TED Community » Grace En-Tien Chang 張恩典

More About Me

I'm passionate about

Human rights, providing useful and inspiring education, logic and justice, marine biodiversity (including abundance), preventive action, sustainable lifestyle and projects, aesthetics and psychology

An idea worth spreading

There are two types kindness: that borne of ignorance, and that borne of knowing. Life is a journey of learning how to be kind, despite and because of everything we know.

Talk to me about

Basic Biology (there's so much to learn!), Power, systems

People don't know that I'm good at

Learning about human interactions, I'm constantly testing myself on how much I'm able to comprehend about what a person really wants in an interaction. It's a very challenging journey.

My TED Story

I discovered TED in highschool at a speech Lucifer Liu gave about creativity. Henceforth I found it fascinating, inspiring and a wonderfully pertinent resource that I just can't wait to share with my friends, especially those who have previously shown an interest in the topic area or major in that area. Sitting in front of TED.com and jotting down ideas that frequently grow into articles has also become one of my favorite past-times. I'm so glad and grateful that TED has created an open translation platform so that I can bring the ideas of TED to people in my environment who can't understand English so well. Thank you!

Comments

• TEDCred score: +2.00 TEDCred reflects your contribution to the TED community.

• +3

  A comment on Talk: Noreena Hertz: How to use experts -- and when not to

  Feb 25 2011: While we should be able to dissent with experts and think critically, I think her talk is dangerous in that it is presented in a manner that is much too absolute. Saying that doctors are wrong 40% of the time has most of us hearing the message "don't trust doctors". As TED has an enormous audience, I think it would be better if she'd considered the service her speech gives. If she is speaking to experts her message should be : "Respect dissent", if she is speaking to a broader audience her message should be "be willing to consider alternate sources, yourself, and think critically. Don't flatline accept."
  
  I think it'd also be good for her to be more specific in her framing. As some of the people have commented, experts are more likely to get it wrong in extremely complex cases that may need to involve multidisciplinary knowledge. And some who act like experts may choose evidence that supports their positions - talking to us about being able to determine the difference would aid us in our critical thinking and would make her speech much more useful. Instead the way this speech is presented is going to have us hearing only what we want to hear.
• +1

  A reply on Talk: Charles Leadbeater: Education innovation in the slums

  Sep 25 2010: upon his teachings except in more stringent manners that could not question the authority of teachers - a direction that the political clime no doubt encouraged. In fact, I would be surprised if much of his teachings in the more socrates direction (if any of his students had decided to pursue that vein) would have survived after the Qin dynasty, what with the burning of books and persecution of scholars. To cultivate lively students at the time would have been suicidal. On second thought, despite the merits that I think about some of Confucious' original intentions, the fact that it was not propagated usefully nor developed upon significantly diminishes its role in our history, our tradition; and certainly a very crude and early model of educational possibility cannot be counted as worthy of consideration when there are other models better propagated through the west.
• +1

  A reply on Talk: Charles Leadbeater: Education innovation in the slums

  Sep 25 2010: Indeed, Chinese education has come so far over the past dynasties as to be utterly undelightful. But I was trying to refer to the most traditional (or ancient) form of chinese education - the one that Confucious attempted to start. And from what I could see from the texts of what he had said at the time he seemed very fond of asking questions of his students, and having them think up answers on their own. He was most frustrated with students who must be told the answers. Of course, he might have expected his students to improve on his educational methods, as he was not too proud a man to seek instruction from people of various walks of life, I doubt he would think his own order the absolute edict upon which nothing could be improved. This improvement, however, unfortunately did not happen. I rather wonder if it is due to also the strong and growing hierarchism and patriarchial respect that even Confucious himself espoused. In any case, his students did not seem to see it fit to improve
• +2

  A comment on Talk: Charles Leadbeater: Education innovation in the slums

  Jun 30 2010: Hearing that modern education stems from a Bismarckian model surprised me. I had always supposed education to have cropped up in similar forms all across the world - through narrative. In Chinese class we learn about how Confucious started the first schools in China, and it did seem that the students were asking a great deal of questions at the time. Later on, Chinese education consisted of literature/philosophy/history analysis with the end goal (for the academic male population) of passing the bar for civil servants (though the idea of serving the people wasn't the predominant one in bureaucratic culture at the time). The tests consisted of compositions, and passing quality was rather subjective to the political climate of the times. It is only in the past century that Chinese education has adopted the western model along with all the western subjects in the sciences. So traditional Chinese education has all but ceased to exist in form. Would the form contribute to education now?