Translator: David DeRuwe Reviewer: Raissa Mendes
Well,
I'm a biologist and a researcher.
Nice to meet you.
I keep repeating this all the time, but it's my childhood dream.
I was that annoying kid,
who took a book to a party and kept pointing out things to people,
"Look at this spider, it has eight eyes,
two on top of its head, six on the side!
Look at its spinner; how beautiful!"
Imagine the guy who was looking at that!
I was like, "Wow, look, how cool!"
I always wanted to tinker with biology and science
and always wanted to tell people how very cool it is.
I certainly didn't know I'd really get to work at it,
get to achieve this dream,
and today, I live by talking with people about science,
more than 4 million people every month.
Every week, I'm there hammering away, talking about science.
The curious thing is I knew very early on that I wanted to do biology.
I was one of those persons who knew what they wanted to do and did it.
I knew what I wanted to learn, and I knew the career I wanted to have,
but the career that I wanted really didn't exist at that time.
What I do today,
talking with people about science on the Internet,
basically, wasn't possible 10 years ago,
much less when I wanted to do it.
It is the fruit of today's world.
I only get to do "Nerdologia,"
the channel where I talk with people every week about science
because we live in modern times.
I depend on a reliable Internet, so that everyone can watch the video,
I need to listen to audiobooks -
I have my little phone here by my side, prepared for when I leave the stage -
and I need to consult articles online.
I depend on an array of people who don't physically work with me:
The person who edits Nerdologia works in Curitiba.
The person who helps with scripts and episodes is often on other continents.
André's on several in the same week.
Deive Pazos and Alexandre Ottoni,
who made the channel possible and gave me the space I use today,
I've only personally seen three times in my life.
What I'm saying is, in past times, I couldn't have done Nerdologia.
I couldn't do what I'm doing -
none of this was possible or feasible, like the profession of many people here.
So I have this lesson of hope
for those who are confused about what they'll do after they graduate:
stay calm.
I don't know what you do now, but very probably,
what you'll be doing in 10 years hasn't even been invented yet.
There's no possible way.
We spend this enormous effort and time,
thinking about our career, what to do, where to work,
but lately, things change so rapidly
that what we'll work at in 5 or 10 years doesn't exist and isn't common today.
You know the sensation we have
that technology is slipping through our fingers?
You finally learn how to use a program,
then they update it, and the menu disappears.
Well, this is only going to get worse.
We depend more and more on technology,
and technology is more and more becoming a stream
where everything is always being updated.
We're always in a beta version, everything's already changed.
To have a notion of how these things happen,
Xiaomi, one of the biggest cell phone makers in the world today,
was founded in 2010.
We're recording this in 2017, and, after seven years,
Xiaomi is the fifth largest cellular company.
It's almost the size of Apple in cell phone sales,
and it was founded in 2010.
We used to put "Founded in 1930" to say that a business had credibility.
If you were to learn programming today
and wanted to work with one of the world's 10 most-used programming languages,
one of them is Go,
a language that Google released in November, 2009,
and is already one of the 10 most-used in 2017.
The tenth most used of 2017, depending on which list you look at,
is Swift, from Apple, that was released in 2014.
Which is to say that someone who has learned Swift during college,
probably hasn't graduated yet.
Good luck if you need to contract a teacher
who has years of experience with this language.
There is no way to do this.
Medicine is an area where we need to update constantly,
but the majority of other areas still haven't gotten there.
We still treat education,
professional training,
as if we were filling a car with gas only once in a lifetime -
at a specific point in your life,
you stop for four or five years,
fill up your intellectual content,
and you spend the rest of your professional career
using what you've learned.
This worked 60 years ago
when an engineer could learn how to work with materials,
and those materials wouldn't change much over the next 30 years.
Today, there's no way to do this.
When you leave from graduation,
what you learned was already outdated when you learned it,
will have changed when you apply it,
and the career that will open up for you
is something that nobody has more than two years experience doing.
You'll spend the rest of your life learning.
It's like the cell phone - at day's end, you have to charge it a little,
to recharge the battery and get new knowledge.
Forget "filling the tank only once."
Now you need to update constantly to stay up with it all.
But we still treat this content
as if we were in the last century.
The class we're giving today, the training that we have,
still is the training of the last century.
Think of the professor in the classroom,
getting people's attention for an hour or two hours.
Here, at graduation, sometimes four hours.
There is no longer the privilege
of getting an hour of people's undivided attention.
Today, if I start talking,
and, in two minutes, I don't get your attention,
you pull out your phone to check messages,
WhatsApp, Facebook,
to "like" that person you've never met, but what they posted is so cool.
It's gone!
In a work meeting, if something doesn't catch your attention,
you'll do something else.
I know this because I fight for the attention of people every week.
Nerdologia is just one click away from the next most interesting video,
and if what I say isn't interesting enough,
they'll watch something else.
And with the cell phone it's much easier
than with a remote control that you need to keep close to the TV to change.
So we have all this available information,
accessible and much more interesting,
and we get easily distracted by it.
The poor professor in the classroom says,
"The students don't pay attention. They're not interested anymore.
They're always so distracted. they don't focus enough."
They may not pay attention to you and what you're saying,
but, this same student will leave class on Friday,
pick up Mario Odyssey, that's just been released,
and will spend 20 hours on the weekend, trying to conquer this game.
The student, who doesn't pay attention in class,
will binge-watch Stranger Things this weekend,
and will wake up on Sunday not knowing where they are.
Their attention is focused on a story,
and that won't happen in the classroom
because the classroom is still treating content
as if we were in the last century.
Think of this.
How many times have you used a ruler and a compass
in the last 10 years?
We learned it in school.
I'm not saying geometry isn't important,
but to contrast,
how many times have you used Google to do searches today?
Today.
And nobody taught you to do this.
You had to figure it out,
and good luck knowing how to filter what you found,
if it was cool or wasn't.
We don't learn these things in school.
Nobody tells us,
"Search the Internet like this."
"Compare the sources this way."
"You get better information like this."
You ask, "Atila, I don't know which technology will be the one of the future,
so why train a child in school to work with Orkut if Orkut's gone?"
Very well, I have a good gamble for you -
we have a computer that everyday is more a part of the body,
and everyday is more powerful.
This computer here.
Brazilians used to have doubts when choosing their first household appliance.
They didn't know which appliance they would buy first -
would it be a stove or a TV?
Today, there's no doubt - it's a cell phone.
You buy a cell phone in ten payments.
The cell phone's the first new thing that's gone into our pocket
for thousands of years.
We used to have our wallet, keys -
and it's the first new object that's here, all the time,
and then if it vibrates on your leg, it's the cell phone.
And this is how we access information,
much more quickly and more consistently.
When we use the cell phone to do searches,
we forget what it was like to not know something.
If I ask you now:
which Brazilian woman has been cited most in international research worldwide?
The doubt that you may be experiencing now
was how we lived before we had the cell phone.
That's how bar discussions were.
Next time they met, someone would have found the answer.
Today, someone's already pulled out a cell phone and found Johanna Döbereiner.
She was a researcher who died in 2003 or 2004.
To correct me, you can search online,
and you can browse for the answer.
This is how we access information today.
I don't need to gather up all the information I put into my head
for four years,
so I can retrieve it later.
We no longer live in a world
where information is contained in a library.
You know the library,
that place where we go to sleep and use Wi-Fi?
In the old days, there was only one place to go to know things.
The information was kept together in a pile of paper tied together,
poorly indexed, and heavy to carry:
it was called a book.
Today, we can search much more easily,
but we still treat information like it was in a book.
I'm not saying this information changed
and that the teaching profession or the university will end.
The university was created when the world felt the need
to put people interested in learning
together with people who had knowledge to teach,
and knowledge was difficult to have at the time
because books were still written by hand.
So libraries brought together
intelligent, interesting, and educated people
with people who wanted to learn.
If the question in the university were about technology,
as soon as the printed book showed up, the university would have ended
because content was distributed more easily with books.
What we look for in a university isn't a technological solution,
it's a pedagogical solution.
It's how we learn.
It isn't only access to information that makes you learn.
Access to information isn't the same thing as learning.
The difference between a crazy conspiracy theorist -
who thinks the Earth is flat,
vaccines are bad,
and there's no global warming -
and a sane person
is that both have access to information,
but the last, who is sane,
knows how to learn and interpret the information at hand.
But "fake news," today, doesn't happen for lack of information,
but for excess, because people can't process what they receive
and will understand another way.
The misery of information is over; it's much easier today.
We aren't training nor are we teaching anyone
to interpret the information when it comes in this form.
This isn't only here in Brazil and not only in the university.
It's in every corner.
They did a cool study at Stanford University
where they interviewed students from elementary age to college graduation
and asked how they consume information on the Internet.
I give you a question, and I want you to go find an answer,
and I want to see how you'll arrive at the answer.
The first thing they saw is that,
for all the ages,
the students didn't know the difference
between appropriate unbiased content and biased content.
They didn't know what the problem
was with reading a text about how to save money
that was written by a bank.
Not that banks don't know how to advise, but they will give a very specific advice,
and the students didn't know how to differentiate this.
What is a trusted source for these students?
Up to graduation,
more than 80% see a trusted source as the one that has more images,
and it can be an image with nothing to do with the text.
No problem.
Why? Because nobody told them,
nobody taught them how to look for information.
Because the teacher is still treating the classroom
as if he were the puller of a cart.
How is a teacher the puller of a cart?
The cart is the classroom.
When all the information is in the teacher's head,
the only thing you can do is get the cart, or better, the carriage,
gather together some students, put them inside the carriage,
and the teacher, who's the coachman of the carriage,
will take it wherever he wants, by whatever route he wants,
whenever he wants.
Did you learn the content in the carriage? No?
Try again next year, good luck.
The carriage goes too slow for you?
Good luck, you have to join,
and the teacher will take you wherever he wants.
The teacher's the coachman, and this is the information you get.
Today, I get to search for this information,
get to interpret it, and use it for other things.
The role of the teacher today is no longer the role of the coachman
who has a carriage and is owner of the road.
The role of a teacher today is that of a GPS.
He will help and guide the student along the way,
telling, more or less, what to do,
hoping the student doesn't drive into a ravine, and it turns out all right.
The student can already drive alone - he has the cell phone, the computer,
has all the ways he needs to look for information by himself -
but nobody's teaching him how to drive.
We don't tell our students how to search and how to interpret this information.
What I didn't know when I was taking biology
was that I'd hardly use biology itself.
In truth, I slept through part of it, and also didn't get much from it.
What I learned that was more important in biology and in postgraduate work
was how to learn, how to search for information,
how to interpret it, chew it up, and make use of it.
It's what I exercise every week.
It's this ability that lets me, today,
with only two YouTube tutorials,
attain information that you've taken forty years of practical skill to acquire,
with only the abilities that I developed there.
If we don't treat the classroom as a way to acquire these abilities,
if we don't actively engage our students to actively produce in the classroom,
to use the Internet,
not to pick out a cool video with cool pictures -
thank you to those who use Nerdologia videos in the classroom -
but not only for this,
but to use the Internet for students to produce information.
Why can't students produce videos and write articles?
Why can't they refute the information sources they consume on the Internet?
Why can't they participate in what they do every day,
the consumption of information?
But this time with tutoring, with somebody helping,
with someone teaching how to navigate this environment.
Or we will continue in the classroom
to wait for a miracle that will, out of the blue,
get students interested in what we've talked about for the last hour.
If, as a teacher, you don't have this ability,
and you don't know how to teach your students to do this,
don't worry, because they'll learn it anyway.
I spent 10 years, after graduating,
learning to write so I could communicate as a scientist
as a graduate and postgraduate.
Guess how I communicate as a scientist today?
With video.
I've used very little of what I learned to write.
You'll use introduction, material, methods, and results on a YouTube video.
Good luck!
But how did I learn to communicate with video?
Like all the world can learn today:
searching, acquiring information online, discovering new sources,
and using the way I learned before
to apply this to a technology that didn't exist
when I learned this ability.
Because today, we live in the future.
Today, we live in the future that the world dreamed of before.
When they interviewed Isaac Asimov,
an excellent author of science fiction and scientific dissemination works,
in 1988,
he told what his dream was.
He dreamed that, one day in the future,
computers would have terminals that linked the entire world,
and that people, at home, would be able to access all the world's information,
consult virtual libraries, and learn other things.
They would stop trying to learn during only one phase of their lives,
and they would continue their whole life learning.
We would leave our system of learning only at certain times of life,
and enter into "life-long learning."
In 1988, he'd already dreamed of this.
We live this future today - we have Internet to do this.
I have the enormous privilege to be on two sides of the Internet today:
consuming information and learning it,
and teaching and transmitting information on the other side.
I know very well the potential that this has for people.
What Asimov didn't know, or whoever dreamed of this didn't know,
is that in this future in which we have this available,
it's more essential.
It isn't that people learn today only for pleasure.
We learn today because we must learn for the rest of our lives.
And if we're not taught to learn, we'll be stuck from now on.
We still treat classroom information
as if it were a water fountain in the desert -
like the world has a drought of information
and what's happening in the classroom is giving water for people to drink.
Forget this, we have a flood of information,
and we need to be teaching people how to swim.
That's it.
(Applause)