TED Community » James McGuiness

More About Me

I'm passionate about

Social development, synergy, motivation, facilitation, sustainable social progress

An idea worth spreading

One idea is that knowledge of the intellectual growth dynamic known as "neuroplasticity" means that education as we know it is actually dysfunctional in significant regards and therefore education reform should cease arguing that a new model is merely "better" or "more effective". Indeed the old model is institutionalized dysfunction and no one will choose dysfunction when a new model corrects that dysfunction. The model I am pioneering under the banner of UNDERSTANDING Inc. does this and much more.

Talk to me about

Anything you feel could bring about a synergy where we bring the future forward to the present.

People don't know that I'm good at

Public speaking and writing.

My TED Story

To be added later.

Comments

• TEDCred score: +5.80 TEDCred reflects your contribution to the TED community.

• +1

  A comment on Conversation: What does your utopian future look like?

  21 hours ago: Capitalism and socialism should absolutely cease being seen as mutually exclusive. I don't think there's is any hope for this world if ideologues continue to carry on as if the Cold War still exist and one must wipe out the other. The US has fallen behind in may ways since the end of the Cold war because it has a delusional element who think the Cold War was "won". Both sides lost for having trashed so much capital and resources and ingenuity into threat of our own extinction. Globalism is a reality and winners in it have hybrid economies that make for entrepreneurial success while providing for the upkeep and welfare of their nations. American ideologues still caught in the time warp believe that it should be "winner take all" and that's what we are seeing, 1% have and 99% have nots. History has shown that people will tolerate that ridiculous inequality only so long. I don't argue for artificial equality enforced by a state, just a hybrid economy where the winners actually consider it a privilege to contribute to the upkeep and elevation of the society. The real truth though is that we are not created beings at all and flaw is the rule not the exception. And one common flaw is the absence of empathy. And wealth seems to follow those who smash others and prefer castles with moats and alligators over safe communities with good schools and public works.

• A comment on Conversation: Does Technology destroy our relationship with Nature?

  1 day ago: There's no reason to think that. And good reasons to see technology as a bridge to nature. I grew up in the 60's in NYC when there were no cell phones, texting, Internet, video games etc. Our schooling was believed to be good "catholic" educations. We thought absolutely nothing of pushing an automobile into a creek and lighting it on fire as whooping it up around it. Nothing whatever told us that that car would remain there creating a toxic waste situation in a tidal creek. We had no connection whatever to nature. In fact we had no connection whatever to each other except as friend or foe. bully or victim. There was no such thing--and there still isn't--called "social development" in which we could have learned that there is great value behind even the most unlikeliest of appearances. My duty in school was to shut up. My duty at home was to shut up and stop making noise so my dad could hear the Mets game on his radio. I learned last night you can download an ap for your smartphone, scan products at a supermarket and if you don't like the ecological or political agendas of the causes your goods manufacturers are linked to, you can instantly boycott them. That doesn't necessarily connect me with nature, but it gives me motivating power I wish I would have had all my life. Education in cities should start with bringing kids and showing them the remainders of the crimes against ecology that people walked passed for generations and saw as normal. When I was kind, I'd by an ice cream pop and throw the wrapper right on the street. All I know is it was gone the next day. It got so bad in the 70's--the cattle cars with graffiti that had become our subways to work and school that some sanity started to rear it's head. By the time I left NY a few years ago I went to the Peace Bell Ceremony at the UN every Earth Day morning. Shouldn't have taken 45 years to get there.
• +1

  A comment on Conversation: Is college really as important as our society today has made it out to be?

  1 day ago: College is flawed in many ways, but people who start businesses still view college as the easy measuring stick for them. Don't assume that just going to any college will guaranty a good job. Lots of people knock themselves out and put themselves in debt just to find that the school they went to is enough to damn them. Right now there is no alternative--there should be, if I win Powerball tonight their may be. 600 Million will get me taken seriously. The old college means everything has some heart-breaking holes in it. You need to get into a top school, get top marks, kiss tushy to get a mentor, then get doors opened to you by the elite. To me that's the way of the 1% and 99% where community college people are treated no better than high-schoolers. What society needs is an alternative that does more for less, is not a crap shoot based on who you know and provides such a radically better way to encompass business econ-systems that they engineer their occupations. Notice I didn't say "jobs". Jobs are a thing of the past--or just a gig you do to get by. There are so many flaws in the current world economy that with real "intelligence" a break-away educational franchise can lead people to create "occupations" that no one knows yet if they'll turn into life long jobs. All we know is there are needs which need precedents and a way to make the results dynamically actionable to a new culture of achievers who instead of hiding their work, lead a "raid economy" of people in flux who can substantiate their impact and earn a percentage. The lecture should go back to being a paid-for entertainment for people to have a social life around, and not a captive audience of passive prisoners trying to keep up or suffer consequences.

• A comment on Conversation: What are some of the key differences in cultures of success and cultures of failure?

  1 day ago: Cultures of failure accept failure and look to blame and scapegoat persons as at fault. It's not wise to use sports as any real indicator--a football is shaped so that it bounces tricky and sometimes you get the bounces and other times the other guys do. And Compaq is an orange to Apple. Let's just take cultures in education, in government, in militaries where authority models are in place but there is no expectation that the model will some day come under question and thus no provision exists for self reform. Businesses draw personnel from these other institutions and can therefore become extension of cultures that play the old game of hierarchical authority where failure is always treated the same way--the blame and ouster of the scapegoat or legitimate underachiever. Schools blame children, they blame parents, they blame curricula, they blame teachers, they blame principals, they blame technology, they blame media. But the one thing they always do is write off some segment of the people who pass through as having failed. They don't ever say school is a faulty compromise and authoritarianism is not good enough--it fails to address motivation accept by threat of consequence, neglects social development entirely, treats kids as if they are capable of synchronous knowledge transfer when they are not. Etc etc. The military had long followed the same model and people died because orders weren't followed. But the military is implementing a "no miss" model that will eventually be in all institutions. In some quarters it has stopped the blame game and implemented a "knowledge transaction" modality. Though they still carry on the tradition of rank, orders are not expected to simply to be followed because threat of consequence is not enough to ensure ideal outcome. Orders that are not under battle pressure are "transacted" where a person is open about not understanding rather than pretending to understand. This must move into school, business and government.

• A comment on Conversation: How can a global business create a fulfilling relationship with a local community?

  1 day ago: I'm in favor of a new kind of journalism that can not be underpinned by commercialism. That means no advertising at all bearing influence on content and content having new priorities which the intrusion of commercialism had previously excluded. But--BUT--that does not mean that commercialism should cease to exist. It means that there must be a successor concept in which businesses become a "living history" in and of themselves where integration can exist to relate business to geographic and economic regionalism. Why should corporate annual reports be esoteric, exist only on glossy paper and sit in the in-boxes or file cabinets of share-holders. Are they not part of the same history on the same planet we share? It's just a matter of blazing trails to new models which bridge old gaps and replace wasteful dysfunction with powerful new function. There's not enough room for me to be more illustrative here, but I welcome messages if anyone would like to shave a decade off the future and stop going sideways or moving in tiny increments. What has been missing from the digital revolution is idealism. There is out-dated "conventional wisdom that idealism is unrealistic utopianism. That used to be true quite often. But the technology now exists, it is the culture that lags. And thus, idealism reverses in fortune to be the most precious commodity if one sticks to engineering, ergonomics, practicalities and doesn't jump any rails into belief systems. Human development ideals--not towers of Babble. What you want is a sustainable progress engine that has a place for people and a place or companies that have fair and healthy relationships that benefit all. That's not impossible. At least not any more.
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  A reply on Conversation: Could a few of us get some help with an overwhelmingly big idea? We call it the Co-opernation. We could also use help naming things.

  3 days ago: Right adesh. I have long tried to blaze some trails in education reform but everyone seems to want to start changing "things" without stopping to acknowledge that the systems we passed through were wrong about US--what we are, how the brain grows the capacity it needs, how the rate might differ between one person and the next, how much growth is possible if education were built on motivation and facilitation of autonomy rather than the "command and control" of factories and militaries. Most people--even educators--don't know that "sleep" is a biological determinant of how much we can grow capacity. Kids are branded slow, or sub-average or given meds for attention deficit when there is a cultural misunderstanding of how growth hormone and delta wave sleep patterns effect our capacity to meet challenges. And that's only a biological first step in getting ourselves right before we set out to alter the systems which are supposed to help us make something of ourselves.
• +1

  A comment on Talk: Ken Robinson: How to escape education's death valley

  3 days ago: "Learning" is questionable as an over-arching objective. Maybe a better expression doesn't exist yet or is too long using existing words. But something more motivating--facilitating--connective needs to be voiced as the objective. "Learning" implies that you've put information into your bucket. The first thing is to stop any idea or practice that views the human mind to be a storage unit. It has no set limits and its neuroplastic nature means that it both grows and trophies. As an ed reform evangelist myself approaching 60 years of age I have long said that "command and control" needs to be at least offset if not replaced by "motivate and facilitate". School shouldn't even exist as a place you go to and "learn". That is the place of the cart in front of the horse. Motivation must become the horse and it must be righted to pull the cart in ways that add up. "Learning" is still too close to "acquiescing to the authority because they said so". We haven't told children that we bring them to school for them to "find themselves" because we haven't had the means to deliver that before. Now we do. And what's keeping kids left behind IS THE SYSTEM which does not accommodate autonomy, social development, individual and group motivation and facilitation into real economy and real democracy. If the system accepts failure at all, it is a failure. Instead of a "hit and miss" culture there must be a "hit, no miss" replacement that bends for the uniqueness of the individual. "Class" by nature creates a "gang" of deluded superiority. There should be no guide for educational reform but idealism because that's what the fruits of all our technological advancements since digital succeeded mechanical makes possible. When offered an ideal versus a known mechanized system of outdated defaults and wrong assumptions, no one will choose or accept the latter for their children.

• A reply on Conversation: Is the cultural anthropological impact of technology and information changing?

  6 days ago: The powers that be will be a powerless that those who dismissed the automobile as a fad when someone delivers a product that illuminates and circumvents institutionalized dysfunction. Kids already text each other under their desks. Why not build a model that embraces cooperation through technology? The powers that be are all products of systems the were devoid of social development imperatives and formal models. So like the automobile they will be skeptical. But if done in such a way as to energize student motivation it would become one of those things like surrendering to the inevitability that your barn must be converted into a garage. I think we're so wrong about ourselves that some of what we call attention deficit syndrome could actually be solved with facilitation of motivation and autonomy rather than medication and a slap with a yard stick. It may take a long time to achieve the kind a of surrender to progress "d like to live to see but a lot will happen in the 21 st Century that will be good. I'm 57 and may not witness it. But I believe in people overcoming wrong eventually.
• +1

  A comment on Conversation: Is the cultural anthropological impact of technology and information changing?

  May 12 2013: Yes. But unfortunately by default rather than visionary design or cultural imperatives. Human intellectual capacity is now known to be "neuroplastic" in nature. This is so profound that it provides an answer to crush something like racism forever. It says that regardless of our appearance there is a dynamic at work in each individual in which he or she grows intellect in the form of "wiring" in the brain in response to challenges placed upon the brain in which people grow access to unused grey matter. No one is sentenced by race to be more or less than anyone else. Education demand reform on this criterion alone. It is never that people should be written off as incapable--it is only that they are unready at a given time. Motivation must become the horse in front of the cart of learning whereas until now learning has been in from of the horse of motivation. Why should education be viewed as an expense and children viewed as liabilities when that could be flipped around entirely to make education an economic profit center where motivation, autonomy and conduits for cooperation invite our progeny to shape the world they will inherit. It is only because we have drawn wrong assumptions and institutionalized dysfunction and set ourselves up as the standard by which young folk are to be judged. Well, we haven't done very good jobs in a lot of areas need to question if we are holding back an extraordinarily rich source of economic stimulus.
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  A comment on Conversation: Why can't we all get together and find a cure to all terminal diseases?

  May 12 2013: The western world is tilted almost entirely by competition. There is no priority in education to balance the scale with formal models that address cooperation. I was over 30 years of age before I heard the word synergy and had to think on it for quite some time before I realized how important and how unfortunately neglected or excluded this concept is and was from western thinking. People cooperate all the time and sometimes the combination of two or more people in the same effort creates a new whole far greater than the sum of its parts where accomplishments are made that could not even be conceived by the very same people before working together and finding that their one plus on equals a million. The word "collaboration" is more often used and that word has negative baggage. As long as we have a "winner-takes-all" culture defining our relationship with out fellow human beings, we shall never realize even 10% of our collective potential. It may even be more like 1% versus 99% which is the current default of capitalism surpassing the point where it is a healthy model of progress. It is more than pass time to reconcile that neither totality won this horrible thing we called the Cold War where we achieved our own extinction level event. If capitalism continues as an intolerant ideological totality, the world will repeat the histories of the French Revolution, the Communist revolution and if you look at Europe today you'll see us very close to chaos. Who will lead the unseen alternative to introduce cooperative models which integrate with competitive ones rather than seeking to merely replace them with the same thing? I for one would risk martyrdom for that cause, The new boss does not have to be same as the old boss. But someone has to take the esoterica out of observing the cooperative model and make it fair. Today's CEO makes 300 times the employee when one time he only made 20 times. Surely we can have a culture motivated by other than winner takes all, some.