Transcriber: Jaime Ochoa Reviewer: Noelia Baccaro
Well, good afternoon everybody. How´s everybody doing today?
Doing well?
I'm doing well, too.
And it really is a special day for me today.
Among other things, oops, not that.
Not that.
It´s my birthday!
(Applause) Yeah!
Yeah, it´s true.
Absolutely true. Yes.
Today I am 65 years old.
Yeah, it´s kind of cool, isn´t it?
No, no, no, no, no. You´ll use up my 10 minutes.
Anyway. You know, I started to worry about something
because I´ve heard the word
used a lot for people in my age bracket,
and now that I am 65.
So, I looked,
actually I didn´t look it up,
I asked Siri this morning to look it up for me
and, so what curmudgeon is according to Siri,
is a crusty, irascible, cantankerous old person
full of stubborn ideas.
(Laughter)
Some of that applies to me but not all of it.
But I´m going to be a little bit cantankerous today
because, I want us to consider
what´s going on in education today,
or specifically, what we can do about it.
Look familiar?
I mean, we´ve all seen this,
anyone who´s taught has been seeing more and more of this.
Students, you´ve been experiencing it yourselves;
so, what brings this kind of behavior about?
Well, there have been a number of articles,
and here´s a recent one,
that tells us what is wrong in the classroom:
it´s the use of PowerPoint slides.
But you know what?
PowerPoint, or for that matter, Apple keynote,
these are not bad entities in and of themselves,
they´re great apps,
but they´re apps that are often misapplied
or misused and here´s the reason why.
This is what students are exposed to hour after hour in the classroom.
Nothing but a bunch of bullet text,
and let´s just bring those bullets right in.
Call a state a state,
(Laughter)
And I am sure many of you have seen
Melissa Marshall´s excellent TED Global Talk of June 2012.
So I borrowed this from her,
it´s not original to me
but guys, what do bullets do?
Audience: kill.
Bullets kill. Bullets absolutely kill and they will kill your presentation.
They will annihilate your students,
they will totally disengage them from wanting to learn
or even be interested in what it is you have to say.
So we find ourselves at a crossroads.
Are we going to take the route of bullet points rather,
we are we just going to continue
to turn our students into mindless zombies
dictation taking machines?
Or, are we going to take an alternate route of multimedia
and see if we can get our students engaged
in what it is we have to say?
Well, I am going to advocate that we do the latter.
And, I´d love to show you three examples
of how I actually try to make this happen in my own classes.
My first example is something called
the framing effect.
Framing, how we frame an argument,
how we frame a question, how we pose a question
can greatly affect the kind of response
that you can get back as a result of that.
So, I don´t use textbook in my class.
So what I do is I go to scientific journals
find something that relates to a point that I want to make in class,
and then I put it into Keynote as bulletpoints
but I would never ever show something like this in class
it's only an outline for me.
So, what I then do
is go from the bulletpoints to Keynote for presentation.
So, the following is what my students see when I talk about the framing effect.
There's an area of the brain, it's called the Amygdala,
it is hugely involved in a variety of emotions,
emotional expressions
the processing of emotions,
things like that.
OK.
With that in mind,
there's a glass of liquid,
let me ask you
how many think this glass is half empty?
One.
How many think it is half full?
Oh, yes. Optimists.
How many think it's a stupid question?
(Laughter)
Yeah! Exactly!
It's a ridiculous question.
But you know what,
if you were grappling
with whether you should answer with half empty or half full,
you in fact were exhibiting this framing effect;
and this is associated with a bit of an emotional response.
Just enough such that you are going to see more activity,
guess where?
In your Amygdala.
So this study asks questions like this of people
while they were undergoing FMRI brain scans, OK?
So let me ask you this:
two packages of ground beef, they're identical!
Except for the labels,
one says 80% beef and the other one says 20% fat.
Which do you want?
(Laughter)
I don't know.
I'm going to ask my two brothers:
"-Whoa, 80% beef versus 20% fat.
Well, I don't like a lot of fat,
so I am definitely going to take the 80% beef."
"--Yeah, but dude 80% beef, 20% fat,
they're exactly the same thing,
there is no choice here, give me whichever you want."
OK, so brother over on the left is trying to grapple
80% beef, 20% fat,
likes the 80% beef, gonna go with that.
Brother on the right says it's a stupid question.
Where are we going to see that increased Amygdala activity?
Over in that guy,
because he's got a little bit of a more emotional reaction
to the way that question was framed.
And that's how I present the framing effect.
My second example deals with drugs,
and specifically how drugs work in the brain,
on neurotransmitters.
So, I could do that,
it's not a lot of bulleted text after all,
but for me it's too much.
So I don't do that,
that's my guideline.
Here is what my students see:
So, a neurotransmitter is found inside the brain
and it will come across from one neuron to the next,
lock into a receptor site, causing it to fire,
getting the message across,
all is right with the world.
An agonist is a drug that mimics the action of a neurotransmitter;
does exactly the same thing.
But an antagonist blocks the action of a neurotransmitter
so that it cannot lock into the receptor site.
And now you have an interruption in communication
in the brain.
That's generally not a good thing,
So, with that in mind,
here's a neurotransmitter, it's called Glutamate,
it's found throughout the brain.
It's particularly abundant in the hippocampus,
an important structure involved in learning and memory
as well as stress and other things as well.
So,
if everything is going according to plan,
we have Glutamate that's going to come across from one neuron,
lock into a very special receptor site
in the next neuron called an NMDA receptor;
and it's going to look something like this.
Gets the message across,
learning and memory will happen
all other things being equal.
But...
but,
what if you've been drinking alcohol?
Alcohol is a drug.
It's actually an antagonist to Glutamate.
It's gonna block that receptor site
so that when Glutamate tries to come across
and do it's job,
ain't nothing's gonna happen.
And now learning, memory goes right down the drain,
(Laughter)
which is bad if you're a student;
one way to remember this,
think about that receptor, the NMDA receptor.
What does NMDA stand for?
Well, it stands for some chemical term.
For me it stands for:
No Memory Drinking Alcohol.
And that's how I present that.
Well, my final example relates to a personal experience of mine.
I was asked to be a plenary speaker
at a rather prestigious honor society.
I was really nervous about that,
about as nervous as I am with TED actually.
This was different,
nervous for a different reason.
I mean, my GPA as an undergraduate was just all over the place.
It settled down to an OK level,
but there was no way that I was an honor student.
So, here I am giving a plenary talk at this honor society,
I am trying to think:
"Oh my gosh, how am I going to start this?"
So I started it by
doing
the following.
Thank you for inviting me.
I really feel like a fish out of water
talking to this particular group.
And I like to show you why I feel that way.
Those of you who are familiar with Sam Cook,
we've heard from Sam Cook's music earlier today at TED,
excellent musician, excellent songwriter,
singer.
Sam Cook wrote a song
called What a Wonderful World It Would be,
and if you remember the lyrics of that song
it had something to do with
how he wasn't particularly good at various topics in school:
but it didn't matter to him because as long as he had his girlfriend
then the world was great,
everything is fine,
it doesn't matter that I don't know all these other things.
So, I put together this slide.
So, like Sam Cook,
oops, whoa,
like Same Cook
I too, don't know much about history,
or biology,
or science books,
or the French I took,
or geography, or trigonometry,
or algebra,
I sure don't know what a slide rule is for.
(Laughter)
It's sad because I really don't.
(Laughter)
I really don't.
And the reason I am showing you this example
is in fact that that it took me 4 hours
to produce what amounts to 14 seconds of screen time.
(Laughter)
Now, I know what you're thinking:
"Get a life!"
(Laughter)
But you know what,
it did take an awful lot of planning to do,
figure what I want to say,
how I want to say it,
locate the media,
stand in front of that green screen
with the fish, I was not in the aquarium with the fish,
I was a fish out of water for god's sake.
So, putting it all together,
do all of the editing,
re-record, re-record till I got the timing right:
do a lot of post production,
four hours later,
my wife walks in and what's for dinner?
I'm supposed to be cooking dinner
and I am cooking that instead.
But, you know what,
was the time well spent?
You know, I really think it was,
and I felt vindicated because I remember what George Lucas said
in a commentary track
way back in the old days when we had laser discs,
this is the ancestor of DVDs guys,
many of you don't even know what a laser disc is;
but they had director tracks.
He was talking about a scene from outer space
that was a very important scene;
it was one of these big battles,
and lots of space ships coming from all directions
and shooting one another.
He said that it took six months to produce
what amounted to four seconds of screen time.
Wow!
Was the time well spent?
Yeah.
He managed to, in those four seconds,
transport us to worlds we had never seen before
and worlds that we would not probably want to see
but that we were able to see
and be drawn in,
and be engaged by them,
engagement;
and that is where I am heading with all this.
Do we have to say death by Powerpoint
death by keynote?
No!
The problem is not with the software,
it's what we do with it.
So, my take home message then
is that we really need to think about ways of getting our students engaged,
engagement is key to unlocking the door to education.
Once we grab their attention,
once we get them engaged,
that door is gonna come flying open
(Laughter)
or get stuck.
(Laughter)
But, you know what,
I really think it is time well spent
and it's worth the investment.
So, thank you all so very much.
Really appreciate it.
(Applause)