I absolutely understand the importance of detailed, specific scientific communication between experts, but not when we’re trying to teach 13 year olds. If a young learner thinks that all viruses have DNA, that’s not going to ruin their chances of success in science. But if a young learner can’t understand anything in science and learns to hate it because it all sounds like this, that will ruin their chances of success.
When he’s not teaching, Tyler makes YouTube explaining scientific concepts in a way that won’t put you to sleep.
To watch his videos, click here, and don’t miss his TEDxBeaconStreet talk, which you can watch in its entirety on TED.com.
(Photos: Tyler’s cartoon science lesson)
The moment kids start to lie is the moment storytelling begins.
They are talking about things they didn’t see. It’s amazing. It’s a wonderful moment…It calls for celebration. For example, a kid says, “Mom, guess what? I met an alien on my way home.” Then a typical mom responds, “Stop that nonsense.” Now, an ideal parent is someone who responds like this: “Really? An alien, huh? What did it look like? Did it say anything? Where did you meet it?” “Um, in front of the supermarket.”
When you have a conversation like this, the kid has to come up with the next thing to say to be responsible for what he started. Soon, a story develops. Of course this is an infantile story, but thinking up one sentence after the next is the same thing a professional writer like me does. In essence, they are not different … a novel, basically, is writing one sentence, then, without violating the scope of the first one, writing the next sentence. And you continue to make connections.
Take a look at this sentence: “One morning, as Gregor Samsa was waking up from anxious dreams, he discovered that in his bed he had been changed into a monstrous verminous bug.” Yes, it’s the first sentence of Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis. Writing such an unjustifiable sentence and continuing in order to justify it, Kafka’s work became the masterpiece of contemporary literature. Kafka did not show his work to his father. He was not on good terms with his father. On his own, he wrote these sentences. Had he shown his father, “My boy has finally lost it,” he would’ve thought.
And that’s right. Art is about going a little nuts and justifying the next sentence, which is not much different from what a kid does. A kid who has just started to lie is taking the first step as a storyteller. Kids do art.
—Novelist Young-ha Kim in his TEDxSeoul talk, “Be an artist, right now!”
When I gave a talk at [TEDxMidAtlantic] in November, I thought that if I did a good job, the video might go viral. But I was still astonished when not only did it go viral, but also today it has 140,000 views while Colin Powell’s (who spoke at the same event) has only 2,700. He is an incredibly experienced and intelligent man. And yet our society’s obsession with celebrity and models means more people were interested in listening to my talk.
Afterwards I was invited to speak on CNN and written up in Jezebel and [The] Huffington Post, among others. I didn’t say anything groundbreaking. I haven’t done the profoundly impactful work many TED speakers have. And yet, people watch.
Why? I don’t know the answer to this entirely. From personal experience, nearly everyone I meet, be it young teenagers, flight attendants, academics, CEOs, actors, you name it, they all want to talk about modelling. And actually, here’s where I think the real power of modelling lies. Not in an ability to get wealthy people to buy expensive clothes, or news anchors to invite you onto their shows (these things can be powerful too). Modelling is a powerful platform because it engages people…
[Modelling] gave me the opportunity to talk about privilege and race on national television – topics most [Americans] are usually very uncomfortable discussing. Yet, they are easy topics to discuss when we talk about modelling. And since the CNN piece was posted yesterday, hundreds of people have engaged with what I said on Twitter, YouTube, Tumblr and elsewhere, and the clip has been viewed hundreds of thousands of times.
I hope that in the coming months and years I can figure out how to use my lottery ticket to make mass media that is more informed, more participatory and more responsible.
