Name: 【TEDx】Creating universities of life: Travis Tennessen at TEDxPSU
Uploaded: 2014-05-02T19:06:38.000Z
Duration: 14 min 21 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...

Present continuous

>> My wife Jenny and I are expecting our first child.

It's made me think about the future more than I had before.

What's that person's life going to be like?

What kind of technologies are going to rule his or her life?

So what kind of technology actually does that?

that we call technology are actually anti-technology.

Instead of helping us, they make us more anxious,

and end up causing a whole bunch of other ones.

That's not the kind of technology that we need

to build the world that we want and to solve the kinds

and that have brought us here together today.

We need technologies that are simple and elegant.

Technologies that bring people together, empower them,

I want to share a technology like that with you today,

I'll give you a definition of a university of life

to tell you a few experiences I've had with universities

and you can think about similar experiences that you've had.

I've got one of my first glimpses of a university of life

my family decided to move to a new village.

Ouzinkie, the place I'm pointing to on the map,

and it happened to be the annual spring cleanup day.

So we grabbed some garbage bags and went out with a team

After a couple of hours, we'd been drenched by the rain,

we got a great haul of cans and bottles and candy wrappers,

we had a big potluck with everyone in the community,

When my family had to decide whether we going to move

I cried at the idea that we would even think

Who wouldn't want to be a part of a community like that?

That rainy day I had discovered a university of life.

Years later, one of my students, a woman named Jessica,

helped me understand even more deeply the power

We had just gotten back from a spring break trip

to Costa Rica, and we were at a reunion dinner

with the whole group, and she made the comment

that she had learned more in the 8 days that we had spent

at this family farm, Finca Pasiflora in Costa Rica,

than she had learned in two years in college.

I just had you in my geography class [laughter],

but she explained what she meant and I came

A few days of living and working, playing and exploring,

and reflecting at Finca Pasiflora had meant more to her

with a greater sense of direction in her life

Certainly more than in any library or lecture hall.

At Finca Pasiflora, she had discovered a university of life,

and was wise enough to point it out to me.

I'm very grateful because I had been taking groups

Lucky me. So what is a university of life?

It is a place where people voluntarily share their time,

labor, resources, and knowledge for the collective good.

Universities of life can take place anywhere, anytime.

They can last for a few hours or a few days, a few weeks,

or very much longer, it all depends on the selflessness

and the dedication of the people involved.

You just heard Spud talk about the co.space,

I would call that a university of life as well.

So, now I would like to tell you about some folks

in Sri Lanka, who I think are among the best in the world

Their story begins in 1958 with a young teacher named Ari.

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【TEDx】Creating universities of life: Travis Tennessen at TEDxPSU

matter

people

break

life