Well today was a special day, TEDxZU was launched.

Since 2009 I have been a curator or co-curator of 3 different TEDx events, spoken at a TEDx event and helped mentor 2 events.

After my last TEDx, TEDxAbuDhabiU which was excellent, I went back to the drawing board.

Actually I asked myself why do a TEDx?

What am I hoping to achieve through a TEDx?

That is when I realized that I needed to get back to basics and back to my community.

There are many fantastic large TEDx community events taking place in the UAE, TEDxDubai.com is a super example of that.

And every TEDx event is trying to tap into the community in some way.

What I was missing in my TEDx experiences was connecting with the community I live in for 5 or more hours a day, Zayed University.

Why go to a TEDx on the weekend or in a different city and for an extended length of time?

Why not fit a TEDx into my day and keep them short but have them more often?

And so I radically changed my thinking about what a perfect TEDx event is and set out in a new direction.

TEDxZU is born in the Salon format.

What is a Salon?

Let me describe TEDxZU.

TEDxZU is a small event aimed at faculty, staff and students at Zayed University.

TEDxZU is in a very public place at a time when there are many people just hanging around.

TEDxZU, for now anyway, is every 3 weeks.

TEDxZU has a year long theme of “the future starts here”.

TEDxZU has micro themes every 3 weeks with a guest who will frame the theme and 2 or 3 TEDTalks to go with it.

TEDxZU is using Facebook as its main communication tool.

TEDxZU also asks those who come out to the event to engage in some fashion, this week people are asked to post to Facebook what inspires them.

No fee, no presents, no invitations just a gathering of the community around TED content to make a difference in our lives.

Community engagement at its best!

Never say never to a larger TEDxZU but for now the Salon format is how we aim to engage the community at Zayed University.

But so far the penetration of e-books is a little reminiscent of the VHS vs BETA days.

Nobody has really come to the plate with an easy, affordable, audience catching model.

So what is the e-textbook thing all about? Here is the primer.

The difference in cost between an eTextbook and the equivalent print book can be large (one of the major eTextbook providers, CourseSmart, promises savings of up to 50%).

And here’s some other benefits to getting your textbook as an ebook.

eTextbooks can be less expensive to buy or rent.	An ebook can cost significantly less than the print book. And there are often ebook rental options, for example from www.ecampus.com, which bring the cost down still further.
Search is an essential tool.	Searching an eTextbook is far faster and easier than thumbing through a print book’s index.
An eTextbook is accessible anywhere.	With downloaded eTextbooks, you can carry your entire library with you on your own laptop or ebook reader; with online eTextbooks, you can access your library from any computer with an Internet connection.
Easy printing of thesections you need	Why lug the whole textbook with you if you only need a few pages?
Purchase just one chapter	You can often buy just the single chapter of the textbook you need. Why buy the whole book if you don’t need to?
Easy Access to Related Materials	An eTextbook can contain the embedded links to related materials in online libraries and websites that we now take for granted.

One of the 1st aggregators of e-text books is coursesmart.

And now the New York Times is talking about a couple of the big publishers wanting to join the game, I guess the writing is on the wall!

So the big guys are coming out fighting!

Inkling currently has 14 textbooks available from publishers like John Wiley & Sons and W.W. Norton. Pearson and McGraw-Hill have committed to add to that number. Pearson plans to make two dozen of its M.B.A. textbooks available along with a number of undergraduate arts and sciences books, marking the first time the company will sell books through Inkling. McGraw-Hill, which has a handful of books available on the service, will add its Top 100 college titles plus some medical and reference books.

In all, Inkling expects to have nearly 100 textbook available by the fall.

“This is not some pilot program on the part of the publishers, but a real commitment to build their business forward,” said Matt MacInnis, Inkling’s chief executive.

The question has to be can old school faculty be convinced to move to e-texts and can students be persuaded to jump onboard?

Is this the end of used textbooks?

What I imagine is a world where every teacher can

First the professor starts thinking about the 7 weeks of vacation that is staring them in the face. Yes academics are not the most highly paid people on the planet BUT they do get great holidays.

The second thing that happens this time of year is students begin to stream into academic offices asking what they can do to get a better mark!

I wonder where we are going wrong!

Why do students think after a final assignment they can do a bit more to fix the failures of their judgement when it came to presentations, assignments and exams.

Tom Peters in his daily cube bomb summed it up nicely today.

Life is pretty simple: You do some stuff. Most fails. Some works. You do more of what works. If it works big, others quickly copy it. Then you do something else. The trick is the doing something else.
–Tom Peters

In my case for either 8 0r 18 weeks I have been teaching my students to arrive to class on time, give 100% and hopefully learn from each experience.

For my part I have arrived on time, sat in my office during office hours, provided a learning experience that is unparalleled and been totally up front with the simple fact that at the end of the course I expect student work that is exceptional, based totally on the student putting in the time and applying the weekly lessons (some lessons lead to a success and some a failure but all are lessons to be applied).

As Elizabeth Gilbert says in her TEDtalk, “I have done my part.”

While many of my students do their part there are still some who are not applying the lessons along the path and figure that anything can be fixed later with a little extra work.

WRONG!

But why wouldn’t a student treat every piece of work like a life or death situation? In many cases those grades and the cumulative grade point average could be a death sentence in the academic world.

Is the classroom suppose to, at the least, have a bit of continuity to the real world?

-arrive on time

-be accountable 100% for work output

-rewards for exceptional work

-incentives to not follow the mediocre crowd (most work is mediocre in quality and creativity these days)

-the only second chance is on the next assignment and there is always an end

Fortunately many educators agree that whether we are training students for a vocation or a lifetime of academics we need to work to the reality of the world we will eventually find ourselves in!

I cringe at the professors who treat the students in a University like grade 5 students, and many do, this does the university student no favours and really makes a clown of the professor.

Then again everyone likes a good circus.

Why is that an issue?

We professors, we bureaucrats, we parents, we …. are truly bankrupt of creative ideas.

What we do have is a means to implement ideas but what we lack are ideas, new innovative,creative ideas.

Look at Greece! How do they fix their financial problems? Loans! Throwing more bankrupt ideas at a problem is no solution.

The environment! We have big problems! How can we fix it?

Has anyone bothered to ask our youth? Does anyone want to listen to our youth? NO, what do the youth know!

I spoke with 7 kids aged between 10 and 12 about their take on the environment and how they are looking at things, the conversation gives me hope!

Uptown Primary School Students Go Green

Nightline a Conversation

The obvious answer is that I spend a portion of my day in the classroom, at the university level, and deal 1st hand with the education realities of the day.

I am also part of a group of educators that is int he process of fundamentally redesigning what we teach and more important HOW.

Which is a logical lead in to the question of what is is that students want from their education?

I am getting ready to teach a convergent media practicum where we are going to set up a morning information portal at Zayed University.  The working title is “Good Morning ZU“, why reinvent a wheel that is working well!

What we are going to do is combine video/audio/text all that may be housed in autonomous web2.0 services and put them in one place.

What I would really like to see is this project find a home on the students BlackBerry or iPhone and bypass the computer/blog delivery totally. We are not there just yet.

But what I am surprised about is how slow the group is to pick up the tech tools and use them!

The reality I am seeing is that we are talking web2.0 and that takes us to facebook and twitter BUT when we look at the other more detailed content creating options the youth uptake is stalled.

So, my question to the youth of today is very simply what do you really want when it comes to web2.0, education, practical activity… what do you want?

Good question and one that seldom, if ever, gets acted upon!

Once children leave primary school less and less attention is given to the engagement of the student and more and more is attention is given to assessment of the 1% of  information the student actually retains.

Maybe Guido Sarducci’s Five Minute University sketch isn’t that far off

Father Guido Sarducci’s Five Minute University the sketch!

So what do we really need to do to make education work today?

No we do not have to, or want to, eliminate rigor, reading, research the hours of labour over a question.

What we need to do is give serious thought to how to give the student ownership of what they are doing.

And by doing I mean an essay, a TV program, an installation piece, a lab.

Ownership is the key to academic success today and has been the key all along!

Only a handful of people ever figure it out and if you take a good look at those who do the best in University and after University it has a lot to do with ownership of what they engaged in!

I have no doubt that this idea of ownership applies to every level of education and is the key to primary school success.

Along the way we lose sight of the ownership variable.

I am teaching a group of girls at Zayed University who have taken ownership to the extreme and in the process are reaping wild success.

The project is simple, get the information of the day out to students.

In this case a hybrid system of blog and podcast is being used.

The project is called ZU60.

The simple remit is to provide 60 seconds of campus information to students every morning.

This is a student owned project!

The students collect, write, edit, record and upload it all and this has to be done for the morning rush!

The students OWN ZU60 and the results… listen and tell me what you think!

The key to success is ownership.

After a week and change of the current semester it is clear to me that the teaching exercise is a pretty easy mix of show and tell.

Think about the best part of your primary school education! Show and tell was always a hit and if you have any doubt go and find a grade 1 class tomorrow!

The problem of course is that we have moved so far away from the teacher /student coeducation relationship (what show and tell is all about), to the dump it on me from above approach, that the idea of anything coming from the ground up is unthinkable!

So this week I am going to institute a show and tell aspect to my university class where 3 students, they will decide who, have a chance to show/teach/initiate the ideas that build on or pull in another direction the flow of the lesson I am preparing.

Talk about walking the wire.

Why not pull the class from the ground up?

Fear, hard, risky, odd, unusual, less control… you pick the reasons.

If the educator and those who are being educated are given more power, responsibility and ability the whole mix of learning moments might translate in to a far more meaningful education.

Maybe!

1. produce a PowerPoint about the essential public speaking skills to be passed on to new students.

2. create a handout to go with the PowerPoint.

My class was broken into groups and given 30 minutes.

The result was not good. I am amazed really!

What I have discovered is that students to day have no concept of people hours and delegation to get more done.

I have also discovered that the ivory tower has a corrupting atmosphere in that it is not the real world so when a real world assignment is given in real world time it is highly likely that the goal will not be achieved.

I am worried about students!

More and more as a professor my job is about training or programming people for the work environment YET these same people do not believe that that environment has demands that are far harsher than the classroom.

Again I am reminded that we need to radically remodel education!

I am worried that they, the teachers have been caught in the teach to test treadmill and won’t be able to get off fast enough!

I am more worried that schools outside of the UK, like in Dubai, that try to be more British than the schools in the motherland will not get off the treadmill at all!

The education system in the UK has been so heavily based on the end goal of SATs that what happens when they are removed?

Teachers have known what they are working for, a good test score. Forever!

Can the old guard actually retool, overnight, to move from the teach to test to the evaluate for meeting standards and objectives through demonstrable work product?

Can the old guard use creativity, leadership, innovation and design priniples to make education relevent for the years to come and not the years that have passed?

Sure kids will be able to read, write and do math… maybe even a bit of design technology. But are the students who are being pulled out of the SAT trap going to be able to think? Are the teachers going to be able to think?

I am worried that thinking has been absent from the mix for so long that new learning curve is going to be rally steep. But one heck of a ride!

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/education/article4943354.ece