Design Revolution -

Earth Atmosphere Exceeds 400 ppm of Co2

Joshua Arnow — Sat, 25 May 2013 20:11:23 -0700

Source: SustainableBusiness.com

Concentrations of carbon dioxide in the global atmosphere could rise above 400 parts per million (ppm) for sustained lengths of time throughout much of the Northern Hemisphere as soon as mid-May.

Today, measurements at the Hawaii station show concentrations of 399.50 ppm ... pretty darn close to 400, according to scientists at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at University of California/ San Diego.

If you'll remember, 350 ppm is the level the entire world has agreed not to exceed because that's when feedback loops and uncontrollable climate change is likely to kick in (as we've begun to see with vastly more wildfires, droughts, floods and storms).

"I wish it weren't true, but it looks like the world is going to blow through the 400-ppm level without losing a beat," says Ralph Keeling, whose has taken over for his father who created the "Keeling Curve" to track daily carbon levels.

It's hard to comprehend, but last time there was 400 ppm of carbon in the atmosphere was 3.2 million to 5 million years ago, during the Pliocene period.

Carbon levels reached about 415 ppm during the Pliocene, with global average temperatures 3-4 degrees C (5.4-7.2 degrees F) higher than today and as much as 10 degrees C (18 degrees F) warmer at the poles. Sea level ranged between 16-131 feet higher than today, according to Scripps.

"At this pace we'll hit 450 ppm within a few decades," warns Keeling.

Prior to the Industrial Revolution carbon levels were 280 ppm and rose gradually to 316 ppm by 1958 when Keeling's father began daily measurements. The rate of rise of CO2 over the past century is unprecedented; there is no known period in geologic history when such high rates have been found. The continuous rise is a direct consequence of society's heavy reliance on fossil fuels for energy, Keeling says.

You can track daily levels of carbon here or on Twitter.

Website: http://keelingcurve.ucsd.edu/ READ MORE »

Solar Impulse: Around the World in a Solar Air Plane

Joshua Arnow — Sat, 25 May 2013 19:51:24 -0700

Source: SustainableBusiness.com News

Solar Impulse, an airplane powered solely by solar energy, began its flight across the US on May 3rd 2013.

It took off at 6:15AM PST from Moffett Field in south San Francisco, a civil-military airport, and is headed to Phoenix first. That leg of the trip took 15-20 hours.

After that it stopped in Dallas, St. Louis and Washington, D.C. and finally ended up at JFK in New York. The whole trip will take about two months, flying day and night, depending on the weather. It can't fly in cloudy or rainy conditions or in strong wind or fog.

The plane was initially meant to demonstrate it could fly during both day and night, but just for 24 hours. But it has performed so well that it's flown across Europe and Africa (separate trips) and now it will fly across the US.

It doesn't have the technology needed for its ultimate goal - to fly around the world in 2015. A more advanced version is being developed for that.

"Our future depends on our ability to convert rapidly to the use of renewable energies. Solar Impulse is intended to demonstrate what can be done already today by using these energies and applying new technologies that can save natural resources," says Bertrand Piccard, who co-founder and co-pilot with Andre Borschberg.

The Airplane

The plane gets its power from 207-foot wings - the wingspan of a jumbo jet - covered with 12,000 solar cells.

The solar cells keep four large batteries charged that are under the wings, storing about as much energy as Tesla's electric car. Also on the bottom of the wings are tiny motors, which provide about 25% of its torque.

It is very light - about the weight of a small car - because it's made from carbon fiber. And it travels at about 43 miles per hour.

In 2010, Impulse completed a 24-hour test flight that demonstrated its ability to fly through the night with power stored during daylight hours. Last June, it flew the first intercontinental flight, from Spain to Morocco.

The project has $112 million in backing with various manufacturers involved in the technology that are using it as a way to test new materials and gain brand recognition.

A similar effort is underway but using a solar-powered boat, MS Tûranor PlanetSolar. It completed its first trip around the world last May using SunPower solar panels.

Learn more about Solar Impulse:

Website: www.solarimpulse.com/en/ READ MORE »

Biggest Solar Project in the World is Under Construction

Joshua Arnow — Sat, 25 May 2013 18:50:02 -0700

SustainableBusiness.com News

Construction has begun on Antelope Valley Solar Project, the largest solar PV project in the world - at 579 megawatts.

Buffet's MidAmerican Solar bought the project from SunPower for $2 billion in January, and SunPower is developing it using its own panels. 650 people will be employed to build the project on 3200 acres, and in 2015 it will begin providing power to 400,000 homes.

It is one of several large solar projects being built in the area of Lancaster, the first city to require solar on all new homes.

Unlike some solar projects which have been given the go-ahead even though they are on sensitive lands, the Sierra Club praises this one for environmentally responsible development. From the outset, it was planned and sited in a way that protects native plants and wildlife, they say.

Antelope is being built on former agricultural lands that were planted with alfalfa and other crops that require heavy irrigation. Since it is located on disturbed land there are no threatened or endangered species.

Because it is near existing transmission lines, including a major
substation, no new infrastructure is necessary.

"The developers listened to our concerns about the local lands and wildlife in the Antelope Valley and incorporated them into the planning and siting for the project," says Georgette Theotig of
the Sierra Club Kern-Kaweah Chapter. "The proposal came out stronger for it, and we were proud to endorse the project and testify on its behalf during the approval process. Solar projects like this show it's possible to move forward with larger clean energy projects and respect conservation values at the same time."

Some locals have criticized the project however because it creates a feeling of industrialization in the rural area.

SunPower's Oasis® Power Plant is a modular solar technology that can be rapidly deployed for utility-scale projects that also minimizes land use. Its high-efficiency solar panels are mounted on trackers that follow the sun during the day, increasing energy capture up to 25%.

In January, MidAmerican Solar purchased the project for $2 billion. It also owns the world's second-biggest solar plant - the 550 MW Topaz Solar Farm under development in California. And it has a 49% stake in the 290 MW Agua Caliente solar project in Arizona.

Since it began acquiring renewable energy projects last year, MidAmerican Renewables has quickly grown to an 1830 megawatt (MW) portfolio in wind, geothermal, solar and hydro. When current wind projects are completed, it will have 2284 MW in that sector alone, making it the largest owner of US wind farms by an investor-owned utility. The utility also recently agreed to retire seven old coal plants.

Dust Is An Issue

Antelope Valley also has an approved re-vegetation plan to control dust, which is an emerging concern.

Antelope Valley Solar Project is different from another nearby - Antelope Valley Solar Ranch, under construction by First Solar. Los Angeles County recently halted the project because of health issues caused by dust.

Building a solar plant in the desert requires considerable scraping and clearing to make way for thousands of acres of solar panels. That kicks up dust, which can cause "Valley fever" when people working at the site or living nearby breathe in fungal spores that are released when desert soils are disturbed.

Agricultural workers have long contracted this illness when working in the desert, but the risk is rising with the enormous solar projects being built now. About half the people that get infected develop flu-like symptoms. Wearing a respirator can prevent it, but workers often take it off when working in such hot conditions.

First Building in the World Covered in Algae

Joshua Arnow — Sat, 25 May 2013 18:45:34 -0700

Source: SustainableBusiness.com News

An apartment building in Hamburg, Germany is giving us a peek into the future - it is covered with algae.

Not that algae is hanging on the façade, it's inside glass panels that also function as solar hot water collectors.

The 5-story Bio Intelligent Quotient (B.I.Q.) building, constructed to Passive House standards, gets all its energy from renewables. The addition of algae on the outside walls will be used to create biofuels to heat the building and also to provide shade and muffle street noise.

The technology is "an outstanding and important development in the use of renewable resources in building technology," comparable to advances in the space program, Lukas Verlage, managing director of the Colt Group, part of the consortium that designed it, told the NY Times.

"Using algae as an in-house energy source might sound futuristic now, but probably will be established in 10 years," Rainer Müller told the NY Times. He's press officer for the International Building Exhibition, which introduced a competition in 2009 that led to the creation of the B.I.Q. house.

Entrants to the competition were asked to develop "systems and products that behave dynamically, unlike conventional building materials, which are static."

Micro-algae - tiny plants about the size of bacteria - are inside 129 bioreactors. They are continuously fed liquid nutrients and carbon dioxide and scrubbers inside the panels keep the glass clean. They double as solar hot water collectors, costing $6.58 million to build the façade.

Sunlight that's not absorbed by the algae is converted into heat. It can be used for hot water or stored in the geothermal system underground.

Periodically, the algae will be collected from the tanks and transported to a nearby biogas plant where it will produce electricity from the resulting methane gas.

Next year US-based Grow Energy plans to accept preorders for its Verde system, and hopes to get it to homeowners by 2015.

The system, which cultivates algae, can be mounted on the roof on wall of a home. It automatically dries and burns the algae to generate about 35% of a home's electricity for about $12,000.

Another "living" building is in Mexico, where the façade neutralizes surrounding air pollution.

Learn more about the Bio Intelligent Quotient (B.I.Q.) building:

Website: www.iba-hamburg.de/en/themes-projects/the-building-exhibition-within-the-building-exhibition/smart-material-houses/biq/projekt/biq.html READ MORE »

FUTURE OF FISH is 2012 Runner Up to the Presitigous Buckminster Fuller Challenge

Joshua Arnow — Fri, 20 Jul 2012 21:45:39 -0700

What Cheryl Dahle, Founder and Executive Director of Future of Fish (FoF), is solving:

Wild Fish

Of the 145 million metric tons of fish harvested annually worldwide, nearly 80 million metric tons come from the oceans. Today, marine fish populations are in serious trouble due to overfishing, ecosystem degradation, and inept fisheries management. Unless significant changes are made to how we harvest and consume seafood, many popular fish species could be commercially extinct by mid-century (FAO, 2010).

Overfishing
According to leading marine fisheries researchers, upward of 85 percent of the world’s wild fisheries either are being fished at the maximum rate that would allow for replenishment, or are already overexploited, depleted, or recovering from depletion (FAO, 2010).

Overcapacity
The FAO suggests that “peak fish”—the maximum wild capture fisheries potential from the world’s oceans—was reached in 1996. In short, there are too many boats on the water and too many people going after the same fish. Some estimates place the worldwide fishing fleet at 200-300 percent of current ocean capacity. This overcapacity is difficult to resolve simply, as removing subsidies and revoking fishing rights can result in vast numbers of unemployed fishers with little ability (or local economic opportunities) to switch careers (World Bank, 2008).

Loss of Biodiversity
Overfishing, destructive fishing methods, coastal development, climate change (ocean warming and acidification), and pollution from agricultural and industrial run-off can severely impact ocean habitats and biodiversity. More than 100 species of fish are currently listed as threatened species. Ecosystems with higher naturally occurring biodiversity (i.e., species richness) are more stable and are less likely to experience collapses of commercially important fisheries (UNEP, 2010 [pdf]).

Bycatch
Non-selective fishing gear, like trawlers, gillnets, and some longlines, can result in huge amounts of bycatch—the harvest of untargeted species, including birds, dolphins, sea turtles, and other edible fish. Depending on how and where it is caught, harvesting one pound of shrimp, for example, can result in as much as 62 pounds of non-shrimp bycatch. Estimates of annual bycatch worldwide vary depending on the methodology, but are between 7 million and 38 million metric tons. Not only is this collateral damage a further threat to already vulnerable wild fish populations, but nearly all bycatch goes to waste (Marine Policy, 2009; FAO, 2005).

IUU Fishing
Illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing is a significant environmental and economic problem. Especially on the high seas and in the developing world where regulation and enforcement are non-existent or where fisheries governance is weak and underfunded, IUU fishing threatens both the sustainable management of marine resources and the livelihoods of local fishing households. The true costs of these illicit practices are unknowable, but estimates are that between $10 billion and $24 billion worth of IUU fish are caught worldwide per year (FAO, 2010).

Cheryl Dahle's Breakthrough Approach and Strategy for Addressing this Crisis:

"The Future of Fish incubator has been operational for 15 months. We support 15 entrepreneurs and have six active projects that cover industry stuck points ranging from traceability technology to supply chain re-design using forward contracts and cost-plus pricing, strategies that bring stability to other commodity markets. Our work is informed by an analysis of the complex, systemic problem of overfishing that surfaced the "holes" in our collective efforts to solve it. That research included sending anthropologists into the supply chain to identify where change was getting stuck. We visited 8 sites on 4 continents, observing processing facilities in China, fish farms in Canada, and distribution centers in the United States.

Our insights led us to tackle the hurdles that prevent the middle of the supply chain from becoming part of the solution to overfishing, including a lack of perceived incentives to innovate, a culture that inhibits long-term vision, a value proposition that is at odds with the reality of seafood scarcity, and inadequate inventory tracking and warehousing technology that result in between 30 and 70 percent of fish being mislabeled in the marketplace. We believe that by launching and supporting a group of networked entrepreneurs whose ideas, technology and practices re-set standards for the supply chain, we can drive the market to adopt more responsible approaches to profitmaking. By connecting entrepreneurs at different levels of the supply chain, we foster a cooperative network whose ability to partner makes its impact more than the sum of its parts.

What the Buckminster Fuller Challenge Review Team said about this year's Runner Up:

Founded in 2010, Future of Fish (FoF) brings to light the power of combining rigorous design thinking with a comprehensive systems view of a given problem space. Cheryl Dahle, founder of FoF, is applying this approach to the massive crisis of overharvesting that threatens the world’s wild marine fisheries with collapse. She has developed pragmatic processes for understanding this complex system and is incubating innovative market based models that are designed to drive second order change in the sector.

The FoF team has broad experience working at the intersection of business and social change. Before launching FoF, Dahle was a director at Ashoka, where she distilled knowledge from the organization’s network of 2,500 fellows in order to provide strategic insight to foundations and corporations. Dahle spent more than a decade writing about social entrepreneurship. She founded and led Fast Company’s Social Capitalist awards, a competition to surface top social entrepreneurs. As the project manager, she helped design an evaluation methodology to measure compelling models for change.

FoF was born out of a research partnership led by Cheryl Dahle which included The David and Lucile Packard Foundation (currently FoF’s primary funder), Ashoka Change Makers, and Central, a design strategy firm. Through this process Dahle learned that over the last decade funding and policy change was directed, almost exclusively, toward two areas: adoption of sustainable fishing practices and reducing consumption of overharvested fish at the retail level. She also discovered that the middle of the supply chain, namely fish processing and distribution, was a largely ignored stuck point at the heart of the fisheries crisis.

So Dahle decided to put her extensive knowledge of social entrepreneurship to work by incubating a “cohort” of “co–entrepreneurs” consisting of industry pioneers and innovators, (16 so far with more on the waiting list), that were selected for their ability to transform this neglected part of the supply chain. Instead of just supporting each entrepreneur on an individual basis in growing their own business, as is typical in most incubators, FoF leads its cohort, representing all levels of the supply chain, through processes that amplify the success of others in the group. This gives FoF the ability to foster greater industry change than any one business could accomplish alone.

The clarity and strength of the FoF strategy, its pioneering quality, its counterintuitive, out-of-the- box insights, its holistic methodology, its applicability to other sectors, all adds up to FoF having the potential to be a critical trim tab in transforming the multi-billion dollar fishing industry and desitined to be an important model for 21st century social enterprise and impact investing.

Learn More:

http://www.futureoffish.org/

Future of Fish Executive Summary

Future of Fish Full Report

The Buckminster Fuller Challenge

A Network of Farmers, Engineers, & Supporters Building the Global Village Construction Set

Joshua Arnow — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 19:47:29 -0800

The Global Village Construction Set (GVCS) is an open technological platform that allows for the easy fabrication of the 50 different Industrial Machines that it takes to build a small civilization with modern comforts. (Website)

A modern, comfortable lifestyle relies on a variety of efficient Industrial Machines. If you eat bread, you rely on an Agricultural Combine. If you live in a wood house, you rely on a Sawmill. Each of these machines relies on other machines in order for it to exist. If you distill this complex web of interdependent machines into a reproduceable, simple, closed-loop system, you get these Key Features:

Open Source - we freely publish our 3d designs, schematics, instructional videos, budgets, and product manuals on our open source wiki and we harness open collaboration with technical contributors.

Low-Cost - The cost of making or buying our machines are, on average, 8x cheaper than buying from an Industrial Manufacturer, including an average labor cost of hour for a GVCS fabricator.

Modular - Motors, parts, assemblies, and power units can interchange, where units can be grouped together to diversify the functionality that is achievable from a small set of units.

User-Serviceable - Design-for-disassembly allows the user to take apart, maintain, and fix tools readily without the need to rely on expensive repairmen.

DIY - (do-it-yourself) The user gains control of designing, producing, and modifying the GVCS tool set.

Closed Loop Manufacturing - Metal is an essential component of advanced civilization, and our platform allows for recycling metal into virgin feedstock for producing further GVCS technologies - thereby allowing for cradle-to-cradle manufacturing cycles

High Performance - Performance standards must match or exceed those of industrial counterparts for the GVCS to be viable.

Flexible Fabrication - It has been demonstrated that the flexible use of generalized machinery in appropriate-scale production is a viable alternative to centralized production.

Distributive Economics - We encourage the replication of enterprises that derive from the GVCS platform as a route to truly free enterprise - along the ideals of Jeffersonian democracy.

Industrial Efficiency - In order to provide a viable choice for a resilient lifestyle, the GVCS platform matches or exceeds productivity standards of industrial counterparts.

Blue Ventures: Winner of the 2011 Buckminster Fuller Challenge

Joshua Arnow — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 18:41:05 -0800

Video - Website

Blue Ventures (BV), led by Ashoka Fellow Alasdair Harris Ph.D, has developed a high-leverage scalable model that enables impoverished tropical fishing communities in the western Indian Ocean to quickly and dramatically raise their incomes while protecting the biodiversity of their coastal waters through the creation of community-run Marine Protected Areas (MPAs). The approach integrates advanced marine conservation science with capacity-building and sound knowledge of fisheries economics in order to provide the necessary skills, incentives, and partnerships that can effect lasting change.

The core of the concept involves determining the recovery period for a fishery that is headed toward collapse, and convincing the fishers to stop fishing periodically to allow the target population to rebound, so that they can benefit from greatly increased fish catches on a sustainable basis. This translates to significantly higher income along the entire supply chain and the preservation of traditional coastal livelihoods as well as marine biodiversity. The recovery method has been scientifically verified and has been met with great local enthusiasm. Within 4 years the strategy has spread to dozens independent fishing villages, which have together created over 100 short term fisheries reserves along several hundred kilometres of Madagascar’s coastline. Management models have since diversified to create the largest community-managed MPA in the entire Indian Ocean.

As a social enterprise BV is imbued with an entrepreneurial community-led spirit that distinguishes it from most other conservation NGOs. Once established these MPAs stand on their economic merits rather than requiring continuous support from outside NGOs. Most of BV’s scientific research is funded by award-winning eco-tourism expeditions and supported by teams of volunteer researchers. As distinct from conventional ‘top down’ outsider approaches to conservation, community engagement and empowerment is the centerpiece of the BV strategy. This has resulted in local citizens taking control of the decisions that affect them and leading grassroots educational efforts that then help other villages replicate the model.

BV is also supporting a full range of community-based economic development initiatives. These include providing educational scholarships for illiterate children, building a reproductive health and family planning clinic now targeting communities in over 50 villages, developing water and sanitation programmes, pioneering alternative sources of income for women through sustainable aquaculture (such as commercial-scale community-managed sea-cucumber and seaweed farming) and developing an ambitious community-owned eco-tourism enterprise. These efforts extend far beyond the typical confines of science-based marine conservation but are critical to ensuring the long-term success and sustainability of BV’s strategy for grassroots conservation. BV’s comprehensive systems approach to conservation assumes that the survival of a natural habitat and the people whose lives depend on it are inseparable.

Already replicating its work in southeast Asia and the Caribbean, and advising governments and communities across several Indian Ocean countries, Blue Ventures’ innovative approach to coastal conservation and development is showing significant potential to improve the lives of millions of people throughout the coastal tropics who rely on threatened marine resources for their daily subsistence.

More Info

Groasis Waterboxx Enables Trees to Survive in Arid Regions

Joshua Arnow — Fri, 29 Oct 2010 11:07:02 -0700

Using the principles of biomimicry, the Groasis Waterboxx enables plants to establish themselves and survive even in the most arid regions of the world, just the way nature does it. Pieter Hoff, founder of AquaPro and inventor of the product, hopes to use the new device to combat hunger, desertification, and climate change.

Hoff has developed a round, 20-inch-wide container crafted from polypropylene that is placed over a two small seedlings. The container is a resevoir for enough water for a full year of micro-drip irrigation. The chamber, which is designed to prevent evaportation, collects rainwater but also maximizes the formation of dew droplets. In some climates dew may be the only frequent source of plant moisture. The Waterboxx design effectively capatures and tranfers condensation into the water reservoir. A wick goes into the ground beneath the box, slowly dripping 50 ml of water to the plant’s root system everyday.

As the plant grows, its roots reach deeper and deeper in the ground, eventually finding their own water source. If all goes well the box can be removed after one year.

Popular Science selected The Groasis Waterboxx as as one of the top 10 inventions of 2010.

These three videos explain how it works very well:

http://www.youtube.com/user/Groasiswaterboxx#p/u/3/lGnhZEye-to

http://www.youtube.com/user/Groasiswaterboxx#p/u/13/mimakdbmd_k

http://www.youtube.com/user/Groasiswaterboxx#p/u/28/HRF2bUBPA90 READ MORE »

Operation Hope: Winner of the 2010 Buckminster Fuller Challenge

Joshua Arnow — Fri, 29 Oct 2010 09:27:16 -0700

The Winner of the 2010 Buckminster Fuler Challenge is Operation Hope, submitted by Allan Savory on Behlalf of the Africa Center for Holistic Management

"This project demonstrates how to reverse desertification of the world’s savannas and grasslands, thereby contributing enormously to mitigating climate change, biomass burning, drought, flood, drying of rivers and underground waters, disappearing wildlife, massive poverty, social breakdown, violence and genocide."

ENTRY APPLICATION: PDF

WEBSITE: Africa Center for Holistic Management

WEBSITE: Savory Institiute

VIDEO: Lecture at Trinity College,Dublin (1hr)

SLIDE SHOW: Project team in the field in Africa

Critical Need Being Addressed

"Viewed holistically biodiversity loss/desertification/climate change are one issue not three. Without reversing desertification, climate change cannot be adequately addressed. This project has demonstrated that livestock can reverse desertification, even during droughts, over the largest areas of the Earth’s land – the grasslands and savannas."

Description of Initiative

"Our work established a previously unsuspected cause of desertification – that humans of all ages and cultures make decisions using the same core decision framework. Flaws in this universal framework made world-wide desertification inevitable. Modifications, explained in "Holistic Management" A New Framework for Decision Making" Savory & Butterfield Second Edition 1999, Island Press, make reversing desertification possible."

"This work, begun in the early 60s gave erratic results. Since 1984 when the decision-making piece of the puzzle fell into place, as long as the process is followed results in restored grasslands have been consistent and can be guaranteed."

"In this particular project ACHM has demonstrated on 6500 acres of grasslands in Zimbabwe the process of reversing desertification. Livestock have increased 400% using holistic planned grazing and we now enjoy open water, water lilies and fish a kilometer above where water has been known before in the dry season. The livestock are integrated with Africa’s big game avoiding competition and wildlife are on the increase. Currently, we can barely keep pace with grass growth even in dry years. This is greatly influencing scientists, NGO’s and pastoralists from all over Africa." READ MORE »

Why does engineering/math/science education in the US suck?

Joshua Arnow — Fri, 29 Oct 2010 07:54:21 -0700

I don't think the reasons elucidated below by Kathi Sierra are limited to the United States. Her blog Creating Passionate Users is excellent! The Graphics are a riot. JA

Why does engineering/math/science education in the US suck?

If you studied math, science, or engineering at a four-year college in the US, much of what you learned is useless, forgotten, or obsolete. All that money, all that time, all that wasted talent. If all we lost were a few years, no big deal. But the really scary part is that we never learned what matters most to true experts in math, science, and engineering. We never really learned how to DO math, science, and engineering.

Toward the end of his life, legendary mathematician Jacques Hadamard asked 100 of the top scientists of his time how they did whatever it was that they did (math, physics, etc.) Hadamard's survey found a massive disconnect between how we teach math and science and how mathematicians and scientists actually work. The majority of his contemporaries apparently claimed that using the logical, left-brain symbols associated with their work was NOT how they did their work. These were simply the tools they used to communicate it. What they used to do the works was much... fuzzier. Intuition. Visualization. Sensation (Einstein talked of a kinesthetic element). Anthropomorphizing. Metaphors.

We are in sooooo much trouble.

What experts use to do their work are the things we don't teach. We focus almost exclusively on how to talk about the work. Obviously this doesn't mean nobody learns to do it... we have plenty of expert engineers, scientists, and mathematicians, who become great either in spite of faulty teaching or because they lucked out and had excellent, clueful instructors and mentors. But we also hear more and more teachers, experts, and employers railing against the sorry state of our advanced technical educations today. The problem is, many of these same teachers, experts, and employers have a tough time articulating what's wrong, let alone how to fix it.

And what do we do to try and improve things? We just do MORE of what's wrong. We redouble our efforts. We drill and test students even harder in facts and rote memorization. We work and test them even harder on using the tools for communication (e.g. code) rather than the tools for thought (e.g. intuition, visualization, etc.)

Our educational institutions--at every level--need drastic changes or we're all screwed. The generation of students we're turning out today need skills nobody really cared about 50, 40, even 20 years ago. Where we used to prepare students for a "job for life", now we must prepare students to be jobless. We must prepare them to think fast, learn faster, and unlearn even faster ("yes, that drug was the appropriate way to treat the XYZ disease, but that was so last week. THIS week we now realize it'll kill you.")

The Waterfall Model of education is failing like never before. We need Agile Learning.

Three of the many people who've been leading the charge on this are Roger Schank, Dan Pink (his "Whole New Mind" book is a must-read), and computing/learning guru Alan Kay. One of my favorite Alan Kay notions is something like this, "If you want to be a better programmer, take up the violin." He claims that the more time he spends playing music, the fresher and better his approaches to engineering become. He's an outspoken critic of engineering students focusing too early in their education, because he believes that with a more liberal arts education, you get metaphors and ways of thinking and seeing that are vital to your later engineering work.

I'll end this with two quotes:

From Jason Fried:
"Hire curious people. Even if they don't have the exact skill set you want, curious, passionate people can learn anything."

And from Jacques Hadamard:
" Logic merely sanctions the conquests of the intuition."

If intuition is the heart of what true experts do, then shouldn't we be trying to teach that? Or at the least, stop stifling and dissing it? And yes, I do believe that we can teach and inspire all those fuzzy things including intuition and even curiosity. But we are running out of time.

[UPDATE: Martin Polley brought up the TED talk by Sir Ken Robinson, and if you haven't seen it already--I urge you to check it out ASAP!

Mark Fowler was surprised that I didn't bring up the book What the Best College Teachers Do, and I can't believe I left it out of the post. I believe it is the single best book on helping someone learn. When we had our most recent author's bootcamp, it was the one book we gave to all attendees. Thanks Mark.

I highly recommend the comments to this post -- they're insightful on all sides, agreement and disagreement and all points in between. And before you tell me I'm advocating for throwing out fundamentals, memorization, facts, logic, etc... PLEASE look again at my venn diagram ; ) This is about brain balance, and addressing much more of the brain than just the narrow channels that are the parts of the brain that actually "talk." ]

Posted by Kathy on November 2, 2006 READ MORE »