Kim Polese opened the fourth annual TEDxBerekley event at Zellerbach Hall on April 20. The theme for this year’s event was Catalyzing Change and in alignment with the theme, she addressed the communications gap between education providers and students. Students don’t know what courses to take so they can succeed in the 21st century.
Our challenge is to preserve the excellence and transform the curriculum. She says, “We face a new crisis, the skills gap, which is a crisis which is affecting everyone so we need a revolution in the teaching model.” One of the things being done include the MOOC courses (massive online open courses), Passive versus active participants in online open courses (small online classes) and SPOCS (Small Private Online Classes).
The revolution is not about cutting costs, she asserts; it’s about this new transformational learning model that is more engaged and also it allows for mass distribution to more people. Only 50% of undergraduates receive a degree in six years. Moreso than that, 55% of students need remediation. The typical student attends multiple universities, which equates to lost dollars and time because so much of the credits don’t transfer over. Often, a student takes “on average” over a year of credits they wouldn’t need to take.
One idea she proposed is making it dead easy to get credits, boosting confidence. What is we offered and made those transfer of those credits seamless? Think about what Visa did to revolutionize the credit business, by swiping a card and it just works. If we standardize undergraduate classes so the credits can be applied as seamlessly as a Visa card is used today to pay for products and services.
There’s a growing divide in the STEM gap (science, technology, engineering and math), so much so that 33% of students just felt that they weren’t prepared enough. A sad stat considering in the U.S., we lag behind most developed countries.
Give out of every new jobs will be in STEM related jobs in the next decade and yet we’re lagging behind countries like Singapore, France and other developing countries. If we just focused on increasing the number of STEM graduates by 10% can produce 75,000 more STEM graduates by the end of the decade, which is close to what Obama’s goal is for higher education.
Women are turning away from computing, the percentage at its all time high was 34% and now its down to below 15%. The first programmers were women. During World War II, the army recruited a group of women out of the University of Pennsylvania to calculate bolistic trojectories and they called these computers women. She refers to the work of TED Prize winner Sugata Mitra. Known for his work in education research, Sugata Mitra won $1 million TED Prize to build his School in the Cloud.
Many who keeps tabs on education will know him for his project called “Hole in the Wall”, an experiment he conducted in 1999, where Mitra and his colleagues dug a hole in a wall near an urban slum in New Delhi, installed an Internet-connected PC and walked away.
Over time, while a hidden camera filmed the area, the video showed children from the slum playing around with the computer and in the process, teaching themselves now only how to use it themselves, but sharing that knowledge with their friends.
His goal is lofty – he invited the world to embrace child-driven learning by setting up something he refers to as Self-Organized Learning Environments (SOLEs). He asked for help designing a learning lab in India, where children can “embark on intellectual adventures.”
Second in the session was Eden Full who is the Founder of Roseicollis Technologies Inc. She studied for two years at Princeton University and is currently taking gap years to work on her start-up full time after being selected for the inaugural class of the 20 Under 20 Thiel Fellowship. Named one of the 30 under 30 in Forbes’ Energy category two years in a row and Ashoka’s Youth Social Entrepreneur of the Year, Eden founded Roseicollis Technologies Inc. to take her solar panel tracking invention called the SunSaluter to developing communities and established markets that need them.
The SunSaluter won the Mashable/UN Foundation Startups for Social Good Challenge and was awarded the runner-up prize at the 2011 Postcode Lottery Green Challenge. While at Princeton, Eden initiated and curated TEDxPrincetonU. Proudly Canadian, she was born and raised in Calgary, Alberta. After coxing for the Princeton lightweight women’s team, Eden was selected to be the coxswain for the 2012 Rowing Canada’s senior women’s development team, where they won a gold medal at Holland Beker and the Remenham Challenge Cup at the Henley Royal Regatta, beating the German Olympic boat.
She shared her story about her patent-pending solar invention called SunSaluter which she has been using in East Africa. Provided extra electricity every day for one 60W panel to charge, plus not just the benefit of getting extra water but clean to people every day. She tested it out in a polit in Nyakasimbi Tanzania and thereafter with a partner in Kirindi Uganda. The goal is deploy 200+ units to 15,000+ villagers.
Curt L. Tofteland is the founder of the internationally acclaimed Shakespeare Behind Bars (SBB) program. During his 18 years of work with Shakespeare in corrections, he facilitated the SBB/KY program at the Luther Lucket Correctional Complex, producing and directing 14 Shakespeare Productions.
“It is within the silence that we discover the absence of self,” he said to TEDxBerkeley audience, as he opened with lines from Shakespeare. “We arrive in this world, naked and alone and we leave this world, naked and alone; we take with us our memories and we leave behind our deeds,” he says reading a story that addressed life issues such as dealing with truth and ego.
I wanted Robert Neuwirth to speak at TEDxBerkeley ever since I first heard him speak at PopTech a few years ago. He is best known for his work with squatter communities and poverty. He wrote Shadow Cities: A Billion Squatters, A New Urban World, a book describing his experiences living in squatter communities in Nairobi, Rio de Janeiro, Istanbul and Mumbai.
He brings us on a journey to West Africa and how locals came up with a creative way to source their own energy when the government couldn’t. Lagos residents use energy conservation. In his time in Lagos, he saw people get their water in large canisters not from fresh water sources or private wells. The Lagos government claims that it provides safe drinking water in sufficient quantities to its people, according to a newspaper he read on his way out of the country and yet, its far from reality. There is no real functioning water system in Lagos and other things are not efficient either. Apparently they waste N1.5 billion by leaving their computers on standby.
It has been believed that education is more easily understood than
defined. That’s how the TEDxBerkeley envision education for the 21st
century. “From thinkers to makers, and from makers to doers.” That is
how education should be understood. “Catalyzing Change.” It is acting
upon by “catalysis” to induced change. And TEDxBerkeley will serve as a
starting “catalysis” for change.
One speaker in TEDxBerkeley
caught my attention. A young former mechanical engineering in Princeton
University who developed a non-toxic, cheap, recyclable device made out
of metal and bamboo that allows solar panels to follow or track the Sun
without the use of an electric motor. It is actually known as the
SunSaluter. People from East Africa knew the SunSaluter as energy-water
nexus as it provides enhanced amount of energy while purifying water.
This innovation from Eden Full is truly remarkable. It’s two in one. You
get energy to power your electric devices while enjoying the purified
water from SunSaluter. According to the blog written by R. P. Siegel,
Eden Full knew that solar panels are very important to the society. In
order to exhaust the full potential of solar panels, they need to track
the sun the way that plants do.
It is truly amazing to know
people with innovative minds like Eden Full. I am pretty sure that there
a lot of people who has the means and minds to create something that
the society can benefit from it. “Catalyzing Change.” We need more
people like Eden Full to develop and innovate things in the field of
solar technology. Solar Energy is the future major source of energy.
With great and innovative minds, sustainable and clean energy will be
achieved.