FriendlyBrain Tip 294: Inspired Learning Environments
This week's FriendlyBrain Tip comes to you from Kimberley Hare of Kaizen Training.
As regular tipsters will know, last month I was lucky enough to spend 4 days at TED Palm Springs. This amazing coming-together of movers-and-shakers from a wide range of disciplines has certainly been my year's most memorable learning experience by far. Many of the sessions we enjoyed are already up on the website - free to the world - at www.ted.com
What I wanted to focus on in this tip, though, is the learning environment created by TED, rather than the content itself - fabulous though that was.
It didn't hurt that the weather was gorgeous. It was wonderful to feel the hot sun on my face, and the venue itself was just stunning - a spa-resort surrounded by desert and ice-capped mountains.
As well as armchairs, collections of comfy bean-bags everywhere. Reflection spaces, meeting spaces, balloon sculpture and art spaces. You could even participate whilst having a free professional massage!
There's a blogger's alley, so those who wanted to capture their learning live, or tweet, could do so.
Google were there with a fabulous cafe providing (all free) healthy snacks and drinks. Healthy chocolate (yes, really!) A great bookshop. A pod where you could be filmed giving your immediate reactions to each talk. And CISCO were on-site with the latest in visual communications technology -people were co-creating, clustering, mind-mapping, adding blogs, creating videos... the most wonderful collaborative pictorial summaries and connecting themes.
Regular live musical and poetry interludes - including people from the audience who were writing songs and poems inspired by that day's content and would perform them as a kind of artistic palate-cleanser.
I learned a lot about give-aways too. Forget the usual boring folder you get at conferences. Here, we each received the most fantastic goodie bag/rucksack full of splendid stuff - donated by TED sponsors and others. Too much to detail here - but examples are: a voucher for cool shoes where every pair you buy means the company sends an identical pair to somebody in the developing world who doesn't have any shoes at all. A scarf made from organically farmed wool, with a baa-aa code on it that allows you to zoom in to see the actual sheep farm the wool came from. New apps for the i-phone - including one I love called i-phorest where you plant and care for a tree (and a real one gets planted too). And get this: the actual rucksack is made from recycled Cola bottles! They were made in pairs - so one of the games here is to find your "rucksack twin" - the only other bag like yours anywhere in the world!
The other thing I loved was how people in the audience were encouraged to stand up and speak about what TED has meant to them. This was often very moving, especially from the Fellows: people who get funding and who couldn't possibly afford to come otherwise. I remember a fantastic guy from Malawi whose motto is "I try and I make". Since first being inspired by a TED talk on windmills, he has built several windmills (from garbage), dug deep-water wells that mean his village now doesn't starve in the dry season, built battery-powered pumps, introduced drip irrigation, started a football team, started a school, and now created the African Leadership Academy. In the last 18 months, this completely uneducated (in the formal sense) young African has impacted 3.75 million people through TED!
Starting the days off with relaxing morning meditations - accompanied by Tibetan flutes. Spending the evenings around the pool - again with a variety of different live musicians - including (I know I'm name-dropping!) Jamie Cullum and Herbie Hancock.
As if this isn't all great enough, then we hear about the "Allosphere" that's been created at Santa Barbara University - a unique machine where 12 researchers can stand inside it on a bridge - and do wonderful stuff like fly through a human brain (from real fMRI data), or get inside a hydrogen bond at the atomic level... now that's what I call brain-friendly learning! It's a bringing together of Science, Art, Technology and Quantum Physics - breathtaking demonstrations! http://www.allosphere.ucsb.edu/
Even just at the level of presenting facts and figures in ways that engage - there was much to learn. If you haven't already seen it, you must check out Hans Rosling with his presentation of the research on the spread of HIV and Aids across the world. http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/hans_rosling_shows_the_best_stats_you_ve_ever_seen.html
A wonderful week. And I'll now satisfy your curiosity following the pop quiz a few weeks ago!
Question: Who was I sat next to on the plane coming back from Los Angeles?
Answer: Keanu Reeves (yes, indeed!)
This week's call to action:
You may not have the budget or influencing power of TED (yet), but how could you use these ideas to create even more inspiring learning environments in your context?