Six and a half minutes. That’s all it will take for you to watch this remarkably inspiring TED Talk of one person’s sensitivity and vision that became a gift first to her neighborhood and then to neighborhoods throughout the world. Candy Chang is what I would describe as a community artist. She is, indeed, an artist…and a designer…and an urban planner. But what strikes me most about her is that she takes all these varied skills and uses them to offer gifts to her community, to invite her community to understand, refine, and claim their identity more fully. In this sense, then, she is an artist for her community, a public artist...
Tweet Fiction
posted by DJL
The following eleven-minute TED Talk by Andrew Alexander combines two of my great interests: 1) story-telling and 2) changes in information technology. In particular, Alexander, a writer, founder of the Twitter Fiction Festival, and member of the News and Journalism Parternship team at...
Introducing TED-Ed
posted by DJL
From nearly the beginning of this blog, I’ve been featuring TED Talks most Wednesdays. I discovered TED Talks the way most others have: someone told me about them. 🙂 And I remember having such a hard time believing that all these incredible talks were being made available for free and...
Reframing Stress
posted by DJL
Most of us know that stress is bad. And in recent years we’ve been finding out just how bad. As it turns out, stress affects our sleep, our health, our sense of wellbeing, our relationships. Yes, most of us know that stress is bad. Or is it? That’s the question that researcher, teacher,...
Embracing Our Limitations
posted by DJL
Phil Hansen’s ten minute TED Talk is as important as it is poignant. Faced with a condition that made his hand shake and thereby seemed to destroy his dreams of being an artist, he took his neurologist’s advice to “embrace the shake.” When he did, he eventually discovered a number of remarkable ways to make art that didn’t compensate or overcome or even transcend his shaking but rather employed it to lead him to new creative ventures and vistas. What Hansen discovered was that far from reducing creativity, limitations actually increase it. Limitations set boundaries, close off the obvious routes forward, and invite – actually...