TED Blog

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• The first School in the Cloud opens in the UK
• The 20 most popular TED Talks, as of this moment
• What to do about Detroit? A Q&A with urban planner, Toni Griffin

The first School in the Cloud opens in the UK Posted: 16 Dec 2013 02:40 PM PST A group of students explores a question at the Killingworth School in the Cloud, as a volunteer member of the “Granny Cloud” gives them guidance from the screen. By Sarah Schoengold Sugata Mitra has opened the doors of the world’s first School in the Cloud. Located inside George Stephenson High School in Killingworth, England, this one-room learning lab is a space where students can embark on their own learning adventures, exploring whatever questions most intrigue them. Students even designed the interior of the space — which has colorful beanbags scattered throughout and (very appropriately) fluffy clouds painted on the walls. Sugata Mitra: Build a School in the CloudOn the glass doors of the lab is the acronym “SOLE,” which stands for “Self-Organized Learning Environment.” It’s a concept drawn from Mitra’s TED Prize wish, in which he offered up a new vision of education that pairs the vast resources of the Internet with children’s innate sense of curiosity. SOLEs are a minimally invasive education technique that lets kids puzzle through big questions on their own, teaching each other in the process. This method can have stunning results. (Read a Wired story on that.) Since Mitra’s TED Talk was posted online, more than 40,000 people have downloaded the SOLE Toolkit to bring the method into their homes and classrooms. But Mitra’s plans are even more ambitious — with his $1 million TED Prize seed money, he is opening up a series of seven learning labs, two in the United Kingdom and five in India. The Killingworth lab is the first. The Killingworth School in the Cloud opened its doors on November 22, with a group of students investigating the question: “Who invented algebra?” As the students gathered around computers and began their research, they were guided by an online mediator from the “Granny Cloud,” which beams retired teachers into the lab not so much to instruct the students but to offer them encouragement. Appearing on a large screen on the wall, this “Granny Cloud” volunteer appeared almost life-sized. A look at the interior of the first School in the Cloud, which was designed by students. Amy Dickenson’s year 7 class took part in the learning lab’s first session, and was thrilled to see her students unpacking big questions. She says, “I believe strongly that this way of teaching — engaging students and inspiring wonder, and at the same time creating independence and self-motivation — has to be the way forward for education today.” The Killingworth School in the Cloud is run by a committee of 12-year-old students, who manage a schedule to let different classes and groups use the lab in time slots before, during and after school. The lab is, of course filled with computers and touchscreen devices, as these are the tools students use to do their detective work. This lab is the first live demo of the School in the Cloud web platform, which not only connects labs to the “Granny Cloud” but also serves as a community foundation for SOLE practitioners and contains an evolving library of guides and resources. Microsoft is the core technology partner for this digital platform, Made By Many is the co designer and development partner, and IDEO assisted with design research. Five more School in the Cloud learning labs of varying resources and bandwidth are scheduled to launch throughout India in 2014, and the second UK lab will go live in the spring. All seven Schools in the Cloud will be directed by the School in the Cloud web platform and its community of Grannies. Beta testing for the School in the Cloud platform will begin publicly in March at the annual TED Conference in Vancouver. To read more about the School in the Cloud, visit the SOLE Stories Tumblr » The learning lab has both computer stations and an area for group discussion.

The 20 most popular TED Talks, as of this moment Posted: 16 Dec 2013 01:18 PM PST As 2013 draws to a close, TED is deeply humbled to have posted 1600+ talks, each representing an idea worth spreading. So which ideas have had the most widespread impact? Below, a look at the 20 most-watched talks as of December 2013. These viewership numbers include all the platforms we track: TED.com, YouTube, iTunes, embed and download, Hulu and more. Some fascinating things to notice on this list, if you’d like to compare and contrast it to the most popular talks in 2012, and to the list we shared back in 2011: Amy Cuddy, Susan Cain, David Blaine and Pamela Meyer are all newcomers to the list, with Cuddy’s talk storming to spot #5 thanks to you sharing it. Meanwhile, Brene Brown’s talk has doubled in its number of views since 2012, with Simon Sinek and Mary Roach’s talks coming close to that line. And finally, Ken Robinson’s classic talk? Well, it has been played nearly 9 million times since last year alone. But what really makes this list so incredible is the fact that it spans so many areas of interest, from education to happiness, statistics to creativity, tech demos to illusions. We love that this list revels in the wonders of the human brain, as well as in the incredible creatures of the deep sea, and far beyond. 1.       Sir Ken Robinson says schools kill creativity (2006): 23,510,221 views 2.       Jill Bolte Taylor‘s stroke of insight (2008): 14,343,197 3.       Simon Sinek on how great leaders inspire action (2010): 14,228,854 4.       Brene Brown talks about the power of vulnerability (2010): 12,703,623 5.       Amy Cuddy on how your body language shapes who you are (2012): 12,682,694 6.       Pranav Mistry on the thrilling potential of SixthSense (2009): 12,068,105 7.       Tony Robbins asks why we do what we do (2006): 10,425,014 8.      David Gallo‘s underwater astonishments (2007): 10,266,221 9.       Mary Roach on 10 things you didn’t know about orgasm (2009): 9,435,954 10.   Daniel Pink on the surprising science of motivation (2009): 9.176,053 11.    Pattie Maes and Pranav Mistry demo SixthSense (2009): 8, 363,339 12.    Dan Gilbert asks: Why are we happy? (2004): 7,788,151 13.    Hans Rosling shows the best stats you’ve ever seen (2006): 7,685,726 14.    Elizabeth Gilbert on nurturing your creative genius (2009): 7,593,076 15.    Steve Jobs on how to live before you die (2005): 7,223,258 16.    Susan Cain shares the power of introverts (2012): 6,807,240 17.    Keith Barry does brain magic (2004): 6,371,778 18.   David Blaine reveals how he held his breath for 17 minutes (2010): 6,359,084 19.    Pamela Meyer on how to spot a liar (2010): 6,256,589 20.   Arthur Benjamin does mathemagic (2005): 4,951,918

What to do about Detroit? A Q&A with urban planner, Toni Griffin Posted: 16 Dec 2013 02:43 PM PST Toni Griffin speaks at TEDCity2.0. Photo: Ryan Lash Everyone knows Detroit is in trouble. The list of problems assaulting the once-mighty Motor City is long and, from a look at national newspapers, incessantly documented. Most recently, the city filed for bankruptcy; its former mayor, Kwame Kilpatrick, was sentenced to 28 years in prison for public corruption. Since the booming 1950s, the city of Detroit has lost more than a million residents; the vacant lots that now speckle the city form a space about the size of Manhattan. Toni Griffin: A new vision for rebuilding DetroitOf course, Detroit’s economic collapse was not solely brought about by bad management, but is the result of larger global economic shifts. In a post-industrial economy, as manufacturing has evolved and established itself overseas, Detroit needs to figure out its new place in the new world. Many people are optimistic it can be done. In today’s talk, architect and city planner Toni Griffin talks about how she and her team plan to rebuild the city from the ground up through an initiative they’re calling the Detroit Works Project. “There is a future for the next generation of Detroiters, both those there now, and those that want to come,” she says in her talk. “Let’s not focus on what Detroit is, but what it can be.” As part of this week’s “Invented Here” series, the TED Blog interviewed Griffin about the challenges that Detroit faces as it transitions to a post-industrial economy. The real key, she says: support local entrepreneurship and the burgeoning creative economy. An edited version of our conversation follows: What’s your involvement with Detroit Works? I worked on the whole planning piece, which is Detroit Future City, published in December 2012. It’s a series of strategies around six planning elements: economic growth, land use, neighborhoods, city systems, public land and civic engagement. And where is that project now? We have a series of strategies for each of these six elements, and now, Detroit Future City’s mission is to partner with the different agencies, nonprofit groups and businesses to implement those strategies. Every sector — from media organizations to corporate business to education — is developing a plan and implementing it. Obviously there’s a lot going on right now related to the city’s bankruptcy and restructuring. Coming out of the bankruptcy, as difficult as that will be, there is hopefully an opportunity to reconfigure our operations and systems to better support the initiatives of Detroit Future City. How can you do that? As an example, we might reconfigure infrastructure such as transportation, water systems, and so on, so it’s better aligned with a more sustainable land-use pattern that promotes density. The goal is to enable neighborhoods in the areas where they’re most viable. What we need to do is realign service delivery, utility systems, transportation systems. For instance, let’s identify the neighborhoods that are dense and active, and make sure they get great bus service. Detroit has become the poster child for urban decay. How can it build an economy that will survive and thrive in a post-industrial world? For decades, Detroit has been a mono-economy city, focused on the automobile industry. The region is still very automotive-centered. Both domestic and international automakers have a presence in the Detroit metro region, including two automakers still within the city itself. There is an opportunity to build on that — for example, by focusing on R&D as it relates to the auto industry and supporting existing small businesses and suppliers. But at the same time, we need to support creating new small businesses and suppliers as part of the larger regional economy. One of the tenets of Detroit Future City is that it’s not so much about the land use as it is about the city’s larger strategy for economic growth. The key is to build that economic growth within the city limits, so that there’s more revenue generated in the city and for the city — and more opportunities for Detroiters to be employed within the city. Remember, while Detroit has lost more than 60% of its population since its peak in 1950, it’s experienced an even higher percentage of employment losses. We still have many more residents than we have jobs for them. We need to rebalance the ratio of jobs to residents of the city. As a great step forward. Goldman Sachs just identified Detroit for its 10,000 Small Businesses program. That will link local Detroit businesses to supportive services and access to capital and capacity for growth. How can Detroit become a meaningful player in the new global economy? Well, Detroit has always been a member of the global economy as a real driver of the automobile industry. And that industry has never left the region. Parts of it have left the city, but not the region. So Detroit is still an important international hub for the automotive industry, with international and domestic businesses located in the region. What we want to remind people is that we need to re-root some of this industry back into the city itself. Detroit has some of the largest educational institutions in the region, as well as companies, including GM’s headquarters. That keeps Detroit as a viable place for continuing to attract business to the region and the city. And how does your plan try to bring jobs back to Detroit? One way is through supporting local entrepreneurship, because we believe that entrepreneurship creates a substantial amount of jobs. We’re also focusing on education. When we visited our sister city of Torino, Italy, another auto-industry town, we found it impressive that the educational sector of R&D there related to the innovation and technologies that create new advancements in the automotive sector. We can do the same with Detroit’s education system; it’s a great opportunity to link back to that larger auto industry. A third sector is to develop the creative class. There’s a great project now called the Tech Town, which is an incubator of creative R&D firms that have the potential to support all kinds of sectors, including automotive and healthcare. This incubator model is also something we learned from Torino, and it gives us an opportunity to expand and support other kinds of sectors. What have you learned from rethinking Detroit? What we realized is that Detroit is richer than one economy. In fact, it’s a network of economies. There’s been a lot of attention in the last year on how the downtown and midtown areas are starting to take on an exciting new life. We’re also seeing efforts to create more housing for new tenants to foster more residential living downtown and to bring more employees back into the city by renovating our classic office buildings. There’s often a tension between encouraging local development and entrepreneurship and also trying to attract new residents to the city. How do you see these dynamics playing out in Detroit? That’s always a tension in any city. That’s why we want to really highlight local entrepreneurship development, and I think that takes on a very broad scale. Entrepreneurs can be very small firms producing for the automobile industry — but they could also be a sole proprietor doing advertising and marketing or website development. Or they can be young and creative entrepreneurs who are thinking about new ways to be productive in the city. Given that the city is 82% African-American, there was also an equity issue on the table about how we intentionally tried to reach out and into the local community to find ways to support those local businesses, from the established business in an office building or shopping strip to the sole proprietor working from home. There’s always a tension between downtown and the neighborhoods, but it helps to have local business owners invest in their own downtown. What we hope to see is a model with opportunities for local neighborhood businesses and local homegrown entrepreneurs to have locations and visibility within the new downtown space. When can Detroiters expect to start seeing these changes in action? You’ll already see that if you walk through Woodward Avenue downtown. There are a lot of very local firms there, and we’re beginning to see some local retail stores. There’s an intentional move to bridge the gap between the downtown neighborhood tension and the outsider/insider tension of new local entrepreneurs. And I think there really are opportunities to overcome that challenge. Shinola, the watch and bike company that I discussed in the talk, is one of those really great examples. The firm decided to move to Detroit, and in doing so, was committed to creating a staff predominantly made up of local Detroiters. That hopefully extends to how they think about their supply chain and how they’ll partner with other local entrepreneurs.

 

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