TED Community » Jack Rowe

More About Me

I'm passionate about

I am passionate about the preservation of remaining wilderness, sustainable development, and humanity.

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• A comment on Talk: Sugata Mitra: Build a School in the Cloud

  Feb 28 2013: That's great! I'm glad you stumbled upon my comment. I'm glad to see that someone out there is making this happen and hopefully the result is what we expect. Do you advertise at all?

• A comment on Talk: Sugata Mitra: Build a School in the Cloud

  Feb 27 2013: I have been thinking a lot about something very similar to this. Inspired by Ken Robinson's book, The Element, I have pondered about a way to change the education process of any student so that each person can follow what they enjoy which will ultimately lead them to excel where their talent(s) take them. The thought occurred to me that a network/resource should be added to the realm of education. If there were a website that allowed users to create a profile and ask questions that they have about homework or entire concepts on something resembling a forum, other users more knowledgeable about the given question or subject could answer - only if they volunteer to. The key is that the choice to help answer a question or not is entirely up to the user. A scenario:
  
  John is having a hard time with a calculus problem involving integrals. He logs into his account onto this network-resource and posts his question. Yi, another user, is a calculus expert and voluntarily answers John's question, guiding him through the logic he used to end up with the correct answer. This uses relatively little of Yi's time (because he is so adroit) and saves John a lot of time re-working the problem at hand.
  
  Now, John has learned how to answer his problem and Yi has done a good did and exercised a skill of his - win-win. The real benefit reveals itself over time with frequent use of this network-resource and Yi is the true beneficiary. Yi will, in time, realize that he is in fact very good at calculus and that - since he is voluntarily and regularly committing some of his time to exercising his skill/talent, that he doesn't mind working out complex equations and actually enjoys it. It is in this way that I can relate the idea to Ken Robinson's ideology. The system is not designed to replace the education system as we know it, but rather to subtly guide its users to discover where their talents meet enjoyment and give them confidence to follow a path that allows them to flex their strengths

• A reply on Conversation: Today, luxury fundamentally amounts to the ability to be wasteful with money, time, etc. Can we redefine luxury?

  Apr 25 2012: The fact that the rich do not have to care about everyone else and are fine regardless is a valid point. What I mean to say then, is that for humanity's sake, everyone needs to care about everyone but that is virtually hopeless. Perhaps, the true answer to my question is that the super "fit" people will continue to thrive and those not financially well-off will get weeded out of the gene pool. Maybe social Darwinism will prove to be a reality and the over-population problem will solve itself. My argument that the redesigning of luxury needs to happen is based on my feeling for the environment and the well-being of the planet and humankind. However, I would be hard pressed to believe for a second that human beings could devastate the Earth to a point where it "died." I assume, rather, that people could make Earth a planet unsuitable for human life and we would be finished here. This of course has happened to many species before us and for some reason, since we our conscious of our "selves," we think we are invincible somehow. It would make me happier to think that the people of the world would come together and help each other rather than letting the "weak" die off and begin a new population from the "strong." However, the more I think about that solution, the more sensible it seems on a grand scale. It's just not a happy ending... for most.