So good evening and welcome.
Tonight's program hosted by the Commonwealth Club Silicon Valley. We'd like to thank the MacArthur Foundation
and Benetech for their support in making this evening open and free my name is Betsy Corcoran
I am CEO and co-founder of EdSurge. EdSurge is a news and information resource on education technology
We ask educators, and we help help them answer the core questions around education technology
Why when where how should technology be used to help students?
to help all of our students
And that's why I am so pleased to be here with this extraordinary panel tonight
Let me start by giving you a short introduction to we have
Immediately to my right we have Jim Fruchterman, who is the coat who is the founder and the CEO of Benetech?
We have Debbie Bial
Who is the founder and head of the Posse Foundation from New York City.
And we have the Manu Prakash who is a professor at Stanford University
We brought them and you together tonight to talk about STEM: science, technology,
engineering, math education and how we can attract more
people more diverse thoughts more diverse people to science
technology, engineering, and math and why do we do this well we think diversity
really matters so
before I come to this panel which is an extraordinary panel
I'd like to start with a question for you the audience you guys are smart folks:
So why did you come here tonight?
I'm gonna guess that you were intrigued by the concept of hearing three people who have been dubbed as geniuses
by the MacArthur Foundation
You know in the past 37 years,
there's only been
990 of the folks identified and you've got three of them right here on stage, that's pretty cool. And
Exceptional creativity is the first criteria
that the MacArthur Foundation uses when they accept their awardees. Now what?
What if I told you that we changed it up on you and that actually tonight we have a different panel for you.
We're going to have an engineer who is blind.
We'll have a child born in the slums of Mumbai.
We'll have the daughter of a cab driver from Brooklyn
Would you have come here tonight?
So let's call this second panel our panel of the future and
Our hope is that by the time we get to the end of this evening you're going to see
that there's an awful lot more in common that that panel of the future has with the panel here tonight
So let's jump in
I'm going to start with Jim Fruchterman who
Is as I said the CEO and founder of Benetech. Benetech wants to empower communities with software and build software
that's changed how people with disabilities can read and learn
through a program, partially through a program, called Bookshare as a program called Martus that helps human rights defenders
pursue truth and justice and it's also built an open-source adaptive management tool
Called Miradi the conservationists love to use. And Jim sort of summed it up this way
in a quote that I love. He said, "I started from a single enterprise entrepreneur became a portfolio of
enterprises ringleader and a guy who wants to help all of Silicon Valley
transform the world of disadvantaged communities."
And he's got plenty of fancy degrees - he's got a
Degrees from Cal Tech, but he is also very proud that he has not quite yet completed his PhD.
So Jim you started Benetech because you came across a technology that you thought could help
people who were vision impaired
But the company you were working for it time didn't think the market was big enough
And that's kinda the kiss of death for an awful lot of ideas in Silicon Valley, so how did you avoid?
that kiss of death? Well I
presented this product to our board and
They said how big is the market for reading machines for the blind and I said we think it's about a million dollars a year
They said but we've put twenty five million dollars in this company. It does not match and
And so they vetoed the product and I was really really disappointed, and I went to my my lawyer
He said the board vetoed the product help the blind I still want to do it. He says well
We could you could start a delivery nonprofit tech company,
and I I kind of giggled because I worked for one of the many accidentally nonprofit tech companies here in Silicon Valley
and I thought wow you could be like you could be like successful by definition, but but my lawyer
volunteered to incorporate us pro bono as a 501 C 3 non-profit a charity
and
We were able to go into the business of making
Machines to the blind because we figured even it was a million dollar market if we broke even it would be
sustainable, and that would a nonprofit sector that would be a giant success instead of a utter and despairing failure
that would be considered among VCs in Silicon Valley.
But the interesting thing is that even though the numbers sounded small
you felt compelled because the impact was huge. I mean I'm like a typical geek right
I want to solve important problems and the money thing
I don't know
It's not bad
but it's not the main thing and
And it turned out that we underestimate the market within three years a five million dollar a year break-even venture
It's the only tech venture I ever been associated with that be planned
but our expectations were way low because we thought
Is this really a market and the market is gonna fail to do a lot of the things that we really should do but
don't make the kind of money you have to make to justify to a venture capitalist. Okay, come back to some of these points
Debbie Bial is an education strategist in
1989 she started the Posse
Foundation based in New York
And the Posse Foundation looks for high-school students who have strong academic and leadership
potential and it creates a posse like ten students each
Helps them learn how to support each other and then sends them off to some of the best universities in the country
Since 1989 the Posse Foundation has enabled more than
8500 students to attend leading universities and together
they have won
1.2 billion dollars worth of scholarship money
and
that's pretty stunning and
Debbie herself has been to some fine schools undergraduate work at Brandeis and her MA and doctorate which she did finish at
Harvard University's Graduate School
Debbie why did you hope to start with the Posse Foundation and and what's changed over time?
Hi
Thanks for coming
Yeah, I just want you to know this is the first time that I've been
Like this with other fellows on a panel it's nice to be with you
In the 80s the word "posse" was kind of a cool word in the youth culture
I ran more than it is now, but it meant my group of friends
and there was a kid who had dropped out of college
And he said you know I never would have dropped out if I had my posse with me
and we thought that is such a good idea why not send a team a
Posse of students together to college and that way if you grew up in the Bronx, and you ended up in
Middlebury, Vermont
Right you'd be a little less likely to say forget it. I'm going home
That was the idea back then right and to your point your question today I
Am much more motivated by the social justice aspect of Posse than I was when I was a kid
I thought these
students deserved a chance to go to these great colleges and succeed and not just get scared off or
Be shocked by the culture, but today. I think it's a national imperative, and I think that if we don't
figure out
how to deliver on the promises that we made during the Civil Rights Movement
then we failed as a nation, and we are not delivering and that's what has changed in this organization because we've
really anchored ourselves in that
That's fascinating and we're gonna come back to that switch, which is it's not just for the kids
It's actually for all of us as well
Now please meet Manu Prakash who is an inventor a physical biologist and assistant professor at Stanford University
And he's got a wonderful description on his Stanford bio
He says we are a curiosity driven research group that works in physical biology
and he's got a very pragmatic streak, too
you might have seen him earlier on with a very very interesting
microscope. A microscope made out of paper an origami microscope
and I was gonna tell you all about the wonderful origami microscope and the fact that you can order
mmmmm a hundred for a school online for very little money,
but he's got something even cooler that he's doing now.
He's building a centrifuge for 20 cents the world's fastest spinning
object with human hand power
that's based on one of the oldest technologies on the planet which is a button on a string
He got his bachelor's degree at the Indian Institute of Technology in Kanpur his PhD from MIT
Manu
How did you ever
come to the idea of building a microscope with paper
I think if I back off
Many of us in this room
Have always been tool makers. I do remember as a kid
I couldn't afford a microscope, and I don't know how many of you're carrying your own microscope in your pocket
And
for some reason I actually took my brother's eyeglasses and thought lenses if I add them together I
built something, but of course my brother was really mad. It was his only eyeglasses
And the point is I think eventually it is in all of us to change and modify the world around us
And very specifically scientific tools are something that give you a window into the new something that you have just never experienced before
When Jim Cybulski my student, and Jim's here tonight
We started talking about this idea of access
You know what is the biggest set of problems that we care about often as engineers we are thought and
told to believe that let's solve problems that are that look hard on paper
you know make the fastest XYZ and not care about the set of resources we asked ourselves a question
We're going to build an instrument
That two billion kids on this planet can actually afford so something along the side of a pencil of microscopy
and it's a very different kind of a design challenge.
Both of us were in Thailand one time in the middle of a rainforest
And seeing these fancy microscopes that had been put there that don't actually work both from a context of
diagnostics both from a context of just making people curious
We came back, and I think I had thought a lot about manufacturing in the print industry
And it struck upon the fact that we could do this with two-dimensional materials and a little bit of robotics
I think the proudest moment for me is of course we made the microscope we wrote a paper.
When as an academic you publish a paper you think the world's gonna change nothing changes
just so some of the other academics in the audience you have to take the next step and
We were fortunate enough that philanthropic
organization supported us and we made a call to anybody in the world of
If you want a microscope we will ship you one and that really started us on this path where we believe.
Scale is one way that we have to assess this ourself at this point. We've shipped around
300 thousand fold scopes to
130 countries and that wouldn't have been possible if we hadn't asked ourselves this question
That how do we take tools that we make not just in our hands?
But give them to people and say what will they discover so primarily driven by that question is what will they discover is really why?
We ended up in this path. That's fantastic.
I wonder if you're starting to see what these three people have in common other than the MacArthur thing of course.
Have you started to see what they have in common?
Well all three of you are involved in STEM. Deborah,
You have a special initiative around creating stem posses
And Jim you're in engineers you're building technology employing engineers
And you're running a science lab and teaching students
And we have talked for decades in this country around the problem of diversity
And it is a huge problem
When you anyway you cut it anyway you look at the number of people who are working in science and technology
We see that people coming from different backgrounds women minorities
Are disproportionately left out of the conversation.
Seventy percent of the workers in science and technology
Are white
The groups that are Hispanic, black,
American Indian, make up about eleven percent
But in the population they're more than double that
Women may have
Fill close to half of all the jobs in the US economy, but they make up 29% of the science and engineering
workforce
So what's the problem? What have we why have we been so stuck on this for so long?
Are you looking at me?
I sure am.
Actually think it's not that
complicated an answer.
It's an upsetting answer. I think that we have not been able to get past the
racism that exists the misogyny that exists in this society
And I think it holds us back, and this is a consequence. I don't think it's that much more
Complicated than that
Why do some kids come from privileged backgrounds and others not and why do we have
You know a class system that in many ways is divided by race
Why is that and I I think we need to look at ourselves?
However upsetting that might sound maybe that's not the answer that you expected, but we
often look at what's wrong with the kids and
we try to fix the kids, but there's nothing wrong with the kids.
there's really nothing wrong with the kids kids are smart everywhere. They have big dreams.
They're ambitious and they want
to succeed.
You're not gonna find a kid that says you know what I don't really want to succeed.
They want to but we don't have a
society that understands its own flaws and I think that's our problem
I mean I think that we have habits
right, habits that we think these things are true and
Where we do, what's an example of a habit?
You know that?
African Americans aren't as good at math as
Caucasians, I mean there are things who people got well, but they
believed it and it's incorrect
But and I think that we then take data, and we use it to reinforce it right
We look at historical data and say this much must be truth, but instead you go
Well you have no idea that the institutional racism, that's already in those systems, so if you look at the data
You're just reinforcing the injustice that already exists in that data.
And I think the last thing is that actually getting past. This is something that is not that expensive.
It's not that hard. It just requires us to think differently about
the
Potential and the opportunity that is in these different communities
That's and we just have to it's we have just like
get ourselves out of our rut and just look at this in a slightly different way and something you'll see the opportunity rather than and
Maybe have it's not the best word, but but this this sort of you know ingrown racist attitude
That is actually not there if you look at people as being full of potential as opposed to let's say
Historically an underclass or treated that way by people of a certain race. Manu you've been traveling all over the world taking your
Microscopes to different places tell us about some of the kids that you have met around the world.
Yeah, I think it's very interesting sometimes when I think about these issues and
we just made a small simple tool
It's actually the microscope that takes us. I don't take the microscopes they just go and it's the drive in communities. It's
Effectively when you ask I mean all the communities that you listed
why is it that you know science sometimes which is essential for our lives and
similarly many of these people are essential for science. We would not be making the kinds of breakthroughs we make if we don't include everybody
I'll give you an example.
You know think about solving problems if you don't live and breathe a
problem every engineer knows you will never be able to crack it.
Eventually when you ask
To live and breath a problem and to tackle some of the hardest problems,
you know you can talk about biodiversity loss is exactly matched to many places where there is highest environmental pollution.
You can look at I'll give you a fun example which was something that I found quite
surprising Jim and I were in Nigeria and one of the things that you often think about this is a very common problem in
In many countries, but Nigeria specifically of a fake currency and fake this and big that
That's correct, and there was a kid who looked at this in our community
We ship microscopes tell people whatever they want and he figured out a way that he could use microscopy as a way to identify
currency, and then you know you can build a business on that it's a brand new idea that he's posed by a challenge that he
faces every day.
And he is exactly the right person the problem is we think of
Education is this bundle and then you're supposed to repurpose it sometimes
For a good of a very small of people
what is most powerful that I find and STEM is it's just a tool that you get to apply to your own community and
Every single place that I have traveled
I have met remarkable people and one of the things is places that I don't even get a chance to travel
You meet because all communities are connected now
they inspire each other you meet every single time an example that of course when you hear a
Solution you say ah this makes sense, but this was an individual that was living and breathing a problem
and so if we empower those people we don't just
Empower them and make a just equal society we actually solve some of our biggest problems
It's a great point
And I want to I want to come back to Debbie because what Manu just said is he said we think of
Education as a bundle that we're giving to a group of people. It sounds like you went through a transformation in thinking about what was
education that your Posses were going to
Encounter. Tell us a little bit about some of the students who've gone through the
Posses and how you made again that transition from thinking, oh, we're doing something nice for them
too this is something for all of us. Right and also to connect it to Manu's point which is if we
Think outside the box we kind of we will
Discover
solutions that we never dreamed of to some of our greatest problems. If we
understand that diverse teams are better teams if we understand that a
kid who's living in the problem might solve it better than a scientist in a lab. Oh my gosh, right?
The possibility is there for great solutions.
So you know we have kids that you never would imagine
Should go to Vanderbilt or Bryn Mawr Brandeis or or Dartmouth or Middlebury?
Those kids that you think of
with the highest SAT scores
Right who the highest GPAs that you know are competing against each other to get into these schools
We find students who traditionally would be missed on the radar screens of these great colleges
And what do I mean by that they're kids?
Who maybe don't have the greatest test scores? Maybe they didn't go to a highly ranked high school?
They're students who represent the diversity of this country
How can you identify a student who's gonna
Succeed at the highest levels at one of the most elite
Institutions of higher education in the United States if they don't have a great test score
Let me just ask you a question for one second how many of you took either the ACT
or the SAT just raise your hand okay?
Keep your hand up if you remember your score
Okay those of you, who remember your score keep your hand up if you're willing to just say what you got right now
Gentlemen right in the middle there.
But the point is why are hardly any hands up?
You believe
That this score is a reflection of
Something about you right your intelligence. Maybe you think it is
or you're
There there's some reason at whatever age you are right now that you don't want to share your test score
we put way too much into these tests and
What we do is we reinforce this
myth that a test equals intelligence or merit. Merit
scholarships in the United States go to students with the highest test scores and
white and Asian students are still scoring the best on the SAT for example
So they're getting the bulk of the merit scholarships and merit means deserve
Just follow me for a second with this
So how do we get black and Latino kids for example into our elite institutions of higher education?
We create programs based on a deficit programs for poor at-risk minority needy
underserved under privileged whatever it is fill in the blank and
think about what that does to the psychology of the community on a campus you've got kids who deserve to be there and
Then kids who are there because we are kind and charitable, and we've allowed them to be there
That's not a good way to think and that's kind of what I'm talking about
When you want you want to break out of the system we have to understand that the system's perpetuate
the isms
And what you're saying is
once again, you said it earlier; It's not the kids fault
It's the point of view of the people who are looking at them, Jim jump in here.
Yeah, so when I started when I left my for-profit company and was gonna make reading machines to the blind
I thought we're gonna get a bunch of volunteer engineers in every city to help blind people
Get there get there reading machine
I went out and I talked to the people that we were going to work with and they said well, you know
None of the companies that make technology for blind people will hire a blind person to sell their tools of Independence. oh
I said we have a bunch of people who could sell the hell out of your product
why did you give a chance like sure sure so the majority by dealers very quickly
majority the more people with visual impairments and a
common why dealers for blind people with a turn for software so one of them wrote a better front-end for the reading machine
than I did and I've supposed to be a bright engineer
type and just frankly he knew and he lived the problem, and he got it better and someone else wrote a
currency identifier because American currency is exactly the same size, so I just
I just kind of sit back and let this kind of flow and I think but but I had this idea
Even though I was going to help blind people
That they needed my help and what they really wanted
is a tool so they could just go on with their lives
And if I can help them make a living along the side by giving them an opportunity to start a business
Stand back and watch what happens!
One of the questions, so thank you very much for contributing questions
This is hopefully and engaged in interactive forum, and if you do have another questions. You can fill out the form
when women and minorities successfully complete education in STEM subjects
sometimes they drop out of the workforce
what happens what do we what do we have to do to change the culture in the workforce?
So that when they have gone through this path, they'll stay
Think there's a slight twist to this question that I like to pose which is
You know we think of this idea of STEM as a career and STEM as a new way of
You know opening new opportunities, which is all correct, but
at that same time
science is also a way of living. Science is a way of making sense of your world
The medicine that you're about to give your child or you're about to vaccinate
Your kids or what you're about to do based on a weather event and where you should actually be living in the future
they're all dependent on your understanding of this world. So science to me and sometimes I
see these statistics about very focused on career and especially when I work with kids
Giving them tools to empower them to learn how to ask questions
and
eventually it boils down to me the mark of success in
many people that I see that contribute very heavily to the field of science are the people who went through the whole process
of SATs course, I went through that I mean I had to pass this crazy exam that I don't even remember now
All across India to make it through but in the end
I don't remember any of that the only thing I remember that somebody told me early on
Learn how to ask good questions, so how do we turn this dialogue going from STEM careers
into a scenario where we're also training the people for the right
opportunities? Of course there is an opportunity if you're carrying a degree from a specific college
But frankly what's gonna matter most and all of you have the power to hire
And hopefully you're hiring the kind of people who really can crack the problem and the people who can crack the problem or the people
Who really understand they learn how to learn.
If we teach people that you have a scenario where we go into a dialogue where this just becomes a part of their life and
I get troubled by this scenario where many people are told
That you're not good enough because you didn't get this and we have X number of people and they don't actually get the opportunity
to show their talent
so let's flip this around and have people have access to show their talent
and then creativity is really the measure and this is what's happening already
I mean in terms of all these digital tools and all the analog tools that are becoming available almost to everybody
but we have not changed the people and including and pointing at academics including myself.
I still evaluate admission files from many of your fellows in the same old fashion
How do I change my system to really be able to have the most talented people rise on how they think?
And how do we give them the courage to ask questions?
I think they're born with it. We just stop Stymieing their growth stops are born
Can I add something to that. We have something called the dynamic assessment process (DAPS). This year
17,000 students across the United States were nominated for a Posse scholarship. 17,000 only 750 won it.
But we interviewed those students in a way that you you'd think were crazy a room like this
big room no chairs though a
Hundred students walk in they've been nominated by someone who believes in them someone like you two right.
You know this student. You know she can do it, but
Maybe she doesn't have the score or whatever the reason should be who she's smart
she can ask questions that are good. They walk in and for three hours. We run them through a series of activities
they're building robots out of Legos. They're running a discussion on genetic testing
they're creating a public service announcement that they have to present in front of all the people in the room and
you could volunteer. You're walking around the room. What are you looking for?
You're looking for the student
Who's got leadership potential who works well in a team who's got great communication skills who asks good
questions
You doing it for the first time would find the same student that I could find doing it for 29 years, right?
Because they stand out.
No paper application will show what you can see in a live setting? We're doing this with
56 universities, they're changing the way they understand potential. An SAT might be important
but it's not the only measure.
Fabulous so changing the way once again change in the way we are looking at the students
Jump into a second question: leadership changes culture
Or it builds resistance to unfortunate changes. What would it take to build
transformative leaders
who can model the changes that our education culture
desperately needs. What does it take to build those leaders?
Jim you've seen a lot of leaders you've seen good and bad
I think the number one thing you start with is remove useless barriers
right because if you never get the chance to even demonstrate you never get into that
into that room with anybody else then you don't have a shot, and I think that we we certainly see
you know we work in the field of people with disabilities, right?
And we just see these
barriers that should not be there that stop people from actually having the
opportunities that they should have and then demonstrating what they could have and yes occasionally some people are able to surmount these
incredible barriers and make it but you know but kids from privileged backgrounds don't have to
Ascend you know and leap over
You know ten story buildings to actually get there
so certainly that my thing is forget to get those barriers out
snd you'll have more leaders demonstrating more of that possibility because they've had more opportunity. How do you get the barriers out?
Well, I mean I think we we've talked about changing people's minds right so one of the things that that we're spending time doing
is
You know we're a charity; we have a free library for people with disabilities. It's fabulous.
But we're spending a whole bunch of time with the educational publishing industry saying hey if you remove those barriers
you would make more money and people would have better educational opportunity
Wow!
What what's not to like it the right way aren't you the guys who steal our stuff for you know for free like yeah?
But but still you still should do this because because it's it's the right thing, but you'll make more money at it
And I think so many of these things people are motivated by money.
Many of the things we're talking about are actually in the economic interest of the society as a whole of the
University of the employer and but people don't think so
so I know that's
Removing barriers in a very same way as you describe in the digital context
Access you know we talk about this
We're here in a fabulous setting and right at this very moment somewhere in the Amazon
is a kid walking by who has probably picked up something that no scientist has ever seen before
so sometimes recalls barriers
but he has something that no scientist has a backyard filled with possibilities
but has no tools no formal training, and you know he looks at a bark
and he's scratching this bark, and it out comes Taxol one of the most powerful drugs in cancer
so we think sometimes of this notion of
access access to tools really changes
but at that same time you have to remember that the people you're empowering
Also have something that society and everybody else in general needs, a better
understanding of this wall to begin with a better sense of empathy for their own kind
when you start realizing that the whole thing is not a rat race that
they're not in there for something and many of these students
I can guarantee you when they go back to their communities are much more dedicated to the fact that you're not just doing this just
for yourself and you shine
Most of these people then look back and say oh, I was lucky now how do I return that back?
So there is this amplification effect in removing access. I think when we talk about this idea of
Making affordable science tools, I really mean this in a sense that if we have two billion kids
we really should be talking about everybody. It's not about developed developing countries
it's really is about haves and have-nots and
How do we look at solutions that will scale at?
The planetary scale because most of these problems are not just problems in the US as well. They are planetary problems and
the hardest hit communities are the communities have the least access not even just to do something about it
but even to understand the problem. So this barrier that we were talking about once we do come up with scalable ways
you are in a situation
where they are bringing something to the table that we do not have
not just in talent
but also in their understanding. So one of the things that struck me when we had a chance to prepare for this panel
is that these people look at the world differently?
right they think up
they look at the world differently and what they're saying is their students
are looking at the world differently and that that is the great gift that they are bringing?
But there's a powerful question here as well, which is that?
systemic change
systemic across the whole country is often driven by people in power and
if people who do not
look at the world differently if people who are not who are underrepresented
don't have a seat at the table of power
Can we break down
these barriers?
Okay
Yeah, I love who wrote that question both of these questions are leadership questions. This
combination of access and you know scaling the idea of access is hugely important, but without leadership
we're lost and
you have you know in the United States for example you 90 percent of the United States Senate is white and
basically 80 percent of our senators are men. These are representatives. How can they no matter how well-intentioned?
maybe
Maybe
It's radio
No, but what I'm saying is no matter how well-intentioned people are
it's very difficult to represent as diverse a population as we have if you're not diverse yourself
leadership, I just did one small thing
you know we always celebrate Martin Luther King, and it was just Martin Luther King Day. I
don't know how many of us in the United States understand that he as a leader was leading a minority
hardly there was a very small number of people in the United States that were pro civil rights movement
without leadership without people who are gonna fight and speak up and yell and
infiltrate and be subversive and be direct and be all of these things I need to be in the room where it happens
what's the Hamilton line that's it's right? You have to have leadership
it is critically important. All that Posse does if I don't if you remember nothing else about Posse
we're never gonna be huge
and and do we're gonna be small we're gonna get a
yhousand new students into these institutions every year and graduate them
and then like hold them by the hand so they can become senators and
CEOs they can run hospitals and newspapers and whatever else they need to run so they can speak out in unconventional
ways because we need them
it is very difficult right now to point to anyone who is a powerful leader
For social justice in the United States, and we desperately
Need them
Jim, Manu
Let's take it down to the micro level. What do you do in your work environments in your labs
to try to let these voices to try to support these voices to try to support these emerging leaders
well, I want to use software and data to hear the voice of all of the members of these communities
I mean we're talking about large scale systems change and
yet often we make these policies without regard to that and I think I think that if we do a better job of doing that
We're gonna end up going in a better direction and of course in Silicon Valley
you know people talk about human centered design, and you know user centered design
and you know the way we do it is we try to put the user in charge and listen to that now
that's that's a recipe for a successful business
but it's also a recipe for a more empowering
social sector and the like and
and I think that I mean
one of the things you know we start with reading machines for the body we had started the largest library for blind people
and dyslexic people and what we did is we said you're in charge of building the collection
so do you scan a book it gets added, so instead of us deciding? What books to say when people should read?
Disabled people decided what books they wanted to read and what about they've built the largest library of its kind
why, cuz they want to read everything like?
And that's so that's exactly what Manu you have been talking about in terms of handing out
hundreds of thousands of microscopes and other instruments right. Yeah, I think I mean
this is a beautiful question because sometimes when I talk about Foldscope and just internally when we think and philosophize
where the future is I often think of Foldscope is not an object. It's a community in the end our
biggest role is to pass
ownership of where people would like to take a capability
so anytime we engage with any ironically if you ever get a Foldscope there is zero
experiments in the instrument when it comes because we want you to really open up and say I have a clean slate
what would I do. So it's not exactly a Lego kit there are not instructions
There are instructions to make it
But then once you have a window
Where you would look in just like if you had a telescope where you would point should be in your own control
This is what we have missed in education we teach people how to read, but then we point
this is what you should read which is backwards
because in the end based on the context of that person so the entire community
translates all the instructions and in the end
this ownership is what create leaders. So Jim and I and a few of us who make these tools possible
it's actually I sometimes get overwhelmed. It's like
oh, you know what we gonna do two billion kids is a lot of kids
but the biggest power that I feel is it's not just my problem to solve. It's everybody's problem to solve
they're playing a role and I have seen every day around the world
Every single day we hear about somebody around the world running Foldscope workshops with zero effort
from our side with zero push from our side because they care. So
this notion that eventually that these leaders know that they're at the driver's wheel which is exactly what you said Jim
it's just so powerful
cecause you know in the end a lot of technology that comes about which is a platform tool
and you ask yourself like this is what I'm gonna apply this to and this is how the world should use it
I have no idea how you should use it you have the diseases you have these tools
let's figure it out
and I'm here to help and
similarly there are thousands of other mentors here to help so we gotta be out of the driver seat because otherwise
we are gonna take this bus to a
specific location. What we really need is these people to really take them in where they want to go
so it's fantastic because you've all answered.
Another question the question very precisely was you've created solutions to enhance the existing state of education how can we use your?
innovations to reform the education and what I'm hearing you say is give it away because it's people themselves
who will reform.
Fabulous
Do we have an anti-science -- no let me not ask them
How can we overcome the anti science, anti
Intellectual, anti journalists bias that we currently have in American society
What are we going to do about this?
I mean I think you should all take out a subscription to something by the way.
Can you explain that what we have an anti science
society. I think
Well so we can ask do you feel that we have
an anti-science doing culture is that everyone's saying yes, we have that should we take a raise okay?
Who says we have an anti-science culture? we are sitting here in Silicon Valley.
Okay who says we do not have an anti-science culture. Okay, who can't make up their mind
See we're kind of divided. Let me cut this question slightly differently you know I think
in science one of the goals is to find the truth
we follow the truth wherever it takes us
but in the end
the frontiers of science have moved so
far and so far into our imagination because we love to build on top of each other's imagination and
We left a little bit of a part out which has become a problem is
society's
viewpoints, but at that same time how do we bring everybody to that upfront and one of the ways that we do that is we
share knowledge
is this important bit that really make us as a as a race
such an important crust of how these frontiers move, but science has a critically an equally important thing of experience
So when you couple
knowledge with experience how many of you have seen your own blood cells? Let me have a raise of hands
So this is remarkable. This is maybe like 10% of you and
that's awesome.
I mean those little blood cells make you work.
Every little one of these details and but that's
Experience you could watch a picture of a blood cell and say you know I get it. No you don't
When you really are bleeding and you decided to take that moment and look through what am I made of?
That is what I mean by experience
I mean when we were playing with Foldscope and some of you gasps by what kale looks like
That's the moment and I think this notion of ecole anti-science is
In some sense are we truly sharing the experience of science with everybody so that we can have a true conversation.
Sometimes that conversation is missed out and
then
fake journalism and people who have another agenda
can take over because it's their knowledge versus another knowledge
I'll give you another example when I am out in the field my hardest problem in healthcare work out in the middle of nowhere
is how do I make somebody believe in medicine? I mean, I say there are germs on your hands. They've never seen one
it's as good as this Voodoo's explanation who said that oh, there is some spiritual power here
and we know germ theories right because we have experience so we have to be careful about this notion of
not just isolating and giving this perfect answer because it might isolate these communities to begin with
really, let's have a rational conversation
with the important bit that in science as
scientists as all of us who you if you call yourself a scientist. It is your job to
communicate this experience of science to every single person you meet it is not written in your job
description but please remember we will not exist if that was not in your job description
I just want to say I don't think I think
global warming for example the majority of scientists
that's vast vast accept it. We almost all scientists accept it ok I
wonder that we have an anti science. I think we have a responsible reporting
I think the media is not always doing the jo it's supposed to do. There's good media. There's bad
but there's there's so much now in social media is so prevalent. I think there's a danger
I hear seventeen-year-old students saying we don't trust the media that's incredibly dangerous.
Um I would love to have a long conversation about trusting the media, but but that might get us a little off-topic
So I'm gonna go back to two other questions that came up
and I hope the questioners will forgive me for for combining them because there's an element of similarity
I'll tell you both of them one says I am a person of color
What advice do you have for people of color for
Educators, what's the best way to be a change agent for education and the second person said how do we get students with learning?
disabilities past the merit based testing reward as members of a disadvantaged community
so that they have an opportunity to be recognized. So I think we're hearing questions from people in these communities sayin.
How shall we lead? How do we get recognized?
We have to talk about it
we have to just talk if you're an educator and you are in charge of a classroom
And you work with students I bet you do this anyway.
I don't know who asked the question, but we have to talk openly and the more we talk the less afraid
we'll be to make mistakes because we're gonna make mistakes
We have to not be afraid to condemn what we believe in our heart
crosses that line and is wrong and yet we also have to be open to all
types of opinions and views. It's really hard, and I think for
you know there's this I think
no matter who you are if you're a person of color or or not you have to feel like it's your responsibility
to allow students the space to talk and that space has to be safe
and it has to be the kind of space where they can come to you with questions
at Posse that's what we do all the time. We're running a retreat this year called Hate
Hope and Race in America
and when you hear those words hate, and hope I
imagine it brings up a lot of images and ideas in your own head, so we're getting
6,000 students in college to talk about that we're bringing faculty to that too
But just the more you talk about it the easier It is to find solutions
maybe that feels like I'm sorry if it feels like too vague an answer, but I can't stress enough how important that is
well, I think I think one of the big issues that we're talking about is people don't want to be defined by one characteristic and
I think that so many people with disabilities
don't want to be the
blind person or the dyslexic person if that comes out and our society gives you every reason in the world to deny or
not talk about an invisible disability like that
and I think what the shift of appreciation is
is happening where people are beginning to realize that many of the things that let's say people with learning
disabilities who make them not good at reading
you know many of those traits were darn adaptive at an earlier point in human society and many of those things
actually work in people's favor.
I mean Richard Branson and Virgin probably pretty darn happy that he's
maladaptive when it comes to reading because it certainly is otherwise worked out for him pretty well.
And so a lot of what we have to do is
stop thinking that these are people who are
broken and need to be fixed and that defines them, but instead say can we get them the tools or the accommodations or or measure
creativity and productivity in a different way other than taking the SAT. Without my spectacles.
I would be blind and no one talks to me like I'm a blind person because I have a tool that
stops me from being blind. I think I think it's the same thing that we as tool makers
just have to say just make those differences a characteristic like having brown hair or
an ear piercing as opposed to this life defining
characteristic where people just put you in a box and say you can't do X because you have this one
characteristic which should not define your life.
What do you hear from your students?
I mean I think one of the challenges that we often face is
this idea of coming from their point of view and growing up sometimes
you meet somebody who's already been exposed to many of these they've been put in the box for a long while and
although of course we have to reinvent ourselves as society, but then we also have to tackle what do we do at this moment and
one of the things that I at least find is
you know there are moments in which
the way we define success for many individuals and the fact that
essentially there is this cascade laid out in our academic system of you know this is a college that you gotta go
this is what you have to do.
We miss out the opportunity of letting the know that the purpose of this is to really find yourself in the end
and we really have to build tools
to provide to the people who've been put in this box many times, and you know I'm
you mentioned the context of race and
the context of blindness I see this many in times in terms of just remote communities where
you know they've been living a lifestyle forever in this way, and now a dramatic change is coming and
you have this option of either
figuring out how to get out of that situation or you have the chance of tackling that situation right there and
most of the time the amount that we have done in beating the same mantra to them has been
way over the top. So we need to figure out ways of solutions in which we will be able to
prepare the people although this is what they have faced so far
there is the next future in which they are part of the solution and that's starting to happen with democratization
of tools at least for science very strongly. There is a movement of democratization of scientific tools
democratization of some of the knowledge already happened, so they need to believe in this fact that this trend will continue and
eventually they should see themselves as problem solvers
but we are in a very tough situation here because many times if I'm out there. I'm working with somebody
essentially at the back of their head, they're really thinking about okay,
I mean all this is good, but what is my next career move and that really shatters the whole thing because you know then
they're really looking for that one step. Which is what you know
we've propagated along the way is like which college should I be going to I think that we could ask questions all night long?
But unfortunately we're getting near the end of our program.
We've heard so much about looking at the world differently about asking fierce
questions about asking a lot of questions and
about us changing our point of view and us changing our way that we look at people
what I'd like to ask each of you now is
to give us some advice.
Give us some advice when we walk out that door or turn off the radio.
How can we look at the world differently?How can we do something differently that will make a difference?
Bring more people into the world of science and technology
so that they will be finding and inventing and
asking all of the questions about the future. What's something different that we can do?
Lead on
I tell this story a lot. I'm gonna tell it to you
aAnd I think this goes back to the person who asked what can I do as an educator, but it's all of us
About a year and a half ago. I was in a room
at Deloitte with the CEO of the company Cathy Engelbert
She's a woman CEO of a fortune 500 company. There are hardly any of those and
she was talking to 50 Posse alumni and
one
woman raised her hand and she said you're a woman, and you're a CEO. How did you get to be there?
Cathy said I'm gonna tell you. You need to remember three things first you have to work really hard
and I thought
Okay, that's not that interesting.
She said second you have to find a mentor someone who could really guide you and be your mentor, and I thought
Okay, that's good
but then she said the third thing
there has to be someone who will pound the table for you and let me tell you what I mean by that she said I
worked really hard and I had mentors at Deloitte, and I was really doing well, but there was this one person at Deloitte
He was an executive and when he was in the room where the decisions were being made and you
sitting at the table and the door was closed
he would pound the table he'd say have you thought about Cathy have you considered Cathy. Cathy is great Cathy is awesome
Cathy Cathy Cathy Cathy
and
Little by little he made his point and Cathy rose in the ranks
and she attributes a great part of her success to someone who pounded the table and
everybody in this room
Can pound the table you can pound it for one person and you will make a difference.
That's what we can do.
Excellent, Jim,
Manu
You know we're talking about STEM education and
as a technologist, I'm excited that we can shift
sort of education from one size fits all where kids have to adapt to education as we present it to where they get to actually
learn the things that they really want to do and we've
we're still at the early stages of doing this people talk about it a lot and
the thing that I talked to
designers about and companies about is
your
customer your user is not you. We know this in Silicon Valley because of the demographics, but but if we really take it seriously
we should think really broadly about who our customer and user is and and in my field that's called Universal Design
We should be designing for everyone.
Senior citizens and people who don't speak English as the first language and everything else if you do that
you will make more money, and you're gonna give more opportunity to all those folks and
but it takes a mind shift because as an engineer I'm often building for myself
And it's a big shift to think about a product that maybe it wasn't what I would get but would actually help
you know a hundred times more people and I think that's the shift the mind shift that has to go on
in many of the companies and the publishers that publish educational materials to
just give that much bigger range of opportunities and people can find
The real kind of opportunity that is gonna make them successful on their own terms
Yeah, just to add to this I think we have to realize this
in the whole conversation, I don't think we said this. This is probably
The most I mean from my point of view the most exciting time to do science just the world
exploded I mean A) we have
probably the hardest problems
ahead of us you know climate change, biodiversity loss, the lack of resources
we just don't this is not an infinitely abundant planet
just we should be frank about this and so it's in your benefit to bring science to people
but at that same time in that abundance of
problems and talent we have this huge problem of access and
often enough and you're thinking about this you're thinking about yourself is how I can
apply the democratization of tools that have now become available to the problems you care about. Jim and I when we think about this problem.
We can make as many microscopes possibly just even more than the number of kids on this planet
I know we can solve that problem. I cannot manufacture mentors
There is no formula for manufacturing mentors, if somebody hadn't held my hand and said that oh
You broke your brother's glasses. It's ok keep going. I wouldn't have been here and
All of us have the capacity to bring
True experience of science to people not just say hey you should be doing STEM or here
I bought this book for you. Go read it. No! show them the "aha" moment
Do that every day.
Science is such a magnet once you understand what a true aha moment is is really lead somebody
through their own question, and if we can do that at mentors you become an amplifier
you it's an amplification effect
and this is what we have seen in the smallest little effort that we have made in our community is that this amplification
has been ringing around the world like a
resonator and
All around the world this keeps going around and round and round and those mentors that had helped somebody are now helping somebody who's now.
Helping somebody so just make sure that you bring honest
"Aha" moments and try to be a mentor and it'll make a huge difference to your own understanding of science
so it goes both ways, and if I was not a mentor I would not have been a scientist I
think we've heard a wonderful collection of ideas and things that we can all do
Look at the world differently, pound the table for someone,
bring the joy of science of
asking questions
to other people, and think broadly about who the people are because
The solutions are going to come from everybody else and the next time you have an opportunity to come
To a panel with an unusual group of people
whether they're
Geniuses, whether they're cab drivers, whether they're people from remote places
whether we think we'd put a label on them,
come and open your eyes
because that's what creativity is all about. I
Hope you have enjoyed this evenings panel brought to you by the Commonwealth Club of Silicon Valley. Again
We'd like to thank Deborah Bial, founder and president of the Posse Foundation,
Jim Fruchterman, founder and CEO of Benetech, Manu Prakash, physical biologist at Stanford university
I'd like to thank all of you for coming here tonight and
All of you who have joined us on the radio
My name is Betsy Corcoran of EdSurge
Thank you very much. This meeting is adjourned
For more infomation >> Ten Tips to Work Effectively in Groups in Higher Education - Duration: 4:37. 
For more infomation >> Sex Trafficking Addressed In Rocklin Unified's New Sex Education Curriculum - Duration: 2:43. 
For more infomation >> Assignment: Education - Wisconsin voucher program expands - Duration: 3:09. 
For more infomation >> Officers, Families Start Autism Training To Help 'Spread The Education' - Duration: 0:45. 
For more infomation >> Zoo 4 You: New health center offers education classes for students - Duration: 2:44. 
Không có nhận xét nào:
Đăng nhận xét