Today as I was looking through my reader, I noticed an old headline on the Presentation Zen feed that I continued putting off looking at because I wanted to be able to spend some time reading and thinking about it. Today I finally clicked on the title “The Animated Sir Ken Robinson” and am so glad that I did. I’ve been a fan of Sir Ken Robinson for quite awhile and was interested to see how Garr was going to write about presentations and Robinson’s work. I was not disappointed. The video below is one created by the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA) that takes one of Robinson’s talks and basically animates it. Take a look, I find it fascinating to watch the artist work.
As far as the talk goes, I like the overall message and agree with it. However, the reason I keep thinking about it is because of the combination of the talk itself and the visuals that were created. It’s stuck in my mind for hours now and I can’t seem to shake it. That’s a powerful presentation. Here are a few things that I think are simply outstanding.
- When Robinson is talking about the the current reality of schools the artist has placed the students on a conveyor belt.
- Robinson says that we shouldn’t be boring our students and putting them to sleep, but rather waking them up. I remember the teacher who “woke me up”.
- I find his idea that education right now is about conformity rather than about learning interesting.
There are many other pieces of this talk that I liked and agree with but, for me, it was the combination of the two. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. I’m looking forward to looking at the RSA Animate video on 21st Century Enlightenment.
* The animation for this video is done by Cognitive Media and is also worth a look.
A version of this post is cross-posted to Tech4Practice as well as the Northeast Middle School Friday Flyer.