Great project, also visually speaking, by Andrew Zuckerman.
From “The Concept” section
Inspired by the idea that one of the greatest gifts one generation can pass to another is the wisdom it has gained from experience, the Wisdom project, produced with cooperation from Archbishop Desmond Tutu, seeks to create a record of a multicultural group of people who have all made their mark on the world.
Besides the trailer, it’s worth exploring the other links on the page and then visit the author’s site at http://www.andrewzuckerman.com/.
Tags: globalization, wisdom
I’m not a person with a lot of heroes or idols, but I confess I get really excited about Barack Obama. Regardless of what he comes to do (and I believe he’ll do a lot, despite resistance and pressure on many levels) I find him an admirable person, a 21st century politician. I was happy that he won, both for who he is but also for the memory of those many who helped him build the way that brought him where he is now, because they dreamed and believed.
The design is superb, but the concept goes even further. It’s worth to travel through these faces and see ourselves reflected in the words, emotions and feelings of these people, so different and so humanly alike.
From the project presentation:
“Created at the beginning of 2003, “6 billion others” aims to create
a sensitive and human portrait of the planet’s inhabitants. The
objective of the project is to attempt to reveal each person’s
universality and individuality. To achieve this, six directors set of
across the world to interview the inhabitants of the planet. The
questions chosen for these interviews are the ones which cut across all
humanity, everywhere and always: they concern the family, experiences,
tests, what makes us laugh, cry, what gives life meaning, and the like.”
A aventura começa aqui: http://www.6billionothers.org/index_en.php. Depois é escolher a língua preferida (Inglês, Francês ou Italiano), abrir os olhos, os ouvidos e o coração e desfrutar uma viagem fantástica pela humanidade mais essencial. São horas bem empregues.
Tags: 6 billion others, globalization
Universal education through schooling is not feasible. It would be no more feasible if it were attempted by means of alternative institutions built on the style of present schools. Neither new attitudes of teachers toward their pupils nor the proliferation of educational hardware or software (in classroom or bedroom), nor finally the attempt to expand the pedagogue’s responsibility until it engulfs his pupils’ lifetimes will deliver universal education. The current search for new educational funnels must be reversed into the search for their institutional inverse: educational webs which heighten the opportunity for each one to transform each moment of his living into one of learning, sharing, and caring. We hope to contribute concepts needed by those who conduct such counterfoil research on education—and also to those who seek alternatives to other established service industries.
This was written by Ivan Illich in1970, in Deschooling Society, but seems like something that could have been written today: “educational webs” remind us of “personal learning networks” or “personal learning environments”, and the notion of learning as a continuous, global process throughout formal and informal contexts, embeded in the very life of people, in which experiences translate into learning, sharing and caring is rather contemporary.
As far as I’m concerned, I think it’s a good idea to have a school in which children and teenagers spend a part of their day, meet and socialize, share the essential experience of the physical world. But a school made more of workshops and conversations than of traditional classes, more for the individuals, their interests and competencies, than for the abstraction and arbitrarity that a class/cohort is, more a place of knowledge and culture to serve the students than a training environment to serve corporations and economical interests. With easy access to information and the technological tools we have today, it’s time to start thinking about a new school that replaces the one we have, resilient because of habit and tradition. Let’s be clear: the school we have today works to some extent, but it is far from the school we need for today and tomorrow’s society.
Tags: education
Significant attainments become lost in the mass of the inconsequential
Vannevar Bush wrote this in his famous 1945 essay, As we may think, where he talks about the Memex (or memory extender), the source in which much of the way we organize or conceptualize knowledge today is said to be inspired (hypertext, Internet, networked knowledge)
In a world soaked with information, which can be accessed and retrieved in various ways almost instantly, the work of the teacher cannot remain the same, lecturing what has been said countless times, but to show what is essential and significant, model ways of connecting/relating information and thinking it critically, so as to attain knowledge and become able to use it in the real world.
Tags: education
What examples do we, parents and teachers, give our children and students? What kind of role model are we?
Tags: education
One of the great “Ted Talks”. Sir Ken Robinson talks about the way in whiich school can kill creativity and how that is, to a certain extent, to kill the future that matters.
Do schools kill creativity?
Tags: creativity, education, tedtalks