("Christian")
David Christian provides a clear and informative message through his recent TED Talk video. David’s message is that the entire universe and all the life in it, is based on the ever diminishing likeliness of the “goldilock thresholds”. His story begins with the formation of the universe; specifically events like the Big Bang and the creation of celestial objects. His big timeline that lays out all of history describes the ever increasing improbability of life in the universe, much yet the life on earth that created you and I. David’s underlining theme is that humans are lucky enough as a species to be alive. In other words, we should cut our differences to collaborate in a global community to surpass future threshold that is described by David Christian as, “collective learning”. More specifically, collective learning is the ability for a species to quickly build upon the mistakes of others to attain more intelligence and complexity. David Christian bases this idea on the invention of the human language. Humans are the only known species that is capable of communicating one’s ideas to someone else, which can be used in future events. David states this as, “Now what makes humans different is human language. We are blessed with a language, a system of communication, so powerful and so precise that we can share what we've learned with such precision that it can accumulate in the collective memory. And that means it can outlast the individuals who learned that information, and it can accumulate from generation to generation. And that's why, as a species, we're so creative and so powerful, and that's why we have a history” (“Christian”). In my own life, I have been able to use this idea of building upon mistakes in school, success in sports, and virtually every activity that isn’t a “one shot and you’re done” endeavor. I have specifically been able to achieve more in my academic career by heavy learning from my own mistakes. For example, if I received a poor grade on a test (C or lower), I make a commitment to myself to either study before the test, or to do my work more diligently. Mistakes have also had the same effect on my performance in athletics. As relates to education, a “mistake-based” approach might be more beneficial towards learning. This could look like an environment where more pop quizzes are sprung onto students. The effect of this would be more students would initially fail. Then because of the internal drive to succeed, students would push themselves to truly know the material, thus thrive in school.
I thought that David Christian’s speaking technique was very effective towards the presentation of his TED Talk. He started his presentation at an average volume of voice and neutral tone. Then his voice and tone evolved into varying dynamics and tones to match each sentence used o describe the “Big History”. The style of his presentation was actually quite unpredictable in the way of his neglect of a thesis statement. However, for his individual presentation, this method worked very well. This is because David Christian is able to seamlessly flow from example to example without forgetting to explain everything that he said. Although David was able to pull off such a spectacular performance as he did in his March 2011 TED Talk, I do not think that his method will work for me.
Works Cited
Christian, David. "David Christian: Big History | Video on TED.com." TED: Ideas worth Spreading. Apr. 2011. Web. 03 May 2011. <http://www.ted.com/talks/david_christian_big_history.html>.
No comments:
Post a Comment