TEDxUniPittsburgh (Moving more and more away from University and towards 'one', which is nice) had its second event this past Saturday at the Entertainment Technology Center (full event overview here). It was a pretty great time - starting with balance and movement with Attack Theatre, filled with lots of robots, and finishing with a one-act play. Highlights:
-Jesse Schell's talk on the web vs. education. He highlighted 4 things that the internet is pushing that we think are pretty cool - it's beautiful, customizable, shared, and (in it's own way) real. In contrast, education tends to be drab, standardized, highly individual, and its real-ness is up for debate (I agree more with the students being uninterested than that teachers are mostly not experts, but that's a different discussion). There are some interesting ideas here - watch for this talk when it comes out on YouTube (I'll try to remember and post a link).
-Mr. McFeely from Mr. Roger's Neighborhood came and talked about giving kids a different and less sugar-coated experience through make believe and television. Also managed to give a 25 minute TEDx Talk (this is hard, see).
-Two different presenters talked about how their robots interacted very well with autistic children. Their rationale - that there's less overall input so it's easier to process - makes a lot of sense to me. Now we just need to be able to make such robots inexpensive enough for general accessibility.
-Daniel Szecket's talk was probably the most powerful of the day - a true personal story about parents, family, and making bad decisions (but good choices).
It was, overall, a pretty great time. The third event will be back at Pitt, probably in the first week or two of November. More details to come - just check www.tedxunipittsburgh.com occasionally. If you have a speaker (we're looking for Duquesne and Chatham-related speakers as well as Pitt) let us know.
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