Name: 【TEDx】A New Culture of Learning, Douglas Thomas at TEDxUFM
Uploaded: 2013-03-29T05:48:51.000Z
Duration: 18 min 22 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

To-infinitive

I'm really happy to be here, and I have a lot to talk about.

Past simple

About a year and a half ago, I published a book

And it addressed what we saw on some fundamental problems with what was

And, it hit us very early on that learning is fundamentally an easy thing that we do,

that we do from the day we're born until the day that we die.

And that for most of our lives it is natural

So, it's sort of a hit this, that maybe we need to rethink a little bit about what learning

how we can recreate our educational systems, our classrooms,

And we came with the idea of  a new culture of learning

The first was the idea that we need to engage passion

A few months ago, I was with a colleague of mine with her three-year-old child

And he came across a very odd tree that had all kinds of misshapen branches

and he just sat there and stared at it and wondered and then like a child would do

when you're three, started taking the bark, you know, smelling it, putting it in his mouth.

He wanted to know everything about that tree.

"I'm really witnessing pure learning happening."

And if somebody has a passion for something,

No matter what obstacles you put in the way,

they will find the way to learn what they need to know.

The second thing that we found as an important component of a new culture of learning

really begins with two words which I think are the two most powerful words in

It's the ability to imagine things differently than they are,

and the incredible power that comes out of those two words

The third component that's equally as important is constraint.

give them a large smooth flat piece of land,

spin out of control trying to figure out what to do with it;

but if you really want to make them happy,

give them something that's impossible to build on.

a big rock in the middle and let them work around it,

and, they will create something brilliant.

I think when Ken Robinson, at the beginning, he was talking about creativity,

It's the idea of creating in the face of obstacles.

can harness that passion and imagination,

and the combination of those two things can create something great.

And out of all this, John and I talked a lot about what the fundamental ingredient was

And I come up with the definition that I rather like,

which is "the play is an emergent property of the application of rules

And if you think about something like as basic as a game where you say

What would you invent? Football or what  we call soccer.

So that idea of just putting those rules in place

fires the imagination, and if you think of all the wonderful things that people

do in that game: the imagination, the creativity, the joy;

And I realized pretty quickly one of the great things about my job

as I get to go to talk about this book to lots of audiences,

And, instead of telling teachers what they need to be doing,

tell their stories about how their schools were working.

And I learned four things from the teachers that I talked to.

was that teachers, just as much as students,