EDUC/GralInt-Una maestra argentina, entre los 50 mejores docentes del mundo

The following information is used for educational purposes only.

Una maestra argentina, entre los 50 mejores docentes del mundo



La directora de una escuela secundaria pública de la Ciudad de Buenos Aires a donde van más de 500 alumnos, en su mayoría adolescentes llegados desde Fuerte Apache y chicos con problemas severos como parálisis cerebral, hidrocefalia, espina bífida y esquizofrenia, acaba de ser elegida entre los 50 finalistas al Global Teacher Prize, el galardón que es considerado el Premio Nobel para el mejor maestro del mundo y que premia con un millón de dólares al docente ganador.

Se trata de Silvana Corso, de 46 años, profesora de historia y directora la Escuela de Educación Media Nº2 "Rumania", en el barrio porteño de Villa Real, cercano a Fuerte Apache. Hace más de diez años que Corso llevó a su escuela la preocupación por la inclusión de alumnos con capacidades especiales y desde entonces se convirtió en el foco de su trabajo docente.

Corso llega a esta pre selección junto a docentes de 37 países diferentes, elegidos entre 20 mil maestros nominados en 179 países. Esta es la tercera edición del Global Teacher Prize, una iniciativa de la Fundación Varkey, una organización sin fines de lucro que incentiva la docencia de excelencia con el objetivo de garantizar educación de calidad para los chicos de sectores vulnerables. La Fundación Varkey fue fundada por el multimillonario nacido en India, Sunny Varkey, un emprendedor renombrado en el sector educativo por su cadena GEMS de escuelas privadas.

"En 2030 se necesitarán 30 millones de maestros en todo el mundo. ¿De dónde van a salir si la profesión está devaluada y nadie quiere convertirse en maestro? El premio busca desandar ese camino", le decía el CEO de la Fundación Varkey, Vikas Pota, a LA NACION el año pasado.

El legado de Catalina


"La escuela inclusiva se construye todos los días -le dice Corso a LA NACION, a pocas horas de haber recibido la noticia de su nominación-. Cada día es un desafío lograr que los chicos aprendan y promocionen. En nuestra escuela no hay barreras no importa los problemas con los que los chicos lleguen o vengan de donde vengan. No hay selección alguna. Se los incluye a todos".

"Trabajo en contexto de riesgo, de vulnerabilidad y pobreza -relata Corso-, con chicos judicializados o de familias judicializadas, alumnas adolescentes que ya son madres". Desde que fue fundada en 1990, la escuela Rumania que dirige Corso tuvo como objetivo incluir a poblaciones vulnerables en lo social.

La inclusión de alumnos con discapacidades físicas y mentales, en cambio, fue una preocupación encarada por Corso. "Me propuse ampliar el concepto de vulnerabilidad y de inclusión. Ahora podemos adaptarlo a todos", explica la docente y agrega: "Faltaban las Catalinas y Catalinos"

Corso se refiere a chicos con desafíos similares a los que tuvo que enfrentar su hija Catalina, que murió a los 9 años en 2009. "Cata se asfixió al nacer con el cordón umbilical. Quedó con parálisis cerebral severa.", relata Corso. Finalmente, en plena epidemia de Gripe A, Catalina murió de una infección pulmonar

A pesar de que Catalina respiraba por traqueotomía, comía con botón gástrico, se movilizaba en silla de rueda postural porque no podía sostener la cabeza ni el tronco, no veía ni escuchaba, pudo empezar su escolaridad en un jardín de infantes común, donde pudo integrarse.

No sólo la historia de su hija inspiró a Corso. Su propia biografía, también. Su escuela primaria estuvo signada por el dictamen de sus maestras establecieron que decretaron casi la pequeña Corso no estaba en condiciones de aprender y convenía que se dedicara a aprender corte y confección o cocina en lugar de seguir estudios secundarios.

"Durante toda la primaria fui pasando de grado más por voluntad de las maestras que por aprendizaje real. Yo no lograba entender y aprender", recuerda. "Iba a la escuela a la mañana. Entraba llorando y salía llorando. La tarde era mi único momento de felicidad. A la noche, volvía a sufrir imaginando la mañana siguiente. El problema era que no sabía estudiar", rememora.

A pesar de todo, inspirada por el hogar esforzado donde creció, acompañada por su padre Julio, un pintor de carteles cuya educación terminó con su escuela primaria, y su mamá, Vicenta Ortega, un ama de casa que no sabía leer y escribir, Corso empezó la secundaria y logró terminar, al mismo tiempo que estudiaba corte y confección. Fue la única de los tres hijos del matrimonio Corso que obtuvo el título secundario.

"En primer año me enseñaron a estudiar", remata y reflexiona: "Cuando estaba en primaria, en mi caso que no tenía en realidad ninguna discapacidad real, nadie se preguntaba por mí, porqué no aprendía y cómo podían ayudarme para que aprendiera. Con Cata aprendí todo lo que hago ahora. Yo empecé a preguntarme cómo aprendía Catalina. Entendí que había otras formas de aprender que no eran las convencionales"

La hipertonía del cuerpo de Cata o los cambios en su respiración se convirtieron en la formas poco convencionales de expresar los aprendizajes que la niña lograba. "Todo el mundo puede aprender", sintetiza Corso.

En el camino de la inclusión

Con la muerte de su hija, una pregunta se instaló en la vida de la docente: "¿Qué hago con todo esto?". Así fue que orientó su carrera docente al tema de la inclusión de las capacidades diferentes, con énfasis en los problemas severos.

Ese principio fue el que Corso llevó a la escuela que dirige. Corso misma se especializó en el área. Corso tiene una diplomatura por FLACSO, otra por la Universidad Central de Chile y el Centro de Altos Estudios Universitarios de OEI y una especialización por la Universidad de Salamanca, siempre en el área de inclusión y discapacidades.

La escuela Rumania integra adolescentes con todo tipo de dificultades. Hay alumnos con Trastornos del Espectro Autista, con Trastornos Generalizados del Desarrollo, con síndrome Asperger, síndrome de Tourette, síndrome de Down, alumnos con problemas pisquiátricos como esquizofrenia o psicosis. También con parálisis cerebral, con mielomelingocele, con espina bífida o microcefalia. "En el turno mañana, donde cursan unos 300 chicos, entre 60 y 70 alumnos tienen estos diagnósticos", dice Corso.

El nuevo ganador se conocerá en Dubai, en marzo de 2017

Los mismos profesores de las áreas tradicionales se ocupan de adecuar los contenidos. "Ellos ponen el cuerpo literalmente cuando algún chico tiene un brote y se pone violento", comenta Corso. La capacitación en servicio de los docentes se orienta haca el área de la inclusión de las capacidades diferentes.

"En la escuela, además de lo académico, a los chicos les enseñamos que todos somos iguales. El chico que viene del Fuerte es tan valorado que se siente único", explica Corso.

En su proyecto pedagógico, primer año es el año clave. Lo explica Corso: "Ahí todavía se dan las burlas y la discriminación entre ellos. Una vez que maman los valores de la escuela, con tutorías muy personalizadas, los chicos aprenden a cuidarse mutuamente. Los chicos que llegan de Fuerte Apache, cuando ven a sus compañeros en sillas de rueda que la siguen peleando, aprenden a relativizan sus propias situaciones. Todos aprendemos que todos tienen algo que aportar y eso enriquece la vida de todos. Trabajamos sobre el valor agregado de cada uno y no sobre el disvalor".

Evaluando logros

Por eso, según Corso, las evaluaciones estandarizadas no resultan útiles para sopesar el aporte de su escuela. "No nos va muy bien en relación con la media que maneja el ministerio. Nos va muy bien en relación con nosotros mismos".

Corso se refiere a las historias de sus alumnos, cuyos logros no suelen estar reflejados en las evaluaciones estandarizadas. Cuenta el caso de un ex alumno con parálisis cerebral que estudia derecho en Universidad de La Matanza y es uno de los mejores promedios. O por el contrario, el caso de un adolescente que llegó a quinto año, sólo se llevó sólo dos materias previas a febrero pero algo pasó: "A veces los atraviesa el barrio y los perdemos en un verano. Así pasó con ese alumno: terminó el verano y no volvió. Le cortaron la cara en un boliche. Lo desfiguraron. Se quedó sin proyecto. Le arruinaron la vida".

En la escuela Rumania no festejan antes de tiempo los logros de sus alumnos. "Festejamos con cada alumno que se recibe y se puede insertar -explica-. Recién ahí estamos en condiciones de medir los logros".

Si en marzo Corso gana el premio millonario, planea primero mejorar las condiciones de su escuela. "Nuestra escuela es re pobre -dice-. A los chicos con sillas de rueda tenemos que llevarlos a upa. La rampa que funciona un día y 20 no; el hueco para el ascensor que hace 5 años que espera un ascensor". Entre sus planes también está abrir una guardería en la escuela y financiar viajes para capacitar a otros maestros. Además sueña con una fundación. "Para trabajar con chicos como Catalina que no cuenten con una obra social", detalla.

El nuevo ganador se conocerá en Dubai, en marzo de 2017, cuando se lleve a cabo una nueva edición del Global Education and Skills Forum (GESF), organizado también por la Fundación Varkey.

En la última edición del Global Teacher Prize a principio de 2016, dos maestras argentinas, Inés Bulacio y Gracia Goicoechandia, llegaron a la final. El premio recayó en la maestra israelí Hanan Hroub.




Fuente:http://www.msn.com/es-ar/noticias/nacional/una-maestra-argentina-entre-los-50-mejores-docentes-del-mundo/ar-AAlwtLd?li=AAggPN3&ocid=mailsignout

EDUC/GralInt-Reforma educativa

The following information is used for educational purposes only.


Reforma educativa

11 DE DICIEMBRE DE 2016



Los problemas del área educativa, que se han venido planteando con distintos gobiernos desde la mitad del siglo pasado en nuestro sistema de enseñanza, dieron lugar a innovaciones que, no obstante las expectativas de superación, resultaron insatisfactorias. Como consecuencia, se han ido acentuando cuestiones críticas del aprendizaje, reveladas con claridad en los bajos rendimientos del alumnado de los niveles primario y secundario, confirmados en diversas pruebas nacionales e internacionales. Paralelamente, con ese descenso de los aprendizajes se ha venido observando una disminución de inscripciones en las escuelas del Estado.

En esa decisión de cambio gravita de manera negativa el hecho de que en las jurisdicciones de la Capital y del distrito bonaerense, principalmente, haya crecido el número de docentes que se jubilan y, al retirarse, no se cuente con la cantidad suficiente de reemplazantes. Ese vacío, cada vez más notorio, redujo días de clases y acentuó la pérdida de formación de los alumnos.


Es lógica y justificada la aspiración de que se superen las limitaciones que asedian hoy a nuestra escolaridad y sea posible una renovación del sistema de enseñanza que permita superar las fallas existentes y estimule la voluntad de superación. El esfuerzo de esta hora tiene que concentrarse, en primera instancia, en capacitar al docente a fin de que haga real un modelo educativo que procure la inclusión con calidad del alumnado. Esta aspiración llevaría a la recuperación del prestigio de la enseñanza oficial. A la vez, convocaría las vocaciones docentes de la juventud y daría cauce a la confianza de que se reafirme el prestigio que merece la profesión. Las medidas por tomar a partir del nuevo año significarán el avance hacia un cambio estructural, lo que requiere también la renovación de la carrera de formación docente.

Entre las innovaciones que han propuesto las autoridades del Ministerio de Educación se cita la formación continua como una clave de superación. Hasta hoy, el décimo año de ejercicio en la carrera ponía un límite a esa aspiración, que ahora se prolongará con un puntaje acumulable, a fin de promover la permanente capacitación de maestros y profesores. Los cambios orientarán los cursos de capacitación hacia objetivos estratégicos que se concentrarán en la mejora de la lectoescritura, la resolución de problemas matemáticos, las ciencias duras y la capacitación social y emocional.


El panorama de la renovación que se anticipa en los niveles primario y secundario y en la formación docente es promisorio y está justificado. Merece firme apoyo el espíritu innovador que anima la reforma, esencial para poner en marcha un cambio significativo.







Fuente: www.lanacion.com.ar

EDUC/GralInt-Carta de Lectores (La Nación:11-12-16)-Educar para crecer

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                            Educar para crecer


La solución es invisible, compleja y no da votos. Aquellos que la lleven a cabo seguramente no serán reconocidos por ello. En todo caso, serán continuamente criticados. Los resultados los trascenderán y posiblemente otros cosechen los frutos de una lucha contra un sistema que siempre se resistió a evolucionar. Sobran las razones para no meterse y mantener el statu quo, es decir, ¿para qué gastar energía y recursos en algo que la sociedad no demanda? Si la sociedad actual no lo demanda, es porque generaciones anteriores no se animaron a dar la pelea. Si se le brindan las herramientas necesarias a la gente, ésta será mucho más exigente, la vara estará mucho más alta. Esta exigencia creará un camino virtuoso donde lo que importe serán los resultados concretos y no las ideologías.

No sostener la educación como bandera es condenarnos a un futuro poco promisorio. Estos cambios llevan décadas, hay que educar a las nuevas generaciones para que éstas transmitan lo que adquirieron a sus hijos y así sentar las bases para la prosperidad. Estamos formando a los chicos para un mundo que ya no existe, obsoleto. Debemos darles las herramientas para adaptarse al mundo que será, el cual es imprevisible. Para ser más ambiciosos, debemos educar a aquellos que darán forma al mundo que viene.

Nicolás Lanús de la Serna

DNI 36.929.945



Fuente: www.lanacion.com.ar

GralInt-TED Talks-Steven Johnson: The playful wonderland behind great inventions

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Filmed October 2016 at TED Studio

Steven Johnson: The playful wonderland behind great inventions



Necessity is the mother of invention, right? Well, not always. Steven Johnson shows us how some of the most transformative ideas and technologies, like the computer, didn't emerge out of necessity at all but instead from the strange delight of play. Share this captivating, illustrated exploration of the history of invention. Turns out, you'll find the future wherever people are having the most fun.
























































Transcript:


(Music)
Roughly 43,000 years ago, a young cave bear died in the rolling hills on the northwest border of modern day Slovenia. A thousand years later, a mammoth died in southern Germany. A few centuries after that, a griffon vulture also died in the same vicinity. And we know almost nothing about how these animals met their deaths, but these different creatures dispersed across both time and space did share one remarkable fate. After their deaths, a bone from each of their skeletons was crafted by human hands into a flute.
Think about that for a second. Imagine you're a caveman, 40,000 years ago. You've mastered fire. You've built simple tools for hunting. You've learned how to craft garments from animal skins to keep yourself warm in the winter. What would you choose to invent next? It seems preposterous that you would invent the flute, a tool that created useless vibrations in air molecules. But that is exactly what our ancestors did.
Now this turns out to be surprisingly common in the history of innovation. Sometimes people invent things because they want to stay alive or feed their children or conquer the village next door. But just as often, new ideas come into the world simply because they're fun. And here's the really strange thing: many of those playful but seemingly frivolous inventions ended up sparking momentous transformations in science, in politics and society.
Take what may be the most important invention of modern times: programmable computers. Now, the standard story is that computers descend from military technology, since many of the early computers were designed specifically to crack wartime codes or calculate rocket trajectories. But in fact, the origins of the modern computer are much more playful, even musical, than you might imagine. The idea behind the flute, of just pushing air through tubes to make a sound, was eventually modified to create the first organ more than 2,000 years ago. Someone came up with the brilliant idea of triggering sounds by pressing small levers with our fingers, inventing the first musical keyboard. Now, keyboards evolved from organs to clavichords to harpsichords to the piano, until the middle of the 19th century, when a bunch of inventors finally hit on the idea of using a keyboard to trigger not sounds but letters. In fact, the very first typewriter was originally called "the writing harpsichord."
Flutes and music led to even more powerful breakthroughs. About a thousand years ago, at the height of the Islamic Renaissance, three brothers in Baghdad designed a device that was an automated organ. They called it "the instrument that plays itself." Now, the instrument was basically a giant music box. The organ could be trained to play various songs by using instructions encoded by placing pins on a rotating cylinder. And if you wanted the machine to play a different song, you just swapped a new cylinder in with a different code on it. This instrument was the first of its kind. It was programmable.
Now, conceptually, this was a massive leap forward. The whole idea of hardware and software becomes thinkable for the first time with this invention. And that incredibly powerful concept didn't come to us as an instrument of war or of conquest, or necessity at all. It came from the strange delight of watching a machine play music.
In fact, the idea of programmable machines was exclusively kept alive by music for about 700 years. In the 1700s, music-making machines became the playthings of the Parisian elite. Showmen used the same coded cylinders to control the physical movements of what were called automata, an early kind of robot. One of the most famous of those robots was, you guessed it, an automated flute player designed by a brilliant French inventor named Jacques de Vaucanson.
And as de Vaucanson was designing his robot musician, he had another idea. If you could program a machine to make pleasing sounds, why not program it to weave delightful patterns of color out of cloth? Instead of using the pins of the cylinder to represent musical notes, they would represent threads with different colors. If you wanted a new pattern for your fabric, you just programmed a new cylinder. This was the first programmable loom.
Now, the cylinders were too expensive and time-consuming to make, but a half century later, another French inventor named Jacquard hit upon the brilliant idea of using paper-punched cards instead of metal cylinders. Paper turned out to be much cheaper and more flexible as a way of programming the device. That punch card system inspired Victorian inventor Charles Babbage to create his analytical engine, the first true programmable computer ever designed. And punch cards were used by computer programmers as late as the 1970s.
So ask yourself this question: what really made the modern computer possible? Yes, the military involvement is an important part of the story, but inventing a computer also required other building blocks: music boxes, toy robot flute players, harpsichord keyboards, colorful patterns woven into fabric, and that's just a small part of the story. There's a long list of world-changing ideas and technologies that came out of play: public museums, rubber, probability theory, the insurance business and many more.
Necessity isn't always the mother of invention. The playful state of mind is fundamentally exploratory, seeking out new possibilities in the world around us. And that seeking is why so many experiences that started with simple delight and amusement eventually led us to profound breakthroughs.
Now, I think this has implications for how we teach kids in school and how we encourage innovation in our workspaces, but thinking about play and delight this way also helps us detect what's coming next. Think about it: if you were sitting there in 1750 trying to figure out the big changes coming to society in the 19th, the 20th centuries, automated machines, computers, artificial intelligence, a programmable flute entertaining the Parisian elite would have been as powerful a clue as anything else at the time. It seemed like an amusement at best, not useful in any serious way, but it turned out to be the beginning of a tech revolution that would change the world.
You'll find the future wherever people are having the most fun.

GralInt-TED Talks-Roger Antonsen: Math is the hidden secret to understanding the world

The following information is used for educational purposes only.






Filmed January 2015 at TEDxOslo

Roger Antonsen: Math is the hidden secret to understanding the world



Unlock the mysteries and inner workings of the world through one of the most imaginative art forms ever — mathematics — with Roger Antonsen, as he explains how a slight change in perspective can reveal patterns, numbers and formulas as the gateways to empathy and understanding.




















































Transcript:

Hi. I want to talk about understanding, and the nature of understanding, and what the essence of understanding is, because understanding is something we aim for, everyone. We want to understand things. My claim is that understanding has to do with the ability to change your perspective. If you don't have that, you don't have understanding. So that is my claim.
And I want to focus on mathematics. Many of us think of mathematics as addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, fractions, percent, geometry, algebra -- all that stuff. But actually, I want to talk about the essence of mathematics as well. And my claim is that mathematics has to do with patterns.
Behind me, you see a beautiful pattern, and this pattern actually emerges just from drawing circles in a very particular way. So my day-to-day definition of mathematics that I use every day is the following: First of all, it's about finding patterns. And by "pattern," I mean a connection, a structure, some regularity, some rules that govern what we see. Second of all, I think it is about representing these patterns with a language. We make up language if we don't have it, and in mathematics, this is essential. It's also about making assumptions and playing around with these assumptions and just seeing what happens. We're going to do that very soon. And finally, it's about doing cool stuff. Mathematics enables us to do so many things.
So let's have a look at these patterns. If you want to tie a tie knot, there are patterns. Tie knots have names. And you can also do the mathematics of tie knots. This is a left-out, right-in, center-out and tie. This is a left-in, right-out, left-in, center-out and tie. This is a language we made up for the patterns of tie knots, and a half-Windsor is all that. This is a mathematics book about tying shoelaces at the university level, because there are patterns in shoelaces. You can do it in so many different ways. We can analyze it. We can make up languages for it.
And representations are all over mathematics. This is Leibniz's notation from 1675. He invented a language for patterns in nature. When we throw something up in the air, it falls down. Why? We're not sure, but we can represent this with mathematics in a pattern.
This is also a pattern. This is also an invented language. Can you guess for what? It is actually a notation system for dancing, for tap dancing. That enables him as a choreographer to do cool stuff, to do new things, because he has represented it.
I want you to think about how amazing representing something actually is. Here it says the word "mathematics." But actually, they're just dots, right? So how in the world can these dots represent the word? Well, they do. They represent the word "mathematics," and these symbols also represent that word and this we can listen to. It sounds like this.
(Beeps)
Somehow these sounds represent the word and the concept. How does this happen? There's something amazing going on about representing stuff.
So I want to talk about that magic that happens when we actually represent something. Here you see just lines with different widths. They stand for numbers for a particular book. And I can actually recommend this book, it's a very nice book.
(Laughter)
Just trust me.
OK, so let's just do an experiment, just to play around with some straight lines. This is a straight line. Let's make another one. So every time we move, we move one down and one across, and we draw a new straight line, right? We do this over and over and over, and we look for patterns. So this pattern emerges, and it's a rather nice pattern. It looks like a curve, right? Just from drawing simple, straight lines.
Now I can change my perspective a little bit. I can rotate it. Have a look at the curve. What does it look like? Is it a part of a circle? It's actually not a part of a circle. So I have to continue my investigation and look for the true pattern. Perhaps if I copy it and make some art? Well, no. Perhaps I should extend the lines like this, and look for the pattern there. Let's make more lines. We do this. And then let's zoom out and change our perspective again. Then we can actually see that what started out as just straight lines is actually a curve called a parabola. This is represented by a simple equation, and it's a beautiful pattern.
So this is the stuff that we do. We find patterns, and we represent them. And I think this is a nice day-to-day definition. But today I want to go a little bit deeper, and think about what the nature of this is. What makes it possible? There's one thing that's a little bit deeper, and that has to do with the ability to change your perspective. And I claim that when you change your perspective, and if you take another point of view, you learn something new about what you are watching or looking at or hearing. And I think this is a really important thing that we do all the time.
So let's just look at this simple equation, x + x = 2 • x. This is a very nice pattern, and it's true, because 5 + 5 = 2 • 5, etc. We've seen this over and over, and we represent it like this. But think about it: this is an equation. It says that something is equal to something else, and that's two different perspectives. One perspective is, it's a sum. It's something you plus together. On the other hand, it's a multiplication, and those are two different perspectives. And I would go as far as to say that every equation is like this, every mathematical equation where you use that equality sign is actually a metaphor. It's an analogy between two things. You're just viewing something and taking two different points of view, and you're expressing that in a language.
Have a look at this equation. This is one of the most beautiful equations. It simply says that, well, two things, they're both -1. This thing on the left-hand side is -1, and the other one is. And that, I think, is one of the essential parts of mathematics -- you take different points of view.
So let's just play around. Let's take a number. We know four-thirds. We know what four-thirds is. It's 1.333, but we have to have those three dots, otherwise it's not exactly four-thirds. But this is only in base 10. You know, the number system, we use 10 digits. If we change that around and only use two digits, that's called the binary system. It's written like this. So we're now talking about the number. The number is four-thirds. We can write it like this, and we can change the base, change the number of digits, and we can write it differently.
So these are all representations of the same number. We can even write it simply, like 1.3 or 1.6. It all depends on how many digits you have. Or perhaps we just simplify and write it like this. I like this one, because this says four divided by three. And this number expresses a relation between two numbers. You have four on the one hand and three on the other. And you can visualize this in many ways. What I'm doing now is viewing that number from different perspectives. I'm playing around. I'm playing around with how we view something, and I'm doing it very deliberately. We can take a grid. If it's four across and three up, this line equals five, always. It has to be like this. This is a beautiful pattern. Four and three and five. And this rectangle, which is 4 x 3, you've seen a lot of times. This is your average computer screen. 800 x 600 or 1,600 x 1,200 is a television or a computer screen.
So these are all nice representations, but I want to go a little bit further and just play more with this number. Here you see two circles. I'm going to rotate them like this. Observe the upper-left one. It goes a little bit faster, right? You can see this. It actually goes exactly four-thirds as fast. That means that when it goes around four times, the other one goes around three times. Now let's make two lines, and draw this dot where the lines meet. We get this dot dancing around.
(Laughter)
And this dot comes from that number. Right? Now we should trace it. Let's trace it and see what happens. This is what mathematics is all about. It's about seeing what happens. And this emerges from four-thirds. I like to say that this is the image of four-thirds. It's much nicer -- (Cheers)
Thank you!
(Applause) This is not new. This has been known for a long time, but -
(Laughter)
But this is four-thirds.
Let's do another experiment. Let's now take a sound, this sound: (Beep)
This is a perfect A, 440Hz. Let's multiply it by two. We get this sound. (Beep)
When we play them together, it sounds like this. This is an octave, right? We can do this game. We can play a sound, play the same A. We can multiply it by three-halves.
(Beep)
This is what we call a perfect fifth.
(Beep)
They sound really nice together. Let's multiply this sound by four-thirds. (Beep)
What happens? You get this sound. (Beep)
This is the perfect fourth. If the first one is an A, this is a D. They sound like this together. (Beeps)
This is the sound of four-thirds. What I'm doing now, I'm changing my perspective. I'm just viewing a number from another perspective.
I can even do this with rhythms, right? I can take a rhythm and play three beats at one time (Drumbeats)
in a period of time, and I can play another sound four times in that same space.
(Clanking sounds)
Sounds kind of boring, but listen to them together.
(Drumbeats and clanking sounds)
(Laughter)
Hey! So.
(Laughter)
I can even make a little hi-hat.
(Drumbeats and cymbals)
Can you hear this? So, this is the sound of four-thirds. Again, this is as a rhythm.
(Drumbeats and cowbell)
And I can keep doing this and play games with this number. Four-thirds is a really great number. I love four-thirds!
(Laughter)
Truly -- it's an undervalued number. So if you take a sphere and look at the volume of the sphere, it's actually four-thirds of some particular cylinder. So four-thirds is in the sphere. It's the volume of the sphere.
OK, so why am I doing all this? Well, I want to talk about what it means to understand something and what we mean by understanding something. That's my aim here. And my claim is that you understand something if you have the ability to view it from different perspectives. Let's look at this letter. It's a beautiful R, right? How do you know that? Well, as a matter of fact, you've seen a bunch of R's, and you've generalized and abstracted all of these and found a pattern. So you know that this is an R.
So what I'm aiming for here is saying something about how understanding and changing your perspective are linked. And I'm a teacher and a lecturer, and I can actually use this to teach something, because when I give someone else another story, a metaphor, an analogy, if I tell a story from a different point of view, I enable understanding. I make understanding possible, because you have to generalize over everything you see and hear, and if I give you another perspective, that will become easier for you.
Let's do a simple example again. This is four and three. This is four triangles. So this is also four-thirds, in a way. Let's just join them together. Now we're going to play a game; we're going to fold it up into a three-dimensional structure. I love this. This is a square pyramid. And let's just take two of them and put them together. So this is what is called an octahedron. It's one of the five platonic solids. Now we can quite literally change our perspective, because we can rotate it around all of the axes and view it from different perspectives. And I can change the axis, and then I can view it from another point of view, but it's the same thing, but it looks a little different. I can do it even one more time.
Every time I do this, something else appears, so I'm actually learning more about the object when I change my perspective. I can use this as a tool for creating understanding. I can take two of these and put them together like this and see what happens. And it looks a little bit like the octahedron. Have a look at it if I spin it around like this. What happens? Well, if you take two of these, join them together and spin it around, there's your octahedron again, a beautiful structure. If you lay it out flat on the floor, this is the octahedron. This is the graph structure of an octahedron. And I can continue doing this. You can draw three great circles around the octahedron, and you rotate around, so actually three great circles is related to the octahedron. And if I take a bicycle pump and just pump it up, you can see that this is also a little bit like the octahedron. Do you see what I'm doing here? I am changing the perspective every time.
So let's now take a step back -- and that's actually a metaphor, stepping back -- and have a look at what we're doing. I'm playing around with metaphors. I'm playing around with perspectives and analogies. I'm telling one story in different ways. I'm telling stories. I'm making a narrative; I'm making several narratives. And I think all of these things make understanding possible. I think this actually is the essence of understanding something. I truly believe this.
So this thing about changing your perspective -- it's absolutely fundamental for humans. Let's play around with the Earth. Let's zoom into the ocean, have a look at the ocean. We can do this with anything. We can take the ocean and view it up close. We can look at the waves. We can go to the beach. We can view the ocean from another perspective. Every time we do this, we learn a little bit more about the ocean. If we go to the shore, we can kind of smell it, right? We can hear the sound of the waves. We can feel salt on our tongues. So all of these are different perspectives. And this is the best one. We can go into the water. We can see the water from the inside. And you know what? This is absolutely essential in mathematics and computer science. If you're able to view a structure from the inside, then you really learn something about it. That's somehow the essence of something.
So when we do this, and we've taken this journey into the ocean, we use our imagination. And I think this is one level deeper, and it's actually a requirement for changing your perspective. We can do a little game. You can imagine that you're sitting there. You can imagine that you're up here, and that you're sitting here. You can view yourselves from the outside. That's really a strange thing. You're changing your perspective. You're using your imagination, and you're viewing yourself from the outside. That requires imagination.
Mathematics and computer science are the most imaginative art forms ever. And this thing about changing perspectives should sound a little bit familiar to you, because we do it every day. And then it's called empathy. When I view the world from your perspective, I have empathy with you. If I really, truly understand what the world looks like from your perspective, I am empathetic. That requires imagination. And that is how we obtain understanding. And this is all over mathematics and this is all over computer science, and there's a really deep connection between empathy and these sciences.
So my conclusion is the following: understanding something really deeply has to do with the ability to change your perspective. So my advice to you is: try to change your perspective. You can study mathematics. It's a wonderful way to train your brain. Changing your perspective makes your mind more flexible. It makes you open to new things, and it makes you able to understand things. And to use yet another metaphor: have a mind like water. That's nice.
Thank you.
(Applause)

ECON/GralInt-TED Talks-Bettina Warburg: How the blockchain will radically transform the economy

The following information is used for educational purposes only.




Filmed June 2016 at TEDSummit

Bettina Warburg: How the blockchain will radically transform the economy





Say hello to the decentralized economy — the blockchain is about to change everything. In this lucid explainer of the complex (and confusing) technology, Bettina Warburg describes how the blockchain will eliminate the need for centralized institutions like banks or governments to facilitate trade, evolving age-old models of commerce and finance into something far more interesting: a distributed, transparent, autonomous system for exchanging value.














































Transcript:





Economists have been exploring people's behavior for hundreds of years: how we make decisions, how we act individually and in groups, how we exchange value. They've studied the institutions that facilitate our trade, like legal systems, corporations, marketplaces. But there is a new, technological institution that will fundamentally change how we exchange value, and it's called the blockchain.
Now, that's a pretty bold statement, but if you take nothing else away from this talk, I actually want you to remember that while blockchain technology is relatively new, it's also a continuation of a very human story, and the story is this. As humans, we find ways to lower uncertainty about one another so that we can exchange value.
Now, one of the first people to really explore the idea of institutions as a tool in economics to lower our uncertainties about one another and be able to do trade was the Nobel economist Douglass North. He passed away at the end of 2015, but North pioneered what's called "new institutional economics." And what he meant by institutions were really just formal rules like a constitution, and informal constraints, like bribery. These institutions are really the grease that allow our economic wheels to function, and we can see this play out over the course of human history.
If we think back to when we were hunter-gatherer economies, we really just traded within our village structure. We had some informal constraints in place, but we enforced all of our trade with violence or social repercussions. As our societies grew more complex and our trade routes grew more distant, we built up more formal institutions, institutions like banks for currency, governments, corporations. These institutions helped us manage our trade as the uncertainty and the complexity grew, and our personal control was much lower. Eventually with the internet, we put these same institutions online. We built platform marketplaces like Amazon, eBay, Alibaba, just faster institutions that act as middlemen to facilitate human economic activity.
As Douglass North saw it, institutions are a tool to lower uncertainty so that we can connect and exchange all kinds of value in society. And I believe we are now entering a further and radical evolution of how we interact and trade, because for the first time, we can lower uncertainty not just with political and economic institutions, like our banks, our corporations, our governments, but we can do it with technology alone.
So what is the blockchain? Blockchain technology is a decentralized database that stores a registry of assets and transactions across a peer-to-peer network. It's basically a public registry of who owns what and who transacts what. The transactions are secured through cryptography, and over time, that transaction history gets locked in blocks of data that are then cryptographically linked together and secured. This creates an immutable, unforgeable record of all of the transactions across this network. This record is replicated on every computer that uses the network.
It's not an app. It's not a company. I think it's closest in description to something like Wikipedia. We can see everything on Wikipedia. It's a composite view that's constantly changing and being updated. We can also track those changes over time on Wikipedia, and we can create our own wikis, because at their core, they're just a data infrastructure. On Wikipedia, it's an open platform that stores words and images and the changes to that data over time. On the blockchain, you can think of it as an open infrastructure that stores many kinds of assets. It stores the history of custodianship, ownership and location for assets like the digital currency Bitcoin, other digital assets like a title of ownership of IP. It could be a certificate, a contract, real world objects, even personal identifiable information. There are of course other technical details to the blockchain, but at its core, that's how it works. It's this public registry that stores transactions in a network and is replicated so that it's very secure and hard to tamper with.
Which brings me to my point of how blockchains lower uncertainty and how they therefore promise to transform our economic systems in radical ways. So uncertainty is kind of a big term in economics, but I want to go through three forms of it that we face in almost all of our everyday transactions, where blockchains can play a role. We face uncertainties like not knowing who we're dealing with, not having visibility into a transaction and not having recourse if things go wrong.
So let's take the first example, not knowing who we're dealing with. Say I want to buy a used smartphone on eBay. The first thing I'm going to do is look up who I'm buying from. Are they a power user? Do they have great reviews and ratings, or do they have no profile at all? Reviews, ratings, checkmarks: these are the attestations about our identities that we cobble together today and use to lower uncertainty about who we're dealing with. But the problem is they're very fragmented. Think about how many profiles you have. Blockchains allow for us to create an open, global platform on which to store any attestation about any individual from any source. This allows us to create a user-controlled portable identity. More than a profile, it means you can selectively reveal the different attributes about you that help facilitate trade or interaction, for instance that a government issued you an ID, or that you're over 21, by revealing the cryptographic proof that these details exist and are signed off on. Having this kind of portable identity around the physical world and the digital world means we can do all kinds of human trade in a totally new way.
So I've talked about how blockchains could lower uncertainty in who we're dealing with. The second uncertainty that we often face is just not having transparency into our interactions. Say you're going to send me that smartphone by mail. I want some degree of transparency. I want to know that the product I bought is the same one that arrives in the mail and that there's some record for how it got to me. This is true not just for electronics like smartphones, but for many kinds of goods and data, things like medicine, luxury goods, any kind of data or product that we don't want tampered with.
The problem in many companies, especially those that produce something complicated like a smartphone, is they're managing all of these different vendors across a horizontal supply chain. All of these people that go into making a product, they don't have the same database. They don't use the same infrastructure, and so it becomes really hard to see transparently a product evolve over time.
Using the blockchain, we can create a shared reality across nontrusting entities. By this I mean all of these nodes in the network do not need to know each other or trust each other, because they each have the ability to monitor and validate the chain for themselves. Think back to Wikipedia. It's a shared database, and even though it has multiple readers and multiple writers at the same time, it has one single truth. So we can create that using blockchains. We can create a decentralized database that has the same efficiency of a monopoly without actually creating that central authority. So all of these vendors, all sorts of companies, can interact using the same database without trusting one another. It means for consumers, we can have a lot more transparency. As a real-world object travels along, we can see its digital certificate or token move on the blockchain, adding value as it goes. This is a whole new world in terms of our visibility.
So I've talked about how blockchains can lower our uncertainties about identity and how they change what we mean about transparency in long distances and complex trades, like in a supply chain. The last uncertainty that we often face is one of the most open-ended, and it's reneging. What if you don't send me the smartphone? Can I get my money back? Blockchains allow us to write code, binding contracts, between individuals and then guarantee that those contracts will bear out without a third party enforcer. So if we look at the smartphone example, you could think about escrow. You are financing that phone, but you don't need to release the funds until you can verify that all the conditions have been met. You got the phone.
I think this is one of the most exciting ways that blockchains lower our uncertainties, because it means to some degree we can collapse institutions and their enforcement. It means a lot of human economic activity can get collateralized and automated, and push a lot of human intervention to the edges, the places where information moves from the real world to the blockchain.
I think what would probably floor Douglass North about this use of technology is the fact that the very thing that makes it work, the very thing that keeps the blockchain secure and verified, is our mutual distrust. So rather than all of our uncertainties slowing us down and requiring institutions like banks, our governments, our corporations, we can actually harness all of that collective uncertainty and use it to collaborate and exchange more and faster and more open.
Now, I don't want you to get the impression that the blockchain is the solution to everything, even though the media has said that it's going to end world poverty, it's also going to solve the counterfeit drug problem and potentially save the rainforest. The truth is, this technology is in its infancy, and we're going to need to see a lot of experiments take place and probably fail before we truly understand all of the use cases for our economy. But there are tons of people working on this, from financial institutions to technology companies, start-ups and universities. And one of the reasons is that it's not just an economic evolution. It's also an innovation in computer science.
Blockchains give us the technological capability of creating a record of human exchange, of exchange of currency, of all kinds of digital and physical assets, even of our own personal attributes, in a totally new way. So in some ways, they become a technological institution that has a lot of the benefits of the traditional institutions we're used to using in society, but it does this in a decentralized way. It does this by converting a lot of our uncertainties into certainties.
So I think we need to start preparing ourselves, because we are about to face a world where distributed, autonomous institutions have quite a significant role.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Bruno Giussani: Thank you, Bettina. I think I understood that it's coming, it offers a lot of potential, and it's complex. What is your estimate for the rate of adoption?
Bettina Warburg: I think that's a really good question. My lab is pretty much focused on going the enterprise and government route first, because in reality, blockchain is a complex technology. How many of you actually understand how the internet works? But you use it every day, so I think we're sort of facing the same John Sculley idea of technology should either be invisible or beautiful, and blockchain is kind of neither of those things right now, so it's better suited for either really early adopters who kind of get it and can tinker around or for finding those best use cases like identity or asset tracking or smart contracts that can be used at that level of an enterprise or government.
BG: Thank you. Thanks for coming to TED.
BW: Thanks.
(Applause)

ED/SOC/GralInt-TED Talks-Victor Rios: Help for kids the education system ignores

The following information is used for educational purposes only.





Filmed November 2015 at TED Talks Live

Victor Rios: Help for kids the education system ignores


Define students by what they contribute, not what they lack — especially those with difficult upbringings, says educator Victor Rios. Interweaved with his personal tale of perseverance as an inner-city youth, Rios identifies three straightforward strategies to shift attitudes in education and calls for fellow educators to see "at-risk" students as "at-promise" individuals brimming with resilience, character and grit.








































Transcript:

For over a decade, I have studied young people that have been pushed out of school, so called "dropouts." As they end up failed by the education system, they're on the streets where they're vulnerable to violence, police harassment, police brutality and incarceration. I follow these young people for years at a time, across institutional settings, to try to understand what some of us call the "school-to-prison pipeline."
When you look at a picture like this, of young people who are in my study ... you might see trouble. I mean one of the boys has a bottle of liquor in his hand, he's 14 years old and it's a school day. Other people, when they see this picture, might see gangs, thugs, delinquents -- criminals. But I see it different. I see these young people through a perspective that looks at the assets that they bring to the education system. So will you join me in changing the way we label young people from "at-risk" to "at-promise?"
(Applause)
How do I know that these young people have the potential and the promise to change? I know this because I am one of them. You see, I grew up in dire poverty in the inner city, without a father -- he abandoned me before I was even born. We were on welfare, sometimes homeless, many times hungry. By the time I was 15 years old, I had been incarcerated in juvy three times for three felonies. My best friend had already been killed. And soon after, while I'm standing next to my uncle, he gets shot. And as I'm waiting for the ambulance to arrive for over an hour ... he bleeds to death on the street. I had lost faith and hope in the world, and I had given up on the system because the system had failed me. I had nothing to offer and no one had anything to offer me. I was fatalistic. I didn't even think I could make it to my 18th birthday.
The reason I'm here today is because a teacher that cared reached out and managed to tap into my soul. This teacher, Ms. Russ ... she was the kind of teacher that was always in your business.
(Laughter)
She was the kind of teacher that was like, "Victor, I'm here for you whenever you're ready."
(Laughter)
I wasn't ready. But she understood one basic principle about young people like me. We're like oysters. We're only going to open up when we're ready, and if you're not there when we're ready, we're going to clam back up. Ms. Russ was there for me. She was culturally relevant, she respected my community, my people, my family. I told her a story about my Uncle Ruben. He would take me to work with him because I was broke, and he knew I needed some money. He collected glass bottles for a living. Four in the morning on a school day, we'd throw the glass bottles in the back of his van, and the bottles would break. And my hands and arms would start to bleed and my tennis shoes and pants would get all bloody. And I was terrified and in pain, and I would stop working. And my uncle, he would look me in the eyes and he would say to me, "Mijo, estamos buscando vida." "We're searching for a better life, we're trying to make something out of nothing."
Ms. Russ listened to my story, welcomed it into the classroom and said, "Victor, this is your power. This is your potential. Your family, your culture, your community have taught you a hard-work ethic and you will use it to empower yourself in the academic world so you can come back and empower your community."
With Ms. Russ's help, I ended up returning to school. I even finished my credits on time and graduated with my class.
(Applause)
But Ms. Russ said to me right before graduation, "Victor, I'm so proud of you. I knew you could do it. Now it's time to go to college."
(Laughter)
College, me? Man, what is this teacher smoking thinking I'm going to college? I applied with the mentors and support she provided, got a letter of acceptance, and one of the paragraphs read, "You've been admitted under probationary status." I said, "Probation? I'm already on probation, that don't matter?"
(Laughter)
It was academic probation, not criminal probation. But what do teachers like Ms. Russ do to succeed with young people like the ones I study? I propose three strategies. The first: let's get rid of our deficit perspective in education. "These people come from a culture of violence, a culture of poverty. These people are at-risk; these people are truant. These people are empty containers for us to fill with knowledge. They have the problems, we have the solutions." Number two. Let's value the stories that young people bring to the schoolhouse. Their stories of overcoming insurmountable odds are so powerful. And I know you know some of these stories. These very same stories and experiences already have grit, character and resilience in them. So let's help young people refine those stories. Let's help them be proud of who they are, because our education system welcomes their families, their cultures, their communities and the skill set they've learned to survive. And of course the third strategy being the most important: resources. We have to provide adequate resources to young people. Grit alone isn't going to cut it. You can sit there and tell me all you want, "Hey man, pick yourself up by the bootstraps." But if I was born without any straps on my boots -
(Laughter)
How am I supposed to pick myself up?
(Applause)
Job training, mentoring, counseling ... Teaching young people to learn from their mistakes instead of criminalizing them, and dragging them out of their classrooms like animals. How about this? I propose that we implement restorative justice in every high school in America.
(Applause)
So we went out to test these ideas in the community of Watts in LA with 40 young people that had been pushed out of school. William was one of them. William was the kind of kid that had been given every label. He had dropped out, he was a gang member, a criminal. And when we met him he was very resistant. But I remember what Ms. Russ used to say. "Hey, I'm here for you whenever you're ready."
(Laughter)
So over time -- over time he began to open up. And I remember the day that he made the switch. We were in a large group and a young lady in our program was crying because she told us her powerful story of her dad being killed and then his body being shown in the newspaper the next day. And as she's crying, I don't know what to do, so I give her her space, and William had enough. He slammed his hands on the desk and he said, "Hey, everybody! Group hug! Group hug!"
(Applause)
This young lady's tears and pain turned into joy and laughter knowing that her community had her back, and William had now learned that he did have a purpose in life: to help to heal the souls of people in his own community. He told us his story. We refined his story to go from being the story of a victim to being the story of a survivor that has overcome adversity. We placed high value on it. William went on to finish high school, get his security guard certificate to become a security guard, and is now working at a local school district.
(Applause)
Ms. Russ's mantra -- her mantra was always, "when you teach to the heart, the mind will follow." The great writer Khalil Gibran says, "Out of suffering have emerged the greatest souls. The massive characters are seared with scars." I believe that in this education revolution that we're talking about we need to invite the souls of the young people that we work with, and once they're able to refine -- identify their grit, resilience and character that they've already developed -- their academic performance will improve.
Let's believe in young people. Let's provide them the right kinds of resources. I'll tell you what my teacher did for me. She believed in me so much that she tricked me into believing in myself.
Thank you.
(Applause)