TED Community » Katja Heikkiläinen

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• A comment on Talk: Diana Laufenberg: How to learn? From mistakes

  May 14 2011: Thank you for the talk! Being allowed to experiment and make mistakes, hopefully also teaches children tolerance for other peoples mistakes, too.
  
  I believe experimental learning is best if it is also comprehensive. At least in my school days the different subjects taught were kept quite separate, and different assignments focused on the subject at hand only. So, for example, when learning geography of some country, we were not supposed to learn about the country's history at the same time, as this was due in the next year's curriculum. This kind of teaching made information scattered, often quite shallow in content and unrelated to "real life". I believe things have improved these days, but the educational systems face many new challenges: class sizes are getting bigger, school budgets smaller and finding committed, qualified teachers more difficult. Even though the benefits of experimental, comprehensive learning can be proven, the decision makers often seem to ignore them when setting up the operating conditions for schools and teachers.
  
  As for the use of internet in education, the medium is not the saviour per se - children (and adults!) still need to be source-critical and recognize the vagueness of some "truths" that can be found in the net. (An interesting talk about how the search engines filter information according to who is looking for it: http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/eli_pariser_beware_online_filter_bubbles.html)
  
  I might be old fashioned, but I would like to see children learn to appreciate the slow ways of learning and finding information, too. I think that the emerging structural internet dependency underlines the gap between countries with good access to the net and the countries/areas, where the use of the internet is not a matter of fact on a daily basis. People coming from these opposite ends of infrastructure shoud still have the same right to learn and interact with each other.

• A comment on Talk: Rogier van der Heide: Why light needs darkness

  Mar 29 2011: Thank you for an inspiring talk, Rogier! I watched it one evening whilst in the city, and travelled to the countryside the following day. Looking up to the sky on these consequent nights underlined the point made in this talk: we do need darkness and areas of no light pollution. Natural light (and the lack of it) it is deeply linked to our wellbeing, and this is an area where interdisciplinary research can really flourish, bringing together scientists and artists.
  
  Living in a country where the natural light is not evenly distributed thoughout the year and seasonal affective disorder a recognized phenomenon, the changes in the amount of daylight can be seen in people quite easily. Even though streetlamps etc. are required in the dark winter months for public safety alone, it seems to me they also enhance the dark around them, making it gloomier than it is in places where there is no artificial light, thus making the season even more depressing: you can't see any light but not really any darkness either. On the other hand, the lack of darkness during summer doesn't feel as bad - even though many claim having trouble sleeping - as it is not artificially controlled. The sources, quality and the actual needs for artificial light in our living environment needs to be critically examined, and this talk was an insightful comment on the subject.