Can Entertainment Renew American Inquiry?

What does this parody of a Lady Ga Ga video have to do with efforts to renew American inquiry and innovation?

It was mentioned at a one-day event in Los Angeles organized by the National Academies to explore ways to use the tools and products of the entertainment world to renew Americans’ lagging engagement in, and appreciation for, science. The consequences for innovation and competitiveness are the focus of the academies.

You can follow others’ observations on Twitter using the tag #SEESummit.

I’m going to post rough riffs and reactions below through the day, as time allows:

3:50 p.m. |Update

Janet English, a prize-winning science teacher at El Toro High School in San Diego, introduces a batch of students to inspire the adults in the room to build the environment kids need to become learners and leaders.

Then she recalls her experiment to see if it’s possible to hula hoop in zero-g:

3:33 p.m. |Update

Sir Ken Robinson discusses the need to reexamine the anachronistic norms for education aimed at innovation, the destructive lines between arts and sciences, and new models for teaching that can advance human progress.

“Most people only discover who they are after they’ve recovered from their education,” he says. “If you make science arid, you lose another generation.”

Here his most famous riff on these issues:

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1:55 p.m. |Update

Tony DeRose from Pixar describes the wonders of the annual “Maker Faire” in the San Francisco Bay area, including the potato cannon gatling gun:

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He also describes Saphira, a fire-breathing dragon, built by his son and others.

1:41 p.m. |Update

It’s great to hear Karen Cator of Dept. of Education bulding a vision of a borderless “classroom” in which telecommunication tech is not turned off but exploited.

To my mind one goal should be to aggregate best practices, but also best experiments!

One great example is Margaret Rubega at University of Connecticut, who used Twitter as a tool to engage studentson tracking, and communicating, bird behavior.

Another is the Atlantic Rising project, linking classrooms around the Atlantic Ocean, from Ghana to Scotland to Nantucket, on understanding ocean and climate change.