Ted x tuttle presentation v3

Editor's Notes

• #3: Child prodigy Adora Svitak says the world needs "childish" thinking: bold ideas, wild creativity and especially optimism. Kids' big dreams deserve high expectations, she says, starting with grown ups' willingness to learn from children as much as to teach. She warns us that we need to invest in preparing this generation as they will be the leaders as we get older.
• #4: Creativity expert Sir Ken Robinson challenges the way we’re educating our children. He champions a radical rethink of our school systems, to cultivate creativity (in an updated education system) and acknowledge multiple types of intelligence. He points out that the education system is antiquated as it still addresses the job market at the time of the industrial revolution.
• #5: This is author Dave Eggers who opened  826 Valencia , a writing and tutoring lab for young people, in San Francisco. 826 Valencia is dedicated to supporting students ages 6 to 18 with their writing skills, and to helping teachers get their students excited about the writing. They found premises at 826 Valencia, an empty shop that reminded them of being in a boat, with its wooden floorboards and beams in the ceiling. As it was zoned for retail, they had to open a store, and inspired by their surroundings, decided to create a pirate supplies store. You can buy an eye patch, or birdseed for your parrot, and through a secret door in the back of the shop, young people find writing workshops, homework clubs, publishers who want to publish their writing, and writing of all kinds. The idea, like most good ones, spread; and now there are 7 centres like this across the US - a superhero supplies store in Brooklyn, a time travellers store in LA - behind each is a place to learn through creative writing. He asks the TED community to personally, creatively engage with local schools and work with teachers to identify ways we can help them in their task.
• #7: So I am going to challenge you to think about how you can create engaging learning experiences grounded in the real world that also deliver benefits to your project.
• #8: This is the backbone of all the learning experiences that you can create. They are all WORK RELATED LEARNING as defined by the DCSF - the Department for Children, Schools and Families – they call it Work Related Learning, which incorporates Enterprise Skills and Real Work Experiences. You can find the full guides online at teachernet or on the DCSF website.
• #9: Schools – approach your kids school, or you know a teacher. As you are not charging, this is often something you can broker with a teacher, without have to go through any bureaucracy  . You may find some head teachers that are particularly keen on these sorts of experiences and just like in a company, this opens up all sorts of opportunities for their reports to work with you. Government funded / Council Run Work Related Learning programs – but the kids and schools still need to bite. They often offer some funding – but if you are offering for free, then you may get introductions to schools through them, without having to go through the complications of being part of a scheme. Or go far more informal Doing the session in a school can be useful
• #11: So when I was in charge of the messaging portfolio at T-Mobile, I volunteered running work related learning and enterprise skills workshops at local schools. I soon realised that I could swap their fictitious case studies for my real ones and as the person responsible for P&L, I was receiving some amazing suggestions from my target market. I also found that the fact that the case studies were real, got the young people more engaged with the exercise – as they knew that the good ideas would get implemented. When I left T-mobile I set up the Digital Youth project and began to take client’s work to the sessions. To help you think this through, I am going to talk about how I have created these learning experiences – how I found the young people, what benefits there were for the project and expand on the sorts of work related learning experiences that the young people had.
• #12: I forged a relationship with North London School through a teacher that I knew there and ran some workshops around an application that enabled users to insert sounds in to their phone calls. The sample that they gave me was a pack of farts. They all groaned – this was typical of what older people thought would have appeal to younger people. I challenged them to think about the functionality and come up with something that they would pay for. The best proposition came from the group with the lowest academic record, who were usually the most disruptive - The Excuses Proposition. I phone my mother, “so sorry I am running late” <play sound of traffic jam>, I phone the school “Sorry I am going to be later” <play doctors surgery>. They had come up with something that was really useful that they would pay for.
• #13: The circle on the left shows the benefits to the project and the circle on the right, the additional benefits to the young people as a work related learning experience.
• #14: This example is from when I was the Director of Product and User Insights for weeworld – the home of the weemee – a start up avatar based online teen community. I engaged users in many of the product tasks and also invited developers to the table to get closer to understanding the user mentality. I found the young people through weeworld employees – cousins, children, neighbours and so on
• #16: Last year I started taking panels of young people in to conferences, particularly in the digital space where I felt that most of the conversations were around revenue models and the technology and there is a distinct lack of user input. I did my first panel at OTA, a grassroots mobile developers conference. The teen panel are on the stage and they receive a number of product pitches from the industry where they give live feedback. It is both entertaining and insightful for the industry and a great learning experience for young people.
• #17: Two of these kids came from a school in North London where they were sent along as the school understood the value of learning experience that I was offering them; one girl was an old colleague’s daughter; there is Alan’s son – Aiden, and Peter’s mother works for Imperial, where the conference was held. She was very keen to get him involved and had been asking the conferences organisers whether he could be given a job to do.
• #18: This proved to be both insightful for the industry attendees as well as highly entertaining!
• #19: The next set of examples are from the Space Makers project that I have been directing in Brixton Village. This is a 1930s indoor market arcade where there were 20 empty units. We negotiated 3 months rent free with the property owners and held an open night where 350 people turned up to look at the spaces. We had 100 applications for temporary and permanent test trade uses from community, creative and enterprising new projects.
• #20: When we kicked off the Brixton project, Dougald Hine, the founder of Space Makers, had a call from his friend Paula, who is a photography tutor at London South Bank University. She had a 2 nd year student that was looking for his mandatory work placement. So, contact universities and colleges to offer placements.
• #22: Write by Numbers are a young theatre group that applied for temporary space in Brixton Village. They challenge writers, performers and theatre makers to experiment with all the ways it is possible to make, create and produce theatre. It was their first production as a group and they held their own application process for young writers and drama students. They attracted over 300 people in 2 weeks through some great social media marketing as well as with promotional hit teams that would roam around Brixton attracting their audience. They put on around 5 performances a day, and also held writing workshops.
• #24: So over to you, what can you do to help teachers in their task of preparing young people to run the future of our world?