A list of interesting films
This is a special list of videos which I have stumbled upon, and found particularly insipring. These films are embedded
on my website, and can be found if you touch on the title of the article. Remember the fragile nature of this kind of thing I'm doing. These videos could disappear from off the net at any time...
or the other website could go down for maintenance, and the page may thus appear to be broken. Such is the nature
of the internet. I'll try to keep on top of this. But please forgive me if you find one missing.
One problem which seems to be prevalent in Australian schools - violence. According to a Queensland schools website - 16,000 kids in the state were suspended at one point or another last year because of physical aggression.
Here's a news report from Adelaide - a city in South Australia:
I have been enrolled in a teacher education program at my local university this last few months, and for one of the projects, I was asked to research and present on another country. I decided to check out the education system of a country which has caught my interest recently - Australia.
I was really impressed with what I learned - that Australia has a constructivist pedagogy - students learn things in a hands-on way. And they take this all the way up through high school - so that vocational skills are really focused on a lot in their upper grades.
Australian teachers also seem to have a profound respect for children's intellect. They believe that children are reasonable people, and that they can achieve great things right now. It's very refreshing, and certainly parallels my view on children which I had thought was very unusual, until I saw that all of Australia seems to see things the same way.
More specifically, the pedagogy folks have in Australia is what they call "Outcomes Based Education." Australians would contrast that with what we have in the USA - they call our system "Standards based education." Tests are not as important to Australian educators as they are to usa educators. The main goal in the Australian education system is to prepare the kids for real life - whereas the main goal in the usa system is to make certain kids have a basic competency in academic areas like science, and math and social studies, and so forth.
Here are some films which I found particularly inspirational - of Australian schools and Australian kids. You can see the spark of intelligence in the kids which you usually don't see in American kids. I attribute that to the better pedagogy (teaching style) of Australian educators.
All of you out there who are engrossed in this debate between science and religion ought to recognise that one of the things that religion uses to its benefit is the power of song. When science starts using song to promote its own visions and ideals, it will be a wonderful day.
This is an "auto-tuned" mash up of words from Richard Feynman, Carl Sagan, Bill Nye, Neil de Grasse Tyson... four people who were/are passionate about science.
For those of you with slightly different tastes in music, here's a more grayscale melody by the same youtuber.
There is a saint who is the President of East Timor. This country seems to have enjoyed peace and good relations with Indonesia in the past ten years since it won its independence from Indonesia. The man is very wise and caring, and is very pragmatic at maintaining this neighborly relationship with Indonesia. And central to this, is the forgiveness of people who oppressed East Timor between 1975 and 1999.
The interviewer here, is cute... but is rather malicious and headstrong in how she wishes to press the president for vindictive policies to "punish" those who hurt the country. She somehow doesn't see that these kinds of policies could easily return the region to a violent struggle struggle between the two nations.
The first segment of this broadcast, can be found here.
This might bore some people out of their skull. But, for those of you who work with children, or in management in any way, I think you'll get a lot out of it. This is a person talking about different styles of directing orchestras. He has some important insights. Neither a laissez faire, nor an authoritarian approach works when you are in a management position. One prominent metaphor that Itay Talgam uses is the people themselves build a roller coaster, and ride on it. And their actions are guided by the physics of their environment. It's important to relish what your people are doing, and be nurturing them, and be bringing them into fruition.
This is a fascinating 20 minute video with Lawrence Lessig, who has been a very erudite campaigner for reforming the government in Washington DC. Here, he again shows how noble he is by refusing to play one side or the other in a debate. Instead, he wants to talk about his honest reasoning.
