I have here a Slinky
It's a kids' toy
But a few years ago I tried out something with it
that most people don't often do.
It's fairly basic. All I'm gonna do... I'm gonna dangle the Slinky like so.
My Slinky is extended under its own weight.
What I wanna do is drop it.
What I'm gonna ask you to do
is predict what will happen when it falls.
Obviously, the Slinky will fall to the ground.
But my question to you is how will it fall?
Will it stay stretched out like this as it's falling?
or maybe the top will fall faster than the bottom?
or perhaps when I let go the bottom might come up?
These are all options that I've heard.
But what I'm gonna request from you is that you make prediction right now,
and you commit to it.
Because scientific research has shown that if you don't make a prediction
what you learn from this will be no more than if you never saw this at all.
So has everyone made their prediction... exactly how the Slinky will fall?
Now if I did this live for you you might not be able to see it, so...
I have already filmed it beforehand
in about 800-frames-per-second slow motion,
to make it really clear exactly what happens when the Slinky falls
The bottom of the Slinky remains completely motionless
until the whole Slinky has collapsed.
It's as though it's defying gravity.
Now one thing I know, if a little Slinky is good
then a big Slinky is even better.
see, now we're talking, right?
This is not just a phenomenon that Slinkys obey.
This is the way all objects work.
If you hold a steal rod from the top and you let it go
the top of that steal rod really starts falling
before the bottom of the steel rod.
That is because that release of the tension needs to propagate
through the whole material.
Now in a Slinky it does it particularly slowly
which allows us to see it.
But the take away, the real piece of learning that we have here
is that disturbances take time to propagate.
you think the gravity should be pulling the bottom down
immediately when I let go.
But the tension is holding it up until it can relax throughout the Slinky.
Now that you have seen it in slow motion,
I bet you can see it live.
You guys ready? In three, two, one...
Right? You could see that.
I bet you anything, if I had dropped it
before you had watched this video you wouldn't have seen it.
You would have seen something different.
And I think that's remarkable.
I mean we say "you need to see it to believe it,"
But sometimes you need to believe it first;
you need to know what's there what you're looking for
in order to... to actually see it.
So, that is one of the YouTube videos that I created.
It's actually my first kind of viral success.
As you might be able to tell I am a teacher.
This is not a profession it's a state of being,
it's a personality.
I was a teacher when I was a kid.
I tutored my friends and younger kids.
I just get a real kick out of helping people understand something.
So I started teaching... one-to-one, that's what I did.
And after I graduated with a degree in engineering and physics
and I did a PHD in physics education
I was teaching in Sydney in small classes
of about 14 students; one to 14.
I also started lecturing at university.
Few of the universities in Sydney had lecture theatres of 400 students.
So I would lecture to these students.
And I was kind of scaling my ability to affect peoples' lives.
I'm not sure how affective each one of those scalings was.
Obviously, smaller class sizes work better.
But now I've got to the point by using YouTube,
that my lessons have reached 250 million views.
It's a quarter of a billion views worldwide.
I think that's extraordinary; it's an extraordinary opportunity,
and it demonstrates the difference that an individual like myself can have.
And it was interesting to hear from Paul...
you know Paul wasn't making videos as part of his sort of... school mandate.
He was making them because like me, he is a teacher,
and he wanted to do the best thing for his students
and it just turned out that was also in the best interest
of people around the world.
So I just wanna give you a little taste of what I've been up to.
My channel on YouTube is called Veritasium, an element of truth.
If you get where am going with that?
But I just wanna give you an idea of how this came to be.
I started making this channel five years ago.
There was no funding behind it there was no organization behind it,
there was no real plan.
I did this for the love of teaching.
So this is what it looks like in about a minute or two
the last five years of my life.
Thank you.
So that's what am always looking for, that moment when the penny drops;
when they make that realization.
And it's not just me who's doing this.
You look around the globe... there are dozens of creators
who are also teachers who feel that need
to share their knowledge, their excitement for science
and technology, for mathematics
to share it with the world.
what is interesting is that the people at the top... of YouTube
and online video who are spreading education
they're not Harvard or Stanford
or big government-supported or major educational institutions;
they are individuals,
they're people who just took it upon themselves
because they needed to share that with the world
and that has resonated with the audience.
So I always try to consider, you know, why is it...
why is it that, you know, it's been these individuals...
You know, each one of these people has a very unique story
about how they just came to make a video on the internet
to share an idea with the world.
And there's something about... about that which is just so compelling
for those people watching.
It's because we're not doing it for the money
and we're not doing it for the mandate or because it works
within our organizational framework;
we're doing it because we love it.
And for some reason that is finding an audience
and it's really resonating.
but I think there's a lot of lessons that can be learned
from the people up on this screen
you know, who have been really successful...
Those lessons can be learned.
I feel like we are at the beginning of this kind of chain reaction;
like the way the Slinky starts, it starts with a little bit at the top
and the rest of the Slinky is not moving.
In a similar way, I feel like we are just at that moment
where the disturbances starting to propagate through our system
and these are the people at the forefront
who are really changing the way education happens.
Now, you might be tempted to say that these people will revolutionize education,
and if that is the inclination, then I'm here to urge caution,
because I did my PHD about how to make films that communicate physics.
I tested how well different films work
to help people actually learn and understand Physics.
And when I was doing this research I came across a troubling history.
Let me take you back nearly a hundred years to 1922.
There's this gentleman Thomas Edison who said,
"The motion picture is destined to revolutionize our educational system
and that in a few years it will largely supplant largely,
if not entirely, the use of textbooks."
You go back a hundred years
and obviously we know he's wrong, we still use textbooks today.
But I hope you recognize that this did not seem like a ridiculous idea
when he proposed it.
Motion pictures are revolutionary; they changed entertainment.
It's extraordinary the impact that they have had on our lives
and yet they have not replaced textbooks.
Why not? I think it's a question worth asking.
If we don't ask these questions, we're bound to repeat the same mistakes.
You can move forward to the 1930's, when people believed that radio
would be the thing to revolutionize education.
There's a lot written about how we can take experts now
and beam them directly via radio into the classrooms,
and in fact replace some of the teachers with radios.
You can essentially have, you know, a babysitter and a radio
and that would take care of your teaching.
This was the big idea in the 1930's.
And you can see the attractiveness of this, right?
To governments who worry about the big budgets of Education, you look for ways
to make the educational system more efficient.
So, in the case of radio, it was this idea that we can take experts,
we can get them into classrooms, and we can reduce the costs of teachers.
They're expensive, they're difficult to train,
it's difficult to get everyone on the same page.
I can understand the desire to believe that this would revolutionize education.
You can move to the 1950's with TV.
Studies were conducted to figure out:
do students prefer it more when they're watching the live lecture?
Or if they're in an adjacent room with a TV which displays the lecture?
I kid you not, these studies were done with mixed results.
In fact, in most of these studies
the result was no significant difference. When you mix up the technology,
how does the learning differ?
The result is it doesn't. The technology makes virtually no difference.
And here, you know, I feel myself echoing Paul again.
But people really thought were onto something in the 1980's.
You know why? Because there were computers,
and computers are not one way; their interactive.
This is the piece that we thought was missing.
"This time is different," they would have said back in the 1980's,
Computers can really revolutionize education; if we teach kids to code,
their logic will get better,
because they're programming the logic of a Computer,
so they will learn these skills.
What happened?
They got better at programming the turtle;
they did not get better at their logic skills.
They get better at the skills that they're being taught.
It's kind of no surprise.
Except that we continue to make these mistakes to this day.
Here's an article, "The big idea that can revolutionize higher education."
I feel like people over the years are invariably drawn to use these words:
Revolutionize and Education.
And there's this sort of amnesia
that we've had a hundred years-worth of these predictions
worth of really groundbreaking technologies that have...
that have really transformed other areas of our lives, but yet have failed
to fundamentally change the way we do education.
So I stand here today as a voice of caution
to think that the future of education is not one of revolutions.
This was a note about MOOCs, right?
Massive Open Online Courses, right? Again, what is the idea here?
Taking great teachers and amplifying them out
to hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of kids
in a highly scalable way that doesn't cost very much, right?
We are all looking for the silver bullet: a way to reduce
the investment that is needed in education.
We want to believe that there is an easy cheaper solution.
Now we talk about: can technology revolutionize education?
This is what a classroom looked like a hundred years ago
..or more. A hundred fifty years ago.
What does a classroom look like now?
Ok it's slightly different, it's a little bit more disorganized;
the desks are... you know
there's group work possibly happening with those kids,
there's clearly technology in places, right?
But what does the SMART Board do that the blackboard didn't?
I mean, fundamentally, it doesn't change the game,
it's what I'm saying.
You still have a teacher here you still have that person
guiding groups of students. Why has this not changed?
You may be dismayed at it, you may think:
this is just the inertia of education and it's impossible to move us forward
past this step.
But I think there might be something else going on here.
I think there're some lessons to be learned
from all these predictions of education revolutions,
and their failures; the fact that fundamentally classrooms look similar.
Why is that? Why did the revolutions fail?
And for me a lot of what comes down to is that this is not education.
This is a statue from Belgium where we have a pupil reading a book,
and essentially he's pouring the knowledge into his head.
Pouring the wisdom into his head; that's the metaphor that's being represented here.
But my point is what we've learned about education
is it's not about a transfer of a thing from A to B.
It's not a transfer from the book to the head.
It's not a transfer from the teacher to the student.
IT is not this sort of commodity.
I hate for education to be thought of as this commodity to be delivered
to students.
Why is it not that? Why is education not this delivery of information?
It's not that because that's not how our brains work,
and that's not how information works.
The way our brains work is we interact with other people;
we engage with our friends, with our families; we tell stories to each other.
And through those stories, through those experiences, through those activities
that we conduct together, we form memories.
Each one of us forms individual memories,
and it is out of those memories that our personalities are formed,
and our understanding of our world forums, and our skills develop.
I guess what I'm saying, fundamentally, is education is a social process.
And I think it works best
when there is a teacher who the students respect, who they feel accountable to,
who can inspire them,
who can hold them accountable for doing the work of learning.
Learning is hard work and it's important to there's someone there that you feel
socially engaged with and that you feel like you have to do the work for.
Just like, I guess, in your jobs you feel you need to do the work for your boss
or they'll be repercussions. I mean...
I share this view with Paul that the future is not virtual technology,
you know, virtual-reality.
The future is not kids only watching YouTube videos.
I like to say that there will be an evolution in education,
as there's already been.
Are tools change, our technologies change,
but what is the core? What is the foundation?
What is the bedrock of education?
It is social interaction between teacher and student and between the students
and amongst the students, right ? That is the core of education
So what does a classroom of tomorrow look like? It is an environment
where the teachers and students are working together.
And if there is a way in which I feel social media
will transform the future of education,
it is not in the delivery of information to the students,
it's in what the students will do with social media.
And this goes back to the point of making the students into makers.
When the teachers can work with the students in such a way
that they can leverage social media
to have a larger impact on the world,
that is where we're going to be seeing the big changes in education.
So I see social media not as a deliverer,
but as a tool to be used by students to really make their own world
and make an impact on the world.
Thank you very much.