0:00:00.441,0:00:07.603
Hi I'm dr Tae and this is a talk similar to the one I recently gave to my last group of students

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At northwestern university. On the last day of class.

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A lot of my students wanted me to post the video of the original lecture online.

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But instead of doing that I'm doing this,

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I'm re-reccording this presentation.

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Just for you!

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So here it is: Building a new culture of teaching and learning

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But why do we need to build something new?

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what's wrong with our current current culture of teaching and learning?

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I can summarize the problem in two words:

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School Sucks!

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kids say this all the time and nobody listen, but now I'm saying it.

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And its an idea that we need to start taking very seriously.

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Because its true school does sucks, especially when it comes to math and science education,

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which is going to be the main focus of my talk.

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So before we get to the part about building a new culture of teaching and learning,

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we need to take a carefull look at what's wrong with our education now.

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[br]Let's start at the top with universities:

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the environnement I've been in for the past sixteen years.

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Universities are ideal places to teach and learn,

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and we can certainly turn to them for educationnal leadership.

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Actually no!

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"Universities are not doing a good job."

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[br]And I'm not the only one whose noticed.

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this quote is actually from Leon Lederman,

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[br]and he thinks there is a problem we should at least here him out.

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Dr. Lederman is a former director of Fermilab he won the nobel price in physics,

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and he also know something about education:

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he started his own school the "illinois mathematics and science academy".

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Here is Leon Lederman in an interview with the science network.

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Right now my biggest anger is with the universities,

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because universities are not doing a good job.

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They do not continue the insperation that kids getting out of high schools have about science.

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there's teachers, and their students that are getting out of high school who say:

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I'm a science major I love chemistry I love biologie,

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and then they go to college and 50% of those kids change feels into none science feels.

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[br]That's the statictical data.

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Why!

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Because they go onto a class of 200 kids they see a small professor somewhere down there.

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You know, or maybe a teaching assistant whose english is not so good.

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The blame is on the universities, depersonalized.

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You know, Kids in high school ok at least there is 20 or 40 kids in a class,

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and these lecture rooms for physics one or chemestry one they are hudge.

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I think its UCLA, at least at one point had an auditorial with 400 kids.

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All just sitting there listening to this one professor.

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You could hardly, you know, see him, or with binoculars.

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Oh! there he is, he's down there...

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Doctor Lederman use the word depersonalized,

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and it captures a lot of what's wrong in our universities.

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Here is a picture I took of a lecture class at NorthWestern.

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It's just one of many examples of "depersonalizition 1 0 1".

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First this snapshoot illustrate a gigantic failure in leadership:

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people at universitie approve this ridiculous format has an ok way to teach.

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Second the professor at the podium made no attempt to engage the students

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[br]that were right in front of him.

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The final and most disturbing thing

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is what the students are doing:

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they're falling asleep, checking facebook or they're email,

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[br]or paradoxically regestering for next term classes

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right in the midlle of class they're completely tuning out.

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Maybe they want to make sure they get a spot in "depersonalization 1 0 2".

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Just try and put yourself in this room.

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Would you pay tuitions to sit in this room?

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Does this environement suit how you learn?

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Universities are supposed to be places where students and faculty I've a lively exchange of ideas.

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And that isn't happening because the culture is become so depersonalized.

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And university leaders faculty and students collectivly let that happenned.

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We should think twice before we refered to a prestigious university has a good school.

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Sadly universities arn't exempt from school sucks.

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Now I need to explain why secondary school suck.

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and I'll start by citing american finest news source: the onion.

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"Increasing number of educators found to be suffering from teaching disabilities"

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Here is my favourite part of the article:

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It's funny cause its true!

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And here is some comments from Lawrence Krauss that might explain why its true.

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Dr Krauss is director of the Origins initiative at Arizona state,

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and he does a lot of work to promote good science education.

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Here is a scary statistic:

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So we compared american students to their counterparts in other 20, 25 other industrialization,

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and there were recent study that came out.

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So we look at kids in grad three and grade five

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and then fifteen year old.

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and what's amazing is grade three and grrade five american students

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on the whole do better in science and mathematics

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than their counterparts.

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but by the time they're fifteen they do subsentially worse

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So we've be doing something very effective to de-educate them or disinterest them in science

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and one of the reason is another equally scary fact which is that.

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over ninety percent of middle school science teachers in this country

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have never taken a science course outside of highschool.

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and..

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what..what percentage was that?

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over ninety percent.

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ninety!

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ninety, yea.

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not nine!

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no, ninety ...

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I had the same reaction than richards dawkings:

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what! How did this happened? How did we let so many unqualified teachers into our schools?

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I think one reason is hiring practices.

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School sucks because the people who run them don't hire great teachers.

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Once again lets start at the top:

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At universities professors aren't really hired to teach.

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they hired and promoted based on the research they do.

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As a result teaching its rarely a priority for professors and it shows.

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Last year I was on a faculty pannel for advising graduate students

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about getting academic jobs and, the other professors on the pannel admited

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that teaching wasn't that important in getting a faculty position

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One of the professor on the pannel was a department chair.

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And she actually reffered to her department school offerings

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as a teaching burden

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that the kind of leadership we have at our universities.

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At the secondary level the problem is hiring teachers

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who just don't know what they are talking about,

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especially in the sciences.

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Here I want to point out the difference between: certification and qualifications.

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For example: I have a Phd in physics, I've been teaching for fireteen years,

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but I'd probably have a hard time getting job teaching at a public school.

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why? Because I never wasted time in a programm to get certified

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to teach in a public school.

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That's backwards!

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If its true that our public schools are already full of certified teachers

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who don't know what they're doing

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then that means the certification process we have right now doesn't work!

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if we want to start getting truly qualified teachers

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we need to get ride of this fraudulent certification system.

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And start hiring people based on real competency.

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The lesson here is that schools have hiring practices that are barriers to getting great teachers.

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And the immediate consequence is that schools at every level

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are full of teachers who can't teach or don't want to teach.

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Now if math and science education

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is really in shambles,

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how did someone like me get into science?

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Well its not because I was immerse in a nationnal culture dedicated to math and science education:

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I was just lucky!

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This is Dean Goldgar the person who got me interested in calculus.

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His high shcool calculus class was better than all the math classes into college.

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Mister Goldar have even work with me outside of class

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so I can study more advanced topic in mathematics.

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He was a real mentor.

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This is Kurt Wiesenfeld.

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My undergraduate mentor.

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Dr wiesenfeld taught the very first college physic class I took,

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and he inspired me to major in physics.

0:08:52.763,0:08:55.861
But that first class was special.

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It was an honor section that only eight students bother sign up for.

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How lucky was that!

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why hundreds of other kids were sitting in lecture halls.

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Eight of us hit the jackpot and had this professor all to ourselves,

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five days a week.

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It was personalized. And it had a huge impact on me.

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Noticed I'm not telling you stories about shiny new building or computer labs or

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interactive whiter boards that really had an influence on me.

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I'm talking about great teachers,

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and unfortunately great teachers are rare.

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David Griffiths understand this important point

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He said:

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That exactly right,

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but schools aren't doing enough of that.

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Now I want to shift years and talk more specifically about sciences classes.

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Dean Zollman had this great story about giving its eight year old daughter

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a tour of the physics building at his university.

0:10:00.171,0:10:03.710
Enventually they came across a lecture hall full of students.

0:10:03.710,0:10:04.881
His daughter asked:

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"What do all those people doing?"

0:10:07.231,0:10:10.411
And Zollmen gave what seems like a reasonable answer:

0:10:10.411,0:10:12.454
"They're learning physics."

0:10:12.454,0:10:15.984
And its daughter responded with the exactly the right question:

0:10:15.984,0:10:19.115
"DO they just sit there?"

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YEA, they do just sit there!

0:10:22.031,0:10:24.840
And an eight year old can see right away

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that there is something horribly wrong with that.

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A lot of science classes are set up to be completely unscientific.

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The first problem is that students just sit there.

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But if you're going to learn science you can just sit there!

0:10:39.376,0:10:45.615
You have to think, and better yet, you have to do experiments: that's what labs are for.

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Unfortunately many labs exercices aren't any fun,

0:10:49.464,0:10:53.922
and sometimes they don't even demonstrate phenomena in a convincing way.

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But teachers don't have to be convincing: because they have authority on their side.

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And they can use grades to enforce that authority.

0:11:02.911,0:11:04.261
Who needs evidence!

0:11:04.261,0:11:10.087
Science its true because the teacher said so and I have to know it for the test otherwise I'll get a bad grade!

0:11:10.097,0:11:16.041
That's the message that comes across when science teachers doesn't really understand science.

0:11:16.041,0:11:19.163
And its the exact opposite of what science is about.

0:11:19.163,0:11:20.791
Here is an example.

0:11:20.791,0:11:23.369
Lets assume you've never seen this thing before.

0:11:23.369,0:11:25.840
Boy it sure does look like sciency!

0:11:25.840,0:11:29.824
I want you to memorize the content of this slide all of it:

0:11:29.824,0:11:33.632
the names of the compounds, the sequence of the reactions were are the arrows

0:11:33.632,0:11:37.112
you even have to learn how to prounonce "phosphorylation".

0:11:37.112,0:11:41.987
You must reproduce this drawing from memory next week on a test.

0:11:41.987,0:11:45.429
Lets say you manage to pull this off and get an hundred percent on the test.

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Congratulations! You haven't learn a damn thing about science.

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Whay I just describe was my experience in highschool biology.

0:11:56.039,0:12:00.567
I had to memorize a lot of stuff that wasn't justified with any evidence.

0:12:00.567,0:12:07.212
I didn't get to do a single expirement to convince myself that anything in that diagram is true.

0:12:07.212,0:12:12.257
And if I didn't memorize all that stuff. I was gonna get a bad grade.

0:12:12.257,0:12:14.569
Actually, it was worse than that:

0:12:14.569,0:12:19.514
if I did a really good job at memorizing the material without thinking or understanding,

0:12:19.514,0:12:21.707
I'd get a good grade!

0:12:21.707,0:12:25.572
That is NOT the lesson we want to teach in our science classes.

0:12:25.572,0:12:27.293
There has to be a better way.

0:12:27.293,0:12:31.214
Where can we fing a good role model for science classes?

0:12:31.214,0:12:33.400
How about these guys?

0:12:33.400,0:12:37.440
"Myth Busters" is the most scientific show on television.

0:12:37.440,0:12:39.136
Because as they say:

0:12:39.136,0:12:42.711
"They don't just tell the myths they put them to the test!"

0:12:42.711,0:12:48.098
The idea at the core of Myth Busters is the same as the core of science.

0:12:48.098,0:12:53.137
If you want to figure out if something is true, you have to do the experiment.

0:12:53.137,0:12:59.069
So in Myth Busters if the claims of a myth agree with experiments the myth is confirmed.

0:12:59.069,0:13:03.736
If the claims of the myth disagree with the experiments its busted.

0:13:03.736,0:13:05.909
That's just how science work.

0:13:05.909,0:13:08.880
And that's the lessons that kids need to learn.

0:13:08.880,0:13:13.038
Science classes should be Myth Busters projects that kids can do.

0:13:13.038,0:13:14.845
But there is one itch.

0:13:14.845,0:13:18.679
Addam and Jammy always give this warning at the beginning of every show:

0:13:19.263,0:13:23.264
Please don't try anything that you are about to see us do at home.

0:13:23.264,0:13:25.042
Ever!

0:13:25.042,0:13:28.210
Maybe lawers are getting in the way of science education.

0:13:28.210,0:13:33.395
Of course we don't want kids injuring themselves by filling their lunchboxes with thermite.

0:13:33.395,0:13:37.394
But we do want kids to copy the spirit of Myth Busters.

0:13:37.394,0:13:42.978
We should encourage kids to try experiments at home, and try to figure things out for themselves.

0:13:42.978,0:13:49.396
That's way more scientific than just telling kids to memorize stuff in science books.

0:13:49.411,0:13:53.414
Our last stop in school sucks, has to do with learning.

0:13:53.414,0:13:57.285
If schools and school reforms are going to be effective.

0:13:57.285,0:13:59.896
They have to be design to help people learn.

0:13:59.896,0:14:02.812
Here's how school are typically structured:

0:14:02.812,0:14:13.572
there's a school year divided into terms, and in each term there is specific courses avalaible and a fixed amount of time to learn the material in each course and the instructor evaluates the students somehow and gives our grades...

0:14:13.572,0:14:18.143
NONE of these features are necessary for learning.

0:14:18.143,0:14:21.361
And I think they actually interfere with the learning process.

0:14:21.361,0:14:23.626
Why would I say that?

0:14:23.626,0:14:27.235
Because I have a better model of learning.

0:14:28.327,0:14:31.009
Skatboarding!

0:14:31.209,0:14:34.159
So what can skatboarding tell us about the learning process?

0:14:34.159,0:14:35.969
Lets find out.

0:14:35.969,0:14:40.786
This next section also happens to be the motivation from my physics of skateboarding project.

0:14:40.786,0:14:43.713
Which you can check out at: physicsofskateboarding.com

0:14:43.713,0:14:49.434
What I'm going to show you is a video of me trying to learn a new skateboarding trick.

0:14:49.434,0:14:52.177
This is a trick I had never even tried before:

0:14:52.177,0:14:54.522
a pop shove it nose manual shove it out.

0:14:54.522,0:14:58.632
I want you to focus on this video, really watch it carefully.

0:14:58.632,0:15:03.575
Because its a vivid example of what the learning process is really like.

0:15:03.575,0:15:06.062
So here the ingredients of the trick.

0:15:06.062,0:15:09.927
A pop shove it were I pop the board up and it turns an hundred and eighty degrees.

0:15:09.927,0:15:13.028
A nose manual were I balance over the front wheels.

0:15:13.028,0:15:16.684
And, a little shove it off the nose another hundred and eighty degrees.

0:15:16.684,0:15:19.994
But now I have to learn how to put those tricks together into something new.

0:15:29.130,0:15:30.145
Shiiit !

0:15:30.145,0:15:33.233
Woua. Why am I almost dying every time I try this?!

0:15:33.233,0:15:35.658
Doing the trick is impossible!

0:16:14.155,0:16:16.383
Holly shit!

0:16:16.907,0:16:21.319
Noticed that I didn't get it first try or second try.

0:16:21.319,0:16:26.969
I didn't show you all of the attemps, but I had to try this trick fifty eight times!

0:16:26.969,0:16:29.842
That means in the process of learning this trick:

0:16:29.842,0:16:32.963
I failed fifty seven times!

0:16:32.963,0:16:35.158
Interesting...

0:16:35.158,0:16:38.967
Skatboarding had helped us discover the secret to learning.

0:16:38.967,0:16:40.207
Here it is:

0:16:40.207,0:16:44.215
Work your ass off until you figure it out.

0:16:44.215,0:16:50.669
If that seems overly simplistic to you, let me some more examples.

0:16:51.530,0:16:53.483
Learning how to walk.

0:16:53.483,0:16:55.779
That's a picture of me and my sister.

0:16:55.779,0:16:59.096
We don't need to send toddlers to walking schools

0:16:59.096,0:17:03.846
so that can get bad grades if they don't learn how to walk in exactly one semester.

0:17:03.846,0:17:07.412
We just let toddlers keep trying to walk untill they do.

0:17:09.150,0:17:10.899
Learning an instrument.

0:17:10.899,0:17:14.235
There was a time when I was actually pretty good at playing the guitarre

0:17:14.235,0:17:16.710
But its not something I learned in school.

0:17:16.710,0:17:20.164
I just practiced as much as I could because I wanted to play better.

0:17:20.164,0:17:23.235
And I don't know of many people who take guitarre lessons

0:17:23.235,0:17:25.811
that's involve hundreds of students in a lecture hall.

0:17:25.811,0:17:29.587
Music instruction is almost always personalized.

0:17:30.448,0:17:32.124
Learning Mathematics.

0:17:32.124,0:17:36.321
Not that he needs one but I have to give Malcolm Gladwell applaud here.

0:17:36.321,0:17:38.655
Because he has new book out called "Outliers".

0:17:38.655,0:17:42.209
And there is a great story in there, from Allan Schoenfeld,

0:17:42.209,0:17:45.368
a professor at Berkeley who studies how people learn mathematics.

0:17:45.368,0:17:48.789
Shoenfeld tells us the story of a nurse named Renee,

0:17:48.789,0:17:53.500
who is using computer program to understand the slope of a vertical line.

0:17:53.500,0:17:55.200
Here is the important passage:

0:17:55.200,0:18:01.636
"Twenty-two minutes pass from the moment Renee begins playing with the computer program to the moment she says:

0:18:01.636,0:18:07.255
'Ahhhh, that means something to me now.' That's a long time."

0:18:07.255,0:18:12.567
Renee had to wrestle with a mathematical concept for a long time,

0:18:12.567,0:18:15.967
before it started making any sense.

0:18:15.967,0:18:19.311
That's what learning mathematics and science is really like!

0:18:19.311,0:18:22.097
Our schools arn't set up to handle that.

0:18:22.850,0:18:25.074
Scientific Research.

0:18:25.074,0:18:27.931
This is an entry of one of my notbooks from grade school,

0:18:27.931,0:18:32.025
when I finally figured out how to solve a problem I've been working on for months.

0:18:32.025,0:18:37.832
But before that day I had already filled a bunch of other note books with tons with other ideas

0:18:37.832,0:18:39.723
that didn't work at all.

0:18:39.723,0:18:43.761
I had lots and lots of failures before I finally figured it out.

0:18:43.761,0:18:45.467
Sound familiar?

0:18:46.220,0:18:48.767
So here is the head to head comparison:

0:18:48.767,0:18:51.345
Schools vs Skateboarding.

0:18:51.345,0:18:56.324
and when I say skatboarding I really mean the process of learning anything properly.

0:18:56.324,0:18:59.458
I can't go into details with all of these points,

0:18:59.458,0:19:02.514
but just look how different these two cultures are.

0:19:02.514,0:19:08.027
Schools have rigid time-tables, fixed amount of time for learning material.

0:19:08.027,0:19:10.595
That's incredibly stupid!

0:19:10.595,0:19:14.900
All that does is stop us from develloping the kind of persistents we need,

0:19:14.900,0:19:17.909
for real learning and real understanding.

0:19:17.909,0:19:23.469
If you're learning something new, it doesn't make the least bit of sense to decide ahead of time

0:19:23.469,0:19:26.361
exactly how long its supposed to take you to learn it.

0:19:26.361,0:19:31.015
That's like saying I'm gonna get an 'F' if I don't land my skateboarding trick in ten tries,

0:19:31.015,0:19:36.528
or I'm never going to understand the fundamental theorem of calculus if I can't do it in a week.

0:19:36.528,0:19:38.038
No.

0:19:38.038,0:19:40.917
If there's something you really have to learn,

0:19:40.917,0:19:43.484
you keep working your ass off untill you figured it out.

0:19:43.484,0:19:46.805
And that crucial for math and science education.

0:19:46.805,0:19:50.162
Just like skateboarders struggling with new tricks,

0:19:50.162,0:19:54.986
students need to learn how to struggle with new ideas without getting cut off.

0:19:54.986,0:20:03.165
Next its surprising how many schools plays authority and coercion at the fundation of the learning environment.

0:20:03.165,0:20:09.026
Instead of giving good reasons for learning teachers give threats in the form of bad grades.

0:20:09.026,0:20:11.909
That just pits teacher and students against each other,

0:20:11.909,0:20:16.711
and most experienced teachers know that you can't really force someone to learn something,

0:20:16.711,0:20:18.113
if they don't want to learn it.

0:20:18.113,0:20:21.217
But that's exactly what our schools try to do.

0:20:21.217,0:20:24.328
Real learning is largely self motivated.

0:20:24.328,0:20:28.378
If students have good reasons to learn they'll want to learn,

0:20:28.378,0:20:34.096
and a self-motivated student, paired with the right mentor can learn a lot.

0:20:34.096,0:20:38.761
In schools grades gives also students a sense of false certification.

0:20:38.761,0:20:42.616
It's disturbing how many students think they mastered something,

0:20:42.616,0:20:45.886
just because a teacher gave them an A in a class.

0:20:45.886,0:20:50.510
In real learning student have to be honest and evaluating themselves.

0:20:50.510,0:20:53.386
They can't kid about themselves about they learned.

0:20:53.386,0:20:56.315
For example the skateboarding trick I did in the video.

0:20:56.315,0:21:02.618
Here is an honnest assesment: "I only landed that trick once, and I can pretend I mastered it".

0:21:02.618,0:21:07.540
With skateboarding and calculus and physics, nobody ever gets it at first try,

0:21:07.540,0:21:11.957
and we can let students think they mastered something just because they've seen it once.

0:21:11.957,0:21:14.371
Mastery takes practice.

0:21:14.679,0:21:20.860
Schools also have to worry about preventing cheating and other forms of academic dishonnesty.

0:21:20.860,0:21:26.569
It would be way easier to have a culture that just didn't give incentives to cheat: like grades!

0:21:26.569,0:21:32.390
If you're goal is to learn something properly there isn't much point in faking it.

0:21:32.390,0:21:36.138
And in skatboarding I'm not even sure what it means to cheat.

0:21:36.138,0:21:41.806
I don't know how to cheat in skateboarding it doesn't really exists, it's not applicable.

0:21:42.130,0:21:43.449
So there you have it:

0:21:43.449,0:21:48.269
if we want to improve education especially math and science education.

0:21:48.269,0:21:50.568
We should make it more like skateboarding.

0:21:50.568,0:21:54.276
But if you ever want to ruin anything...

0:21:54.276,0:21:56.639
Make it more like school!

0:21:56.639,0:22:01.063
Now we can get back to the original optimistic purpose of this talk:

0:22:01.063,0:22:03.909
Building a new culture of teaching and learning.

0:22:03.909,0:22:05.354
Were do we start?

0:22:05.354,0:22:08.064
Well we need to fix our schools,

0:22:08.064,0:22:13.728
But when I say that, it means that we have to change the fundamental culture in schools,

0:22:13.728,0:22:16.574
to support how people actually learn.

0:22:16.574,0:22:21.302
On top of that, we need to get leaders, who hire great teachers.

0:22:21.302,0:22:26.640
I want to emphasize that changing the cultures is the priority.

0:22:26.640,0:22:31.913
If get better teachers, they need to teach the right things, in the right environment.

0:22:31.913,0:22:35.370
If all they do is re-enforce the existing culture,

0:22:35.370,0:22:38.263
and just do better job of teaching to the test,

0:22:38.263,0:22:40.969
well, I don't think that's progress.

0:22:40.969,0:22:45.292
That's why I'm weary of teacher recruiment programs like "Teach For America".

0:22:45.292,0:22:50.535
Because changing the structure of schools isn't an explicit goal in those kind of programs.

0:22:50.535,0:22:56.118
Anyway, making all of these changes might seem like trying to polish a turd.

0:22:56.118,0:23:01.599
But here is the case for optimism, and if you've seen that episode of Myth Busters,

0:23:01.599,0:23:03.084
you know what's coming up...

0:23:03.084,0:23:06.924
as it turns out: you CAN polish a turd!

0:23:07.263,0:23:13.394
Here is how I polished a turd called physics 330-2: advanced classical mechanics.

0:23:13.394,0:23:17.341
The typical way to teach classes like this is to get a professor to lecture,

0:23:17.341,0:23:21.256
and have the students sit there, screw that! I did something different.

0:23:21.256,0:23:27.569
First of all I didn't give a single lecture. I didn't want my students just sitting there,

0:23:27.569,0:23:29.672
I turn the classes into workshops.

0:23:29.672,0:23:35.885
My students came to class, worked together and really wrestle with difficult physics problems.

0:23:35.885,0:23:39.215
And of course they got a lot of stuff wrong.

0:23:39.215,0:23:44.556
And I would help them through that. But in that process the big advantage from me,

0:23:44.556,0:23:48.307
was that I could see how my students were thinking into real time,

0:23:48.307,0:23:52.033
and I could give them meaningfull feedback on the spot.

0:23:52.033,0:23:56.067
You know the students and the professor were actually having a:

0:23:56.067,0:23:58.619
"Lively exchange of ideas".

0:23:58.619,0:24:02.017
The whole point at being at the university!

0:24:02.017,0:24:06.744
So it really is possible to change the culture in the classroom.

0:24:06.744,0:24:11.018
We just need teachers who are willing to take a chance on making those changes.

0:24:11.018,0:24:14.645
But we also need to work outside the world of our classroom.

0:24:14.645,0:24:19.177
And this where I think the biggest changes in our culture of teaching and learning can happen.

0:24:19.177,0:24:22.928
I thought I invented the term distributed teaching.

0:24:22.928,0:24:25.818
There doesn't seems to be a Wikipedia page for it,

0:24:25.818,0:24:29.161
but, google says that other peolpe have used the phrase.

0:24:29.161,0:24:31.879
So I should probably explain my version.

0:24:31.879,0:24:36.638
The name distributing teaching was inspired by distributing computing.

0:24:36.638,0:24:39.439
If you're not familiar with distributed computing,

0:24:39.439,0:24:42.944
you should look out the SETI@home project as an example.

0:24:42.944,0:24:48.889
But the basic idea is that using a lot of relatively slow computers part time,

0:24:48.889,0:24:53.673
might be just as usefull as a single super-computer running full throttle.

0:24:53.673,0:24:56.319
So what I mean by distributing teaching,

0:24:56.319,0:25:00.430
is that, if everybody did some kind of teaching in they spare time,

0:25:00.430,0:25:06.492
that might be just as effective as having a group of full time teachers.

0:25:06.492,0:25:09.718
So how do we start doing distributing teaching?

0:25:09.718,0:25:11.830
Well, we're already doing it.

0:25:11.830,0:25:17.389
The main tool using for distrubuting computing, is also usefull for distributing teaching:

0:25:17.389,0:25:19.052
The Internet.

0:25:19.052,0:25:22.590
I'm putting this talk online, that's one form of distributed teaching.

0:25:22.590,0:25:26.241
Wikipidea is another kind of distributed teaching.

0:25:26.241,0:25:30.449
Lots of people can share what they know in varying amounts,

0:25:30.449,0:25:32.390
and contribute when they can.

0:25:32.390,0:25:35.989
And it works just as well as traditionnaly encyclopedia

0:25:35.989,0:25:38.835
offer by a limited number of people.

0:25:38.835,0:25:41.389
Of course the idea of distributed teaching

0:25:41.389,0:25:44.618
isn't just for the Internet, you can also do it in person.

0:25:44.618,0:25:49.930
This summer I'm going to film a documentary about a group of scientist and engineers,

0:25:49.930,0:25:53.033
who are going to be teaching at a space camp in south Korea.

0:25:53.033,0:25:56.075
None of these people are professional teachers.

0:25:56.075,0:26:00.765
They're just spending a little of their time, to share what they know with some kids.

0:26:00.765,0:26:05.980
If all of us started things like this it would start adding up pretty quickly.

0:26:05.980,0:26:11.562
But distributed teaching is only going to work, if you start contributed.

0:26:11.562,0:26:15.593
But, why should you bother spending time sharing what you know?

0:26:15.593,0:26:20.074
Well because if you don't, you're being unreasonably selfish!

0:26:20.074,0:26:24.068
"Knowledge isn't like a cheesburger."

0:26:24.068,0:26:28.500
I wish I could remember where I got this, its great really simple point:

0:26:28.500,0:26:32.321
if I have a cheesburger, and I want to share it with someone.

0:26:32.321,0:26:35.270
That means I going to end up with less for myself.

0:26:35.270,0:26:37.430
Knowledge doesn't work that way.

0:26:37.430,0:26:41.725
You can share what you know as much as you want and you won't lose any of it.

0:26:41.725,0:26:45.080
There is no reason to be selfish with knowledge.

0:26:45.080,0:26:49.866
And that's exactly why everybody should be teaching in some capacity.

0:26:50.558,0:26:54.172
Maybe the most usefull thing distributed teaching can do,

0:26:54.172,0:27:00.270
is drag people away from this weird notion that teaching and learning only happens in schools.

0:27:00.270,0:27:04.936
Building a new educationnal culture isn't just about fixing schools.

0:27:04.936,0:27:09.019
It's really about making teaching and learning cultural habit.

0:27:09.019,0:27:11.689
Things that all of us do all the time.

0:27:11.689,0:27:15.000
And building that new culture isn't hard.

0:27:15.000,0:27:17.889
We just have to follow just one simple rule:

0:27:17.889,0:27:20.981
Share What You Know.

0:27:20.981,0:27:22.988
Thank you very much for listening.

0:27:22.988,0:27:24.766
If you want to keep track of my projects:

0:27:24.766,0:27:31.241
please visit: drtae.org physicsofskateboarding.com and universitae.com

0:27:31.241,0:27:33.554
Thanks again.

0:27:42.340,0:27:45.406
Nobody is gonna watch this!