Created with tagxedo. Content from musculoskeletal module
school kills creativity
This is insane! Tis' the most crazy wonderful video I've seen on Youtube for a long time, and a smart one at that.
Please watch this, if only for the animated medium which is really amazing. I also suggest every video under the Youtube channel of RSA Animate, if you have some time.
Yet, beneath all this pretty surface belies a real issue on about the inadequacy of the current educational system, which is almost the same in the Philippines as in the United States. I find it ridiculous that we have not updated this dysfunctional model for more than a century now. Every experience is character building, they say. We must be acutely aware though that the results can turn out either positive or negative. In this case, Sir Ken Robinson nailed it when he said that formalized education kills most of our potential for creative thinking as we get older. Or rather, our current measures for success in institutionalized testing (e.g., a perfect score in a written exam) promotes boxed answers and one-note perception of the world around us.
Nay, while this may be the best that standardized education can get, do we really have to succumb to mediocrity if we can invent something radically better?
A school dropout turned out to be the most idolatrised icons of the century, not because he aced the current model, but essentially because he broke free from convention. His name was Steve Jobs, and we either like him, hate him, or feel indifferent about him. Still, here's a guy who did not know how to code a programming language but, two decades later, owned a venerated computing company that is worth more than Exxon Mobil, PetroChina, Royal Dutch Shell, and Chevron, the world's biggest petroleum giants, or even Microsoft or Google. The handful of companies with market capitalization beyond 200 billion dollars are all listed here as my unrefutable evidence.
Formalized education will tell us that Steve Jobs was a statistical aberration, an obvious outlier, because that is what it wants us to believe. But those numbers are immutable, and one fact remains: he was a great idea-man, a diamond in the muck, and for many people, the world was made better because of divergent thinking.
So, can we really invent a learning-teaching model that is better than the current mire? Here's hoping we do.
So, can we really invent a learning-teaching model that is better than the current mire? Here's hoping we do.
yo puedo leer español un poco
I switched the channel to BBC and chanced upon Click, one of its nifty tech shows. By some happy circumstance, the host was talking about Duolingo, a new language-learning service with two exciting things written all over it: ONLINE and FREE. You probably have guessed from this post's title that I don't know Español that well - I have only taken one very basic Spanish course at the university during my entire undergraduate life - but BBC Click made me get up from bed to google for "duolingo".
The Duolingo website says it's in private beta, which means it sifts through tons of e-mail addresses they get via the front-end page, probably on the look out for bogus addresses to screen them out, and then give out official invites to a few lucky ones.
Aside from being a language tutorial website, Duolingo doubles as a translation service. The developers are doing non-commercial content first, it seems. One of Duolingo's developers is Luis von Ahn of Carnegie Mellon University, who is known for bringing CAPTCHA and reCAPTCHA to the web. These 2 gating systems are common tools in many websites to deter bots and automated spammers. In fact, reCAPTCHA is perhaps very revolutionary for the Web that Google bought the system in 2009 for an undeclared amount; must be a pretty large sum for Google, a publicly traded company on NASDAQ, to hide details from the investing public.
In the end, the more ambitious aim of Duolingo is to translate hundreds of thousands of sentences, commercial or otherwise, whilst providing free language tutorials precisely through the massive crowdsourcing capacity of online language learners all over the world.
Who knows, I might be able to finally write a decent Spanish text after this module, or help out with the Spanish page of the TED Open Translation Project, of which I am currently a volunteer.
Evidently my knack for understanding español has dried up. It is quite impossible to cough up an extra hundred dollars to learn the language with other online services like Rosetta. Google Translate remains a free and viable option, but in my months of translating for TED, it's kinda hit-or-miss. The local Instituto Cervantes here in Manila is only a train ride away, but they charge several thousand pesos per module. I totally understand where they are coming from, requiring enrollment fees and all, having to earn their keep as a thriving language center, but of course I am hardly a rich man who can barely pay the rent.
I'm pretty eager to improve my syntax and expand my vocabulary like that of a Creole mestizo zapped out of the 1800's when the Philippines was still under Spanish rule. I think I'd be one lucky guy if I ever get Duolingo's official invite.
The Duolingo website says it's in private beta, which means it sifts through tons of e-mail addresses they get via the front-end page, probably on the look out for bogus addresses to screen them out, and then give out official invites to a few lucky ones.
Duolingo introduction
Aside from being a language tutorial website, Duolingo doubles as a translation service. The developers are doing non-commercial content first, it seems. One of Duolingo's developers is Luis von Ahn of Carnegie Mellon University, who is known for bringing CAPTCHA and reCAPTCHA to the web. These 2 gating systems are common tools in many websites to deter bots and automated spammers. In fact, reCAPTCHA is perhaps very revolutionary for the Web that Google bought the system in 2009 for an undeclared amount; must be a pretty large sum for Google, a publicly traded company on NASDAQ, to hide details from the investing public.
Luis von Ahn at TEDxCMU
Who knows, I might be able to finally write a decent Spanish text after this module, or help out with the Spanish page of the TED Open Translation Project, of which I am currently a volunteer.
Evidently my knack for understanding español has dried up. It is quite impossible to cough up an extra hundred dollars to learn the language with other online services like Rosetta. Google Translate remains a free and viable option, but in my months of translating for TED, it's kinda hit-or-miss. The local Instituto Cervantes here in Manila is only a train ride away, but they charge several thousand pesos per module. I totally understand where they are coming from, requiring enrollment fees and all, having to earn their keep as a thriving language center, but of course I am hardly a rich man who can barely pay the rent.
I'm pretty eager to improve my syntax and expand my vocabulary like that of a Creole mestizo zapped out of the 1800's when the Philippines was still under Spanish rule. I think I'd be one lucky guy if I ever get Duolingo's official invite.
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