How to TED

Richard Wurman's ( founder of TED Conference ) advice to Saul Kaplan ( founder of BIF Innovation Collaborative Summits ) on how to create great events: 

Bring interesting people that you want to have at your dinner table that you are interested in their story and you can learn from and then invite other people to listen.

Source:

Saul Kaplan at BIF-4

Message taken from 10:47 to 11:58 mins of the talk

Interest Expedition

Question

How can I learn in the most effective way?

 

Possible Answer

Follow your interest

 

Sense from:

Information Anxiety 2

Richard Saul Wurman, Loring Leifer, David Sume

Que

Page 87

ISBN: 0-7897-2410-3

 

You can follow any interest on a path through all knowledge. Interest connections form the singular path to learning. It doesn’t matter what path you choose or where you begin your journey. A person can be interested in horses or the concept of time and can make connections to other bodies of information.

Someone who’s interested in cars could move into a fascination with the Porsche and the German Language or the physics of motion or the growth of cities and the pattern of movement and defense or the chemistry of fuels. Various cars are made by various countries that have different languages and histories. Studying Italian automotive design, you can gain entry into the study of roads, the Appian Way, the plan of and the history of transportation itself.

The idea that you can expand one interest into a variety of other interests makes your choices less threatening. You can jump into a subject at any level and not only can you follow the subject to greater levels of complexity but you can follow it to other subjects.

Learning is remembering what you're interested in

Situation:
I do not remember everything I learn.

Question:
How can I remember what I have learned?

Possible Answer:
Instead of learning will result in remembering, why not - learning is remembering what you're interested in.

Sense from:
Information Anxiety 2
Richard Saul Wurman, Loring Leifer, David Sume
Que
Page 249 - 250
ISBN: 0789724103

Learning can be seen as the acquisition of information, but before it can take place, there must be interest; interest permeates all endeavors and precedes learning. In order to acquire and remember new knowledge, it must stimulate your curiosity in some way.

Interest defies all rules of memorization. Most researchers agree that people can retain only about seven bits in their short-term memory, such as the digits in a ZIP Code or telephone number.

Learning can be defined as the process of remembering what you are interested in. And both go hand in hand - warm hand in warm hand - with communication. The most effective communicators are those who understand the role interest plays in the successful delivery of messages, whether one is trying to explain astrophysics or help car owners in parking lots.

Multi-level parking garages are generally pretty threatening places. They conjure up frightening images - a favorite site for nefarious activities, clandestine meetings, rapists, and mob hitmen, to say nothing of the fear of remembering on what level you parked your car.

In downtown , I recall there was a multi-level parking garage that used the names of countries instead of numbers to denote each level. In the elevator, the buttons were labeled France, Germany, etc., each in a different typeface. In the elevator lobby on each floor, the national anthem of the country was broadcast through an intercom. While parking garages don't seem to inspire the imagination of the public, foreign countries do. People didn't forget where their cars were parked, and many left the garage smiling.

The developer of this parking garage took a mundane thing and not only made it work, but made it into a cultural learning center as well. This parking garage exemplified the principle that we learn only if we are interested in the subject.

In his book Freedom to Learn, Carl Rogers states that the only learning which significantly influences behavior is "self­discovered, self-appropriated" learning. Only when subject matter is perceived as being relevant to a person's own purposes will a significant amount of learning take place.

Information anxiety results from constant overstimulation; we are not given the time or opportunity to make transitions from one room or idea to the next. No one functions well perpetually gasping for breath. Learning (and interest) require way-stations where we call stop and think about an idea before moving on to the next.

Learning Fantasies

How do we make learning interesting?

Richard Wurman’s 15 suggestions

An ideal school would be like a smorgasbord. You could take large or small plates and eat fast or slow. You could construct the meal going forwards and backwards and you could start again. You would be given permission to have desert first and the people who fill up the plates would have conservations with you. You could pick up a plate called fancy cars and have somebody advise you that this salad here, the road system and mode of transportation, go with it.

But most of us don't have that kind of experience with schools. In an attempt to overcome any shortcomings in my education, I try to create learning environments in my life. I have developed a list of imaginary courses that I thought would be good courses that would inspire me. They inspire me to look at the world differently.

1. Learning about learning

For me, this should be the only course taught for the first six years in school.

2. The question and how to ask it

Asking questions is the most essential step toward finding answers. Better questions provoke better answers.

3. What do you want?

We don't pay enough attention to the old adage: be careful what you wish for because all too often it will be exactly what will you get.

4. A day in the life

Studying in intimate details a day in the life of anything - a truck, a building, a butcher - would not only provide a memorable understanding of what it means to be something else but would also permits us to have a better understanding of ourselves in comparison.

5. What are we to ants?

This would be an advanced version of a day in the life. The whole idea of how a thing relates to something else is often left unexamined in school, yet it is the essential doorway to knowledge.

6. Time, fast and slow

If you studied all the things that take place in a minute or a day, or a week, or a year, or a thousand years, you would have a new framework for understanding and for cataloging information.

7. The five-minute circle

What could you do or see in five minutes from where you are sitting?

8. The five-mile circle

What could you do, see and understand about sociology, the fabric of schools, urban life and systems within five miles of where you are sitting?

9. This is your New World?

If you were king of this five-mile world how would you run it, change it, understand it, communicate with it?

10. A person course

You could have a course on Albert Einstein, Louis Kahn or Yasir Arafat.

11. Hailing failing

More learning is possible by studying the things that don't work than by studying the things that do. Most of the great technological and scientific breakthroughs are made by examining the things that fail.

12. Wait-watching

We spend a great deal of time waiting - in checkout lines, in ticket lines, in doctors' offices. How could we better occupy this time?

13. How to explain something so your mother could understand it?

The recognition of someone else’s ability to understand is essential to all communication, yet it is something we rarely think about. We assume that others can understand the same things we can.

14. The difference between facts and the truth

Facts are only meaningful when they can be tied to ideas and related to your experience, yet they are offered in place of the truth.

15. The obvious and how to hug it?

In our zeal to appear educated, not only do we often forget the obvious, we avoid it. Yet it is in the realm of the obvious that most solutions lie.

Source:

Information Anxiety 2

Page 243-244

Richard Saul Wurman

Que

ISBN: 0789724103