This first meeting of the North Central States brought together 20 Fellows and almost as many Big Ideas, including:
- Technology, education and inter-generational communications
- Science Beyond the Classroom
- Use and application of classical mythology on music
- Education and socially active students
- International Fellowship development
- Rural investment in China
- Community advocacy for live-work space for artists; economic development strategy
- Urban interventions
- Urban transport
- Community partnerships to address economic issues, environment, health care, nutrition and social justice
- Bringing art to the public
- Economic literacy
- Urban forests
- Arts exchanges
- Identifying communities needs such as access to parks, urban transit
- Preserving wealth through durable housing
- Social entrepreneurship
As you can imagine the discussion was lively, and we covered more than one of the above topics. The main discussion centered on education and life-long learning, kids and technology, and inter-generational communications as follows:
- Is traditional education irrelevant in today’s world of fast changes?
- Half of what we learn in college is obsolete before we graduate
- Are we failing to produce young thinkers?
- Is there too much information for creative thinking?
- Is this a generational problem?
- Kids are digital natives, adults are digital immigrants
- We are missing contemplative time which leads to creativity
- There is an economic perspective attached to the failure of science education
- Science to what end? Science can sometimes set us back and do things we don’t want
- Lack of nutritional science education is decreasing life expectancy
- Learning is driven by fear and necessity
- How do we get past monetizing the “story of stuff” and more towards life cycle design?
- How do we get past the competition model to the collaborative model?
- How do we get past the geospatial model to the transnational model?
- Wired Magazine forecasts the demise of the printed word
- The demise of penmanship and hand writing skills can have a negative impact on language and communication skills
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