I’ve been slowly making my way through the TEDTalks videos. It tends to take forever because each video sends me off googling and wikipedia-ing, looking for more information about the topic of the speech. It’s been rather incredible, and I’ve learned more about multi-touch computing, global poverty, religion, innovation… I just feel like I’ve been learning a ton.

And that was the light-bulb.

One of the things I always wonder about with the notion of open inquiry is… how do we expose students to enough ideas, enough content, enough inspiration such that they had great questions to launch them forward and then enough gumption to keep them going.

I’m going to think about this in terms of a wonderful class we have at SLA — Advisory. It’s wonderful for any number of reasons, but for this idea, it’s wonderful because it’s curriculum is utterly flexible. It’s primary purpose is to be a space for a community of students and a teacher to come together over four years and learn together. Much of the time, the learning is co-created through topics that matter to the members of the community. (I’ve been meaning to write about Advisory as a piece of the idea of "teaching wisdsom," it’s coming soon. I promise.) But because we’re not tied to any specific curriculum except that we learn together things that matter to us and will help us grow, it also means it’s a great place to play. For other schools, I could see this as a senior elective — and even at SLA, I think this idea could be a great launching point for capstone — but the point it, there could and should be space for something like this in a high school curriculum.

What if we ran a TEDTalks Inspiration class? This idea is really not refined, and this is real "blurt-blogging," so feel free to offer up suggestions, but what if you ran a semester-long class that looked like this… (again — bare, bare bones here…)

Introduce the idea of the TED Conference – what it is, why it is, how it works, etc…
Spend several classes watching various TEDTalks and then having discussions about what it was we saw.
Have students do follow-up research on the ideas, the presenters, etc…
Then have students watch ten more TEDTalks videos on their own, keeping a K-W-L style journal as they do.

Then have the students pick one video with the plan of watching it at least five more times.

But after each viewing, have them look at their journals and try to find answers to what they didn’t know, and keeping a journal of what they learned and what new questions they have. Then rewatch and continue the process.

After six viewings, have students take a look at the final questions they still have and have them ask themselves, what kind of project / creation could they embark upon to learn more? How could they present what they already have learned and what they plan to learn?

This is rough, but I think there’s power here. What I love is that the TED speeches are so rich, so powerful, so inspiring that I think kids would come up with incredible questions based on what they saw. I could see students getting so inspired by a topic that they went and took a college course on it… or looked to create their own course of study… etc…

What questions would our kids ask? What answers would they come up with? What further study might they want to pursue?

I’m curious… is this completely a 2:00 am ramble or do people think this idea could prove worthy of further exploration?