"In case you are new to Mind42, here's a quick roundup:
Mind42 lets you create comprehensive mind maps with our fast and simple online mind map editor. To get started simply press the button "Start mind mapping" to the right. For more information you might want to take a look at our user guide. If you have any questions or feedback you want to share with us feel free to contact us."
"In Mind42, "42" is not only the answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything. We pronounce Mind42 as Mind FOR TWO, and the whole word play is not only a reference to Douglas Adams The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, but indicates the collaborative character of mind mapping, and brain storming in general. And that's what Mind42 is. A collaborative browser-based online mind mapping tool.
Mind42 allows you to manage all your ideas, whether alone, twosome or working together with the whole world. Mind42 runs in your browser, so no installation necessary for the ultimate hassle-free mind mapping experience. Just open your browser and launch the application whenever and wherever needed."
Suzie Boss provides 8 tips for turning K-12 classrooms into innovation spaces. How can we prepare today’s students to become tomorrow’s innovators? It’s an urgent challenge, repeated by President Obama, corporate CEOs, and global education experts like Yong Zhao and Tony Wagner. Virtually every discussion of 21st-century learning puts innovation and its close cousin, creativity, atop the list of skills students must have for the future.
A great article that provides tips on how to encourage students to become innovative. They are, in fact, things that all teachers should be doing in all classrooms, but to see it put into perspective in terms of creativity is helpful, particularly as it is also framed in terms of usefulness for the future.
TED Talks Matt Mills and Tamara Roukaerts demonstrate Aurasma, a new augmented reality tool that can seamlessly animate the world as seen through a smartphone.
"TED has just launched a new awesome app free of charge called TED Books. As you know, TED is a non profit group that began as a conference back in 1984 and then developed into amazing platform for inspirational talks delivered by some of the most influential personalities in their fields. TED has also expanded to include multiple events from all around the world, a video website, and a number of programs that feature prizes and fellowships for people that evidence the capability to inspire and motivate others."
"Question: Leaders of the Common Core have emphasized the importance of students understanding and responding to non-fiction, shifting away from the personal response, even going so far as to say “In college and careers, no one cares how you feel.” Do you think this will be helpful?
Yong Zhao: This is getting silly. The world is not filled with heartless, cruel, cold individuals, and the world actually needs individuals who understand emotions and feelings. If they had read any recent studies about creative, innovative, and entrepreneurial talents or books related to multiple intelligences, they would understand the importance of emotional intelligence and the value of empathy.
Question: How should we pursue excellence in the absence of national standards?
Yong Zhao: I have tackled this issue in my upcoming book World Class Learners: Educating Creative and Entrepreneurial Students, to be released by Corwin Press in mid August. My basic suggestion is that excellence comes from the individual—individual students, individual teachers, individual schools, and individual communities. A true high expectation comes from the students themselves when are allowed autonomy and rewarded for genuine contribution to the society using their talents, passion, time, and efforts. My new book includes three elements of an excellent education: personalized learning/student autonomy, product-oriented learning, and the globe as the campus."
"I love my three young children immensely. So it's hard for me to be fully rational about them. Of course they are the smartest, the best looking, and the most athletic. I'm not alone — all parents are irrational."
"Irrationality can be a strong asset. Sure, a vast majority of new businesses fail, so a fairly rational person could easily justify maintaining the status quo. But our world is — unquestionably — a better place because people take risks that don't quite make logical sense. Of course, irrationality presents challenges too. It can blind innovators to real problems and to important signals telling them to do something different. Yes, perseverance may be an underappreciated skill, but when paired with passion, it often leads to fanaticism.
So how can you toe the line between irrationality and fanaticism without pursuing a doomed idea?"
TED Fellow Abigail Washburn wanted to be a lawyer improving US-China relations -- until she picked up a banjo. She tells a moving story of the remarkable connections she's formed touring across the United States and China while playing that banjo and singing in Chinese.
Abigail Washburn pairs venerable folk elements with far-flung sounds, creating results that feel both strangely familiar and unlike anything anybody's ever heard before. Full bio »
'I see the power of music to connect cultures. I see it when I stand on a stage at a bluegrass festival … and I bust out into a song in Chinese, and everybody's eyes just pop wide open.' (Abigail Washburn)"
"Live from the TED Stage in Long Beach, the 2012 TED Prize winner – the City 2.0 – spoke through the voices of world leaders, advocates, and visionaries, calling on people around the world to forge a new urban outlook.
In December, for the first time ever, the TED Prize went not to an individual but to an idea on which our planet’s future depends: the City 2.0. This is the city of the future in which more than ten billion people must somehow live happily, healthfully, and sustainably.
Today, the official “wish” of the City 2.0 was unveiled in the form of a film showing the wish’s key phrases on billboards, graffiti and stock market tickers. Its message: “I am the crucible of the future…where humanity will either flourish or fade. Dream me. Build me.”
Accompanying the wish is a new online platform that allows citizens anywhere to participate in the creation of their own City 2.0.
With context and urgency expressed through talks on the city by Rio de Janeiro Mayor Eduardo Paes, Harvard professor and economist Edward Glaeser, and Vice Mayor of Long Beach Suja Lowenthal, the words of the City 2.0 wish called for action with these words:
“Imagine a platform that brings you together, locally and globally. Combine the reach of the cloud with the power of the crowd. Connect leaders, experts, companies, organizations and citizens. Share your tools, data, designs, successes, and ideas. Turn them into action.”"
""Aspects of creative thinking that are not usually taught.
1. You are creative. 2. Creative thinking is work. 3. You must go through the motions of being creative. 4. Your brain is not a computer. 5. There is no one right answer. 6. Never stop with your first good idea. 7. Expect the experts to be negative. 8. Trust your instincts. 9. There is no such thing as failure. 10. You do not see things as they are; you see them as you are. 11. Always approach a problem on its own terms. 12. Learn to think unconventionally.
"'Bloom’s Taxonomy' is one of those teacher terms that a parent may not necessarily be familiar with, however, it is very important. It is a central concept to know how to use it at home in conjunction with learning activities to help your child expand their critical thinking skills. Critical thinking skills allow a child to thinking independently, find and fix mistakes, solve problems, evaluate alternatives, and reflect on their own beliefs. It’s not something that can be learned from reading a book or completing a worksheet, however the skills are built through hands-on lessons that build beyond basic rote memorization of facts.
Bloom’s Taxonomy http://tinyurl.com/7v8qrot provides learning levels to increase higher order thinking skills for children of all ages. The levels include remember, understand, apply, analyze, evaluate, and create. The way a parent or teacher talks to a child, engaging them in learning, and activities that they provide for learning should have a basis on Bloom’s Taxonomy."
"Watching videos online is usually considered fun, but generally a waste of time. Not so with TED videos, which are uniformly interesting, educational, inspiring, and enjoyable." Here are three descriptions of the ten. "How I Became 100 Artists You don't need to be an artist to appreciate Shea Hembrey's "How I became 100 artists," but if you are it's even more amazing. Hembrey talks about his experience staging an "international art show" with 100 different artists. That would be daunting, but Hembrey decided to invent the 100 artists and create their biographies, passions, and art himself. A fascinating and inspiring piece. A Modern Take on Piano, Violin, Cello If music is more your thing, then the "Modern Take on Piano, Violin, Cello" entry from the Ahn Trio is a must-watch (and listen). The Ahn sisters (Maria, Lucia, and Angella) don't spend much time talking, but you won't be disappointed. 3 Things I Learned While My Plane Crashed Learning experiences like this, I could do without. But Ric Elias' talk "3 things I learned while my plane crashed, details the experience of being on flight 1549 as it crash-landed in the Hudson River in January 2009."
"'4 Generations' is a film short documenting my journey in southwestern China (near Tibet) to first find, then deliver a water buffalo to a poor family. The water buffalo led us to a family with an phenomenal story. Inspired and donated by author, educator, and founder of photo.net, Philip Greenspun."
For the upcoming TED conference — TED2012: Full Spectrum — we’re looking for 10 of the world’s best teachers to take the TED stage during a special session we’re calling The Classroom. We’re accepting nominations to help track these people down. You can nominate yourself or a remarkable educator we should know about — who doesn’t have to be a teacher in the traditional sense.
After TED, these talks will have a life online as part of TED-Ed, a new initiative we’re launching in 2012. With TED-Ed, we are creating a library of videos sepcifically for educators and students. The videos will be arranged using teacher-centric/learner-centric categories and tags, designed to help teachers quickly discover the perfect video for the lesson at hand. The videos will also be arranged into playlists to give students a multidisciplinary, immersive insight into a learning concept.
The talks we’re looking for will each:
+ be shorter than 10 minutes + contain informative material, not just inspiring messages + be delivered with a huge amount of passion for the topic + engage an audience from age 14 to adult + be something you might imagine a teacher using in the classroom as video to supplement a lesson.
I am interested in this post and post on critical thinking. Is critical thinking a skill? Can one teach critical thinking? Stephen has delivered the course on Critical Literacies MOOC in the past....
Robert H. Ennis, Author of The Cornell Critical Thinking Tests “Critical thinking is reasonable, reflective thinking that is focused on deciding what to believe and do.”
Assuming that critical thinking is reasonable reflective thinking focused on deciding what to believe or do, a critical thinker:
1. Is open-minded and mindful of alternatives 2. Tries to be well-informed 3. Judges well the credibility of sources 4. Identifies conclusions, reasons, and assumptions 5. Judges well the quality of an argument, including the acceptability of its reasons, assumptions, and evidence 6. Can well develop and defend a reasonable position 7. Asks appropriate clarifying questions 8. Formulates plausible hypotheses; plans experiments well 9. Defines terms in a way appropriate for the context 10. Draws conclusions when warranted, but with caution 11. Integrates all items in this list when deciding what to believe or do
What are the principles of critical thinking?
- Knowledge is acquired only through thinking, reasoning, and questioning. Knowledge is based on facts.
- It is only from learning how to think that you learn what to think.
- Critical thinking is an organized and systematic process used to judge the effectiveness of an argument.
- Critical thinking is a search for meaning.
- Critical thinking is a skill that can be learned.
- Do the above principles hold true and won’t change from one domain to the next?
Hello David, I agree with you, to be a critical thinker sometimes can be even dangerous, buttheyare the people who move the world...thanks a lot for your comment!
"The TED-Ed team provides an in depth look at the powerful features of the newly-launched TED-ED Beta website. You'll learn how TED-Ed videos are created, how they are arranged, about the learning materials that surround each video, and how you can create customized or "flipped" lessons based on any TED-Ed video or any video on YouTube."
"In this day and age of short attention spans, flipping of classrooms, and rethinking of education… it’s time to rethink course titles. While some schools admittedly are starting to do a better job of making course titles a bit more attractive, most are not up to par.
In an effort to give school administrators and teachers a guidepost with which they can rethink current course titles (what better time than in July, right?), I offer up the idea being shared on Twitter this morning: that we take a page from TED and offer courses using their naming schema.
In other words, make the course titles sexier, the descriptions more attractive, and get students excited to attend a class before they even step foot in the classroom for the first time."
"In 1833, Ralph Waldo Emerson, a New England pastor who’d recently given up the ministry, delivered his first public lecture in America. The talk was held in Boston, and its nebulous-sounding subject (“The Uses of Natural History,” a title that conceals its greatness well) helped lay the groundwork for the nineteenth-century philosophy of transcendentalism. It also changed Emerson’s life. In a world that regarded higher thought largely as a staid pursuit, Emerson was a vivid, entertaining speaker—he lived for laughter or spontaneous applause—and his talk that day marked the beginning of a long career behind the podium. Over the next year, he delivered seven talks, Robert D. Richardson, Jr., tells us in his 1996 biography, “Emerson: The Mind on Fire.” By 1838, he was up to thirty. Then his career exploded. In the early eighteen-fifties, Emerson was giving as many as eighty lectures a year, and his reputation reached beyond the tight paddock of intellectual New England. The lecture circuit may not have shaped Emerson’s style of thinking, but it made that style a compass point of nineteenth-century American thought.
Whether Emerson has a modern heir remains an open question, but, more than a century after his death, the speaking trade he enjoyed continues to thrive. In this week’s issue of the magazine, I write about TED, a constellation of conferences whose style and substance has helped color our own moment in public intellectual life. As many media companies trading in “ideas” are struggling to stay afloat, TED has created a product that’s sophisticated, popular, lucrative, socially conscious, and wildly pervasive—the Holy Grail of digital-age production. The conference serves a king-making function, turning obscure academics and little-known entrepreneurs into global stars. And, though it’s earned a lot of criticism (as I explain in the article, some thinkers find TED to be narrow and dangerously slick), its “TED Talks” series of Web videos, which so far has racked up more than eight hundred million views, puts even Emerson to shame."
"Anything we’re trying to make happen as a leader involves other people, and the fact is, most people don’t have to follow us. They don’t have to believe in our great ideas, buy our great products, or do what we want them to do. Even when we have authority—as parents of teenagers will tell you—our power doesn’t go very far without others believing that what we want them to do is in their best interests. The pull of connecting to others and their interests is far more powerful than the push of control, especially when we find the intersection between their interests and our goals. How do we know what’s truly in someone else’s interests?
“Become the other person and go from there.” It’s the best piece of coaching advice I ever received, coming from Tanouye Roshi, and it applies equally to influence, negotiation, conflict, sales, teaching, and communication of all kinds. To become the other person is to listen so deeply that our own mind chatter stops; to listen with every pore on our body until we can sense how the other’s mind works. To become the other person is to feel into her emotional state, see through her eyes, think like she thinks, and see how she views us, our proposition, and the situation at hand. To write it out or read it in serial fashion makes it sound like a lengthy, time-consuming process, but in fact, deep empathy conveys its insights in a flash, and our ability to empathize deepens with practice, as we learn to quiet our own inner state."
"All great teachers do great work. And not only that, but they also do different work. Great teachers are always looking to improve practice, steal ideas and try new things -- all in order to meet the needs of their students. PBL teachers are no exception. Any teacher who is truly doing PBL would also agree that it's different. There is something about being a PBL teacher that requires different work, and work that is especially capitalized when implementing a PBL project. Because I work with so many PBL teachers, I feel there are some things that PBL teachers should specifically be proud of. I present them in these six affirmations."
Kentucky Virtual Library has creared a visual tool to help students do research. This is an excellent model of how to present a step by step approach in a visual way that includes a set of tasks that students can follow in conducting research. The basic steps are:
Robin Good: Critical thinking is a key strategic skill needed by any serious professional curator.
"Critical thinking provides the keys for our own intellectual independence..." and it helps to move away from "rashy conclusions, mystification and reluctance to question received wisdom, authority and tradition" while learning how to adopt "intellectual discipline" and a way to express clearly ideas while taking personal responsibility for them.
Key takeaways from this video:
Critical thinking refers to a diverse range of intellectual skills and activities concerned with "evaluating information" as well as our own thought in a disciplined way. Critical thinking is not just thinking a lot. To be an effective critical thinker you need to seek out and be guided by "knowledge" and "evidence" that fits with reality even if it refutes what the general consensus may want to believe. Critical thinkers cultivate an attitude of curiosity and they are willing to do the work required to keep themselves informed about a subject. Critical thinkers do not take claims at face value but utilize scepticism and doubt to suspend judgement and objectively evaluate with facts the claims being made. Critical thinkers should evaluate information on the basis of reasoning and not by relying on emotions as claims the factuality of a claim cannot be solely based on the level of emotion that accompanies them or the fact that they may be believed by certain groups.
Thank you for sharing this video and the importance of critical thinking. It is so easy to get into the mindless consumption trap and making ourselves slow down, read, think, question, and seek is so important. It is all about the resisting the urge to click, but to hit the pause button and make yourself think
Grazie come sempre, Robin! You always share valuable information and this video is a great source to reflect on the importance of critical thinking to refine thought processes when curating content. Content curation certainly requires and develops "better thinking".
In the Brevia section of the 9 August 2002 issue of Science, Weir et al. report a remarkable observation: The toolmaking behavior of New Caledonian crows. In the experiments, a captive female crow, confronted with a task that required a curved tool (retrieving a food-containing bucket from a vertical pipe), spontaneously bent a piece of straight wire into a hooked shape -- and then repeated the behavior in nine out of ten subsequent trials.
"Let’s review some good lifestyle options we can follow to maintain, and improve, our vibrant brains."
1. Learn what is the “It” in “Use It or Lose It”. A basic understanding will serve you well to appreciate your brain’s beauty as a living and constantly-developing dense forest with billions of neurons and synapses.
2. Take care of your nutrition. Did you know that the brain only weighs 2% of body mass but consumes over 20% of the oxygen and nutrients we intake? As a general rule, you don’t need expensive ultra-sophisticated nutritional supplements, just make sure you don’t stuff yourself with the 'bad stuff.'"
"TED is a small nonprofit devoted to Ideas Worth Spreading -- through TED.com, our annual conferences, the annual TED Prize and local TEDx events."
"We’re thrilled to announce that TED’s official app is now available for iPhone, optimized for a small screen and introducing several much-requested features!
Adapted from our award-winning iPad app, the new TED iPhone app allows users to browse and watch TEDTalks, videos ranging from 3 minutes to 18 minutes in length. TEDTalks feature great ideas from speakers on everything from genetics and geopolitics to sculpture and creativity.
The TED iPhone app experience is tailored to mobile phone users who use their devices when on the move. For instance, users at the gym or out walking the dog now have the option to simply listen to TEDTalks audio. With the iPhone app, TED introduces TED Radio, which streams curated audio TEDTalks 24/7 – click the button and start listening immediately. The app plays audio in the background, allowing listeners to multitask, using other apps like Safari or Mail simultaneously.
Also new to the iPhone app is Bookmarks, a user-requested feature, which allows users to flag and save talks they don’t have time to watch at the moment. They simply tap the Bookmark button, then access talks later from the My Talks tab – with no obligation to wait for a video download.
Many popular features of the TED iPad app can be found in the new iPhone version:"
"Stephen Lazar describes how teachers can impart both critical thinking skills and cultural literacy through the use of historical documents and strategic questioning.
One of the great challenges of teaching high school history is negotiating two competing charges.
We must equip students with a degree of cultural literacy by exposing them to America's past and humanity's shared heritage. In states like New York and Virginia (where I have spent my teaching career), students must be able to demonstrate this content knowledge when they take high-stakes history exams.
But we must also ensure that our high school students gain the skills and knowledge necessary to be critical thinkers and citizens in our democracy. Our world is saturated with media, and students need to learn how to evaluate the information they encounter, based on where it comes from, who is producing it and when, its use of evidence, and its intended audience.
I have found that teaching history through inquiry provides a model to serve both these masters, simultaneously. Here are some tips on how to do that:"
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