Caroline Casey

Caroline Casey knew exactly what it meant to live without limits. Growing up blind and to not know it must have been a journey on its own; but the aftermath of her 17th birthday blew me away. I watched this TEDtalk because I heard classmates talking about it during class and thought it sounded really interesting… and I was right. Casey had been legally blind since she was born and did not know it until she was 17. She pushed past all of the hurdles she encountered and kept going on in life, which would not change after she turned 17 either.

This is a story that anyone can learn from.  Casey went through life like everyone wants to. She never has any regrets and she would not let anyone stop her. When she finally could not see father than a few inches she asked for help, which was one the hardest things to do for her. This is when she had to figure out what she wanted to do for the rest of her life. Did she really want to work in a big company anymore? No. She started a fund-raiser for cataract surgeries. Casey rode an elephant and raised money for others with eye problems.

The most amazing part of Casey’s story is that she never gave up. Even after learning that she was blind, Casey still lived her life to the fullest. She appreciated the small things in life, which lead her to finding the true meaning of the big picture. This big picture ended up being absolutely truly you. The courage Casey found inspired me so much. She saw the beauty in being your very best self and nothing less. I have no idea what it would be like to be blind, but I do know that I would see life in a totally different way than how I see life now. Casey told everyone that she did not need eyes to see. I interpreted this as she beyond the physical beauty in things and grasped the meaning full beauty. This aspect of Casey’s TEDtalk relates a lot to mine. I have decided that I am going to talk about appreciating the small things in life and how this relates to how we treat people. Caroline Casey replicated this perfectly. She appreciated the small things which as earlier mentioned slowly grew to the big picture.

Towards the end of her speech Casey talks about the need for change and how this change will come through not labeling people by what they can or cannot do. Caroline Casey's parents did not tell her that she was blind so that she would not set limitations on herself. From this experience Casey learned that she COULD go beyond the assumptions of what her limitations would be. Casey went above and beyond “what” a blind “could” do. Casey has changed the course of living for blind people. She has inspired people with disabilities to go beyond what they were told they could do. By breaking down barriers change will happen. Leaving limitations behind and allowing ourselves to be who we want without the labels and stereotypes.

Her message shows that believing in yourself will lead to great things. I think this can lead to building better relationships. If one believes in their self than they can believe in others and trust in others. If the world had better relationships, than there would be a more personal professional world. Relating to other people is the key to building good relationships. This all goes back to pink’s ideas about symphony and metaphors. Humans use metaphors in their everyday life and metaphors can be used in conjuncture with relationships between people. Casey’s story shows how be confident and breaking the limitations you give yourself can help you in the professional world.

I really connected to Casey's TEDtalk because of the message it taught. It made me think of what life would be being blind and how that would affect my over all personality. I could not believe the courage she had when it came to her disability. It is quite an amazing story.

Clay Shirky

When Clay Shirky talks about the Kenyan women’s website going global my mind automatically thinks about Egypt’s recent struggles over freedom.  Both the women and Egypt’s people presented their ideas through technology. The Kenyan women used a blog account and Egyptians used twitter, facebook, and other online sources. The website, Ushahidi, was later created by the two men helping the Kenyan women’s blog account.  If Ushahidi was used in Egypt to help protesters congregate would the crusade for freedom been more organized? Ushahidi creates a map where all of the commenter’s information is organized and tracked. 

Ushahidi could be used in the education system. If each school has a website like Ushahidi, then each classroom is a different “city”. The classrooms information will hold what that class did that day, homework, and any other necessary information the children learned during class. Different schools could look at other’s Ushahidi websites and get ideas for their students. Opening the knowledge and information of each school to the world could create a new way of learning.

Shirky also talked about civic and communal value and how if we change the world based off of money the change will not survive. But, if the change is based off of feeling the whole world with contribute to their civic duty.  Civic value helps humanity as a whole; on contrast communal value only helps the people interested. Ushahidi has civic value; it helped the people interested and went worldwide and helped humanity as a whole. Now if we take Ushahidi and expand it even further into education, the civic value of Ushahidi will expand making a stable change in humanity.

Shirky’s stories of cognitive surplus also reminded me of the book we just read, Little Brother. In Little Brother, the main character’s knowledge of technology helps him change his world. Cognitive surplus has helped the Kenyan women change her world and could possibly help the rest of the world to change.

In Drive by Daniel Pink, he talks about the motivations of people and how people perform better when they do something just because they like to and not because they are being paid. If each person contributes their free time and help with a large project, our workforce will change. This free time will use that natural motivation that Pink talks about to cognitive surplus. But, how much free time do we really have? Shirky talks about having trillions of hours of free time. I personally do not know where all this free time is and does this free time include homework or extra work from one’s job? I want to know more, so I emailed Clay Shirky. He has not emailed back, but if/when he does I will post his response. 

Daniel Pink

Daniel Pink, an author of inspiring books that could change the world. He lives in Washington, DC with his wife and their three children. He has been to law school and has write Drive, A Whole New Mind, Adventures of Johnny Bunko, and his first book, Free Agent Nation. Pink is a free agent and his last “real” job was working in the White House as the chief speechwriter for vice president Al Gore. He achieved a BA from Northwestern and a JD from Yale. His ingenious speech is defiantly backed up by the hard work he did during college.

Daniel Pink’s TEDtalk was about the science of motivation. He starts out his talk about how he went to law school and did terrible. This leads into how his idea is going to be in the form of a case backed by hard headed evidence. Pink is challenging how society today runs business. His main argument is that we are all wrong in the way we motivate our workers.

Pink’s first piece of evidence is the “candle problem” created by Karl Duncker. The “candle problem” looks like this:                                                                                                                                                                                      

The object of the experiment is to attach the candle to the wall so that the wax does not drip on the table.   There are two solutions people try first. One is some people try to tack the candle to the wall, and second is to melt some wax on the candle and stick it to the wall. Both do not work.  After a few failed attempts many come up with the solution:

The key is to overcome “functional fixedness”. This is when the participant looks at the box as something that only hold the tacks. But, when the participant exhausts all other options they see that the box can be used as the platform for the candle as well.  Sam Glucksberg did this same experiment but gave one group rewards and gave the other group nothing. The group that received incentives preformed the task three and half minutes longer. This is because rewards narrow the groups focus. The group that received nothing for their work performed the task faster because there was nothing blocking their creativity.

The overall message learned from this experiment is that incentives work well for a set of rules and a clear solution. But, when the tasks become creative incentives hurt the workers’ productivity. Daniel Pink provides more examples of this in his book Drive. Some of these include, Swedes donating blood and parents picking up children at a daycare. A more broad analysis is that everyday life does not have clear rules and one solution there are many rules with upon dozens of solutions. Incentives will not help a person’s overall work, as we though it has for years. This puts stress on need the more right brained life where there is not physical incentive and people just complete task for the joy of doing them. The more right brained world relates back to Daniel Pink’s book A Whole New Mind.

Today people are doing more creative work and we are still giving incentives that do not work. Our world has known this for years and has ignored it.  Daniel Pink is trying to across that we NEED to change what we are doing in order to flourish as a society.

Pinks talk about how Dan Reilly puts MIT students through a series of games that included creativity, motor skills, and concentration. What happen is if the tasks involved only mechanical skill bonuses and incentive worked (higher the pay, better the performance), but if the task involved any cognitive skill a larger reward resulted in poorer performance. They tested this in India and in London and the same result was reported.

If we want high performance we need to have a new approach. The new approach revolves around intrinsic motivation- the drive to do something because it is interesting, fun, challenging. He believes that this revolves three main things, which are autonomy, mastery, and purpose. He begins to explain further on autonomy, the urge to direct our own lives.

There is a movement towards letting employees to do what they want for a certain amount of time a day. This gives people more autonomy. Through this productivity goes up and new things are created that effect us in our everyday life.

Pink finishes talking about the two different encyclopedias. The one that gives no incentive to its workers has out lasted the one that gives incentive to their workers. There is a mismatch between what science knows and what business does.

Daniel Pink is so passionate about his topic. He is jumping around the stage and using hand motions. He is always moving and changing his facial expression. Pink has hard cold facts and examples of why incentives are not working. His approach to his subject implants the message into the audience mind without a doubt.

Pink’s speech is mostly of the information from his second chapter of his book Drive and ties back to his idea that right brained people will take over the job force. Daniel Pink’s idea can strength business and change the world today. When the world accepts that people are not motivated through money and material means,  the business world will change forever.


* The background infomation of Daniel Pink is from http://www.danpink.com/about

5 Dangerous Things You Should Let Your Kids Do- Gever Tulley

5 dangerous things you should let your kids do. Quite a catchy title! This TED talk drew me right from the beginning. Gever Tulley, the author and presenter of this TED talk, is a contract computer science and the founder of The Tinkering School. The Tinkering School is a summer program that helps children build the things that they in vision. In Gever Tulley’s “5 Dangerous Things You Should Let Your Kids Do” there is the message of allowing your children to do these dangerous things they will learn and use their natural instincts.

 The first dangerous thing is to play with fire. How dangerous! To some it might seem the last thing you would let you child of any age do, but Tulley makes the argument that children will learn about how to control and use the fire in a safe way. He believes that the children will learn more things from playing with fire than watching the regular children TV show. People have been using fire since the cavemen and now to become so cautious of something that drove evolution is insane.

The second dangerous thing is to hold a pocket knife. This shows children how to handle a knife and empowers the child.  The pocket knife will also teach one’s children how to hold a knife. If the parent lays down a few rules, such as always cut away, the children will know what to do from there.

The third dangerous thing that one should let their children do is to throw a spear. Throwing objects is a natural instinct and action of a human. This exercises muscles which we strengthen one’s brain. Also, it helps enhance their visualization skills and predictive ability.

 The fourth dangerous thing is to deconstruct appliances. This allows the child to grow interest and will the child a sense of know-ability.  By taking apart appliances the child will feel accomplished and have confidence that they can figure out how anything works.

The last thing one should let their child to do is break the law. Tulley’s first example of this was to break the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act).  This shows the child that laws are sometimes broken and they need to be interpreted. The second example of breaking the law was to have your child drive a car. This gives the child a sense of handle and grasp on the world.

Tulley had some valid points. One of the most apparent ones was that children have a nature instinct on to handle things and parents should let that flourish. Another one was that even though children can be hurt by some of these objects, they will gain more from experiencing them. I really enjoyed this TED talk because it was out of the norm. Watching your children’s every move and keeping them as safe as can be has become a trend in the present world.  Tulley’s talk brought another opinion and point of view into the minds of parents.

 This TEDtalk also reminded me of Sir Ken Robinson’s one about creativity. Tulley talks about the five dangerous things that one’s children should do. He states that these can help one’s children grow and develop different attributes. Sir Ken Robinson talks about how children should be encouraged to achieve what they wish and no form of creativity should be squandered. Both of the talks relate back to each other in the context of new thinking. Both Tulley and Robinson’s ideas could change the world and how we teach and bring up the next generation’s children. Each speech had similarities too. As I learned in A Whole New Mind laughter, irony, joking, and humor are all right brain activities. Tulley’s and Robinson’s speech both incorporated some type of humor into their speech. Tulley’s humor is brought out through his chosen photos and Robinson’s humor was brought through his stories and jokes. Both of these keep the audience on their toes and engaged in the speech rather than zoning out half of it.

Tulley’s speech techniques affected me in two ways. One he had great points to back up his overall topic, but if he talked with more confidence and urgency in his voice I think his ideas would come across stronger. On the contrary, his topic could be put to use in so many households that there was a large personal connection. I have always thought that younger children have a natural instinct for handling things; this personal connection to Tulley’s TEDtalk helped keep me engaged. I think that his topic is relatable to anyone that knows children, allowing the audience to create the images in their heads of the children they know doing “the five dangerous things”. With the majority of the audience relating to this topic, Tulley’s message came across better and with more effect.

This video could impact the world and how children are raised in the future. It defiantly creates question and wonder in the viewer’s mind, which is one of the main ideas of TED talks. If the society in this world did not have an over obsession of safety, the world would have been on a much different path. But, we can still achieve this more creative path through “the five dangerous things”. This movie could be the start for the movement away from safety regulations and closer to going back to the routes of natural instinct.  Gever Tully wants to show the audience that children will be hurt by these things but they will bring them for knowledge than pain.

BLOG 1- Sir Ken Robinson

What if education revolved and thrived off of creativity? How could our world change? Sir Ken Robinson makes his point clear when discussing how schools kill creativity. In his introduction he states, “All kids have extraordinary talents and we squander them.”Sir Ken Robinson wants to treat creativity and literacy with the same importance and status. Throughout his speech he emphasizes the need to rethink intelligence and the fundamental principles that we are teaching our children. Sir Ken Robinson wants change education to have it nourish and support creativity rather than diminish it.

 Sir Ken Robinson uses quotes such as, “To see your children for the hope that they are” and, “To make something of your future”, to stress his points to the audience. Also in his tone of voice the listener can here the passion behind his words.  Sir Ken Robinson does a great job reaching out to the listeners lives. He connects with them through his stories and jokes. Many of his stories that back up his main idea are about children. This brings personal connections to all of the parents viewing. This technique helps the message stick with the viewers and affect them in a more powerful way.

If the world followed the lessons in Sir Ken Robinson’s speech, education would take a turn for the best. A school would be a place where all children could flourish. Certain talents would not be looked down upon and creativity would be exalted not put in the corner. By changing the educational system, the world would be impacted, resulting in changes with in everyday life and society.

Sir Ken Robinson’s speech did not have any pictures or slides. This made the viewers really focus on the main message and not be distracted by other images. For Robinson’s speech I think this worked in his favor, because his idea was so new and usually not thought of.  Without the pictures, the audience had the responsibility of creating their own picture, which results back to creativity. Without slides or pictures Sir Ken Robinson is already enforcing the idea of using creativity.