TEDGlobal 2013: Think Again, Edinburgh, Scotland, June 10-14, 2013
We are in the midst of a global remix. Disciplines merge and cross-pollinate. Technology intrudes into biology and society. Power and authority are redistributed. Boundaries shift — or disappear. Hopes and anxieties collide. A new world is emerging at the intersection of once-separated realities, and everything we think we know might just be wrong. TEDGlobal 2013 will bring together those who challenge us to pause for an instant and Think Again.
If there is still space on your summer reading list, here is a mega reading list of 200 books recommended by TEDsters. Reading some of those books would give you a good taste of the global remix currently underway.
Lawrence Lessig’s promotion of free and remix culture, emphasizing the shift from read-only to read/write culture, can be seen as one response to the global remix. Lessig is a professor of law at Harvard and one of the leading authorities on intellectual property in the Internet Age.
Susan Sontag also had a thorough vision for remixing education to cultivate lifelong learning.
The world that is emerging through this global remix will be qualitatively different from the world we are used to. We are all actors in this transformation of the planet, both by what we do and by what we fail to do, and the future is the place where we will spend the rest of our lives.
As educators, our foremost task is to prepare learners for the real world that is emerging in the 21st century. Learning how to learn – which above all means learning how to ask the most important questions – and cultivating lifelong learning, have never been more important. This is one more reason to rigorously globalize education, for
In a time of drastic change it is the learners who inherit the future. The learned usually find themselves equipped to live in a world that no longer exists.
Hence a very basic question: Which world are you living in?
And more fundamentally:
The central task of education is to implant a will and a facility for learning; it should produce not learned but learning people. The truly human society is a learning society, where grandparents, parents, and children are students together. (Eric Hoffer)