TED Community » Elisabeth Buffard

More About Me

People don't know that I'm good at

DIY solutions : my pupils nicknamed me 'McGyver'

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  A comment on Talk: Bart Knols: Cheese, dogs and a pill to kill mosquitoes and end malaria

  Dec 9 2012: My dad was one of the doctors who was involved in the WHO malaria eradication campaign of the 1960s, which eventually failed, and I was born after he returned from that campaign, while he hope I would see the end of malaria in my lifetime. He told me that man was bound to find a way sooner and later, but we should keep in mind that large scale human intervention seldom is meticulous throughout, and nature evolves and adapt, so cunning endeavours only can beat those nasty 'plagues'. Which is quite what you are in the process of doing. Thank you for being who you are doing what you do.
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  A comment on Talk: Arunachalam Muruganantham: How I started a sanitary napkin revolution!

  Nov 25 2012: Thank you for making me believe in mankind again! That brings back their original meaning to the common in "common sense" and the "good" in "greater good". That should be an inspiration to high school projects.
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  A comment on Talk: Noah Wilson-Rich: Every city needs healthy honey bees

  Sep 2 2012: In Marseilles, France's second city, the authorities have placed 7 hives in one of the biggest city parks, and there are about 20 hives scattered through the city. So Noah WIlson-Rich's message (and all those who spread the same idea) has fallen into some official ears at last.
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  A comment on Conversation: Imagine you were sent decades into the future with the task of selling your decade as the golden age to visit. How would you argue the case?

  Jul 31 2012: Now that's a great topic to use as an assignment in K12 / final high school year! As for me, I would just do what has been done with the roaring 20s, the rocking 50s etc. Push forward everything positive and hide all the nasty underlying things we are so aware of. What comes to mind are eras glorified in films that way, be it Hercule Poirot, Fred Astaire or Marilyn Monroe's films. How I love to watch them and how far away from the reallity of their time they are, showing just the little bit that's so wonderful about their age. And may I quote Billy Connolly, "the good old days weren't always good and tomorrow ain't as bad as it seems"
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  A comment on Conversation: The future of Education lay with highly sophisticated technology.

  Jul 30 2012: Technology helps, at best it reaches wider audiences. When things get too easy, pupils get quickly bored. Those who are curious will be eager to experiment and learn. The easier things get, the laziest some people become. Just look at how passive and non creative so many teenagers are when sitting at a computer.
  I've been teaching for 25 years now, from 10 year olds to adults and peers, and I can see how elearning despite all the technology involved only seduces a minority as it implies giving up passivity and "consumerism". The worst impact I've seen is among teachers, who find it so hard working full time, plus some overtime, having to find some minutes and hours on a regular basis for their own life-long training. I should stress I am NOT TEACHING SCIENCE, but foreign languages, and right now it's far from exact when digitized. It makes it even less attractive. So I am convince that technology has to be sort of transparent, invisible. Everything I have seen so far to teach languages is... geting in touch online with other humans, otherwise it's a revamped version of the 1940's methods, at best. What I would like to see is virtual building blocks for sentences that you could used as lego bricks through kinect type of interactivity. Vocal chat bots that get nonsensical when your accent is not correct and your syntax approximative. So far, the biggest benefits of technology evolutions in teaching have been beneficial mostly to science and elementary learning, because it still is too binary, the alternative to right is wrong, and the quite/not quite alternative is hardly seen.
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  A comment on Talk: Jared Ficklin: New ways to see music (with color! and fire!)

  Jul 14 2012: Can you get more TED than this guy? and a bigger tribute to Stephen Hawkins? Growing up with a deaf dad, this really brings home to me that different approach to sound I had nearly forgotten. Thank you Jared for all this work, and the TED team for allowing you to share it. (Right now being translated for subtitles in quite a number of languages whose spectrums would produce quite different visualisations!)
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  A comment on Conversation: What advice would you give a younger you?

  Jul 7 2012: I would not write a full letter to my younger self, a text message would be enough, as my advice is just one word : "DARE"
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  A comment on Conversation: What's the best news you have received in the last month?

  Jun 26 2012: It's not cancer.
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  A comment on Conversation: Euthanasia: In favor or opposed?

  Jun 26 2012: Whoever gives an opinion on this has to have been helpless next to someone suffering without any possibility of relief and a death verdict from doctors, day after day, night after night. There is no other legitimate position to give any opinion but being the one suffering and dying.
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  A comment on Conversation: How many books have you read this year?

  Jun 21 2012: an appalling total of 2! Superfreakonomics, and "The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared " by Jonas Jonasson. I definitely recommend it, and indeed I've passed my copy around twice already (so easy with paper back, yes paper!) It's about a centenarian who runs away from an old people's home and this old man is no ordinary guy... it's witty, funny, picaresque, and so uplifting, it beats any prozac-like drug.
  books... I've sort of lied, because I keep re-reading some classics, and this year, it's been Victor Hugo's poemes "Les contemplations', as to me that's everything poetry should ever be, and Voltaire's "Le Fanatisme" so modern that it's scary.