Yes, they are actually curious about science. Image Couretsy of Margaret Kroto
It is not every day that you meet a Nobel laureate in chemistry who calls himself Harry, rather than Professor Kroto or Sir Harold. But this guest speaker, slated to give a Skoltech seminar on July 15, is different. Perhaps it’s because he focuses not on his own credentials but on future generations. Harry Kroto deals with new ways of tapping into young people’s creativity, in an ever-changing landscape of webinars, online courses, and seemingly endless knowledge. Harry Kroto cares about young people living in what he calls the GooYouWiki World – and their brains.
Seminar Title: “The Educational Revolution and the Goo-You-Wiki World”
When: July 15th, 12 PM
Where: Beijing-1 Auditorium, China cluster Skolkovo School of Management
Further details and info: buldina@skolkovotech.ru
Seminar Abstract
The aim of education is to uncap the creative potential of every child and we now have a new device which promises to help us do better than before. The Internet has initiated the second great revolution in education; the first was initiated by the printing press. The GooYouWiki World not only makes information almost instantaneously locatable and accessible today, but it also enables anyone with expertise and the passion to communicate to contribute to the amazing globally-accessible cache of knowledge.
On-line education is of course invaluable for students who are unable to attend a university physically but it is not clear that the simple repackaging of courses utilizes the new technology to its full potential. For instance the traditional teacher-student dynamics is basically no different on-line from what it was before and certainly the close personal teacher-student interaction, often so crucial in successful education relationships, is lost. We should thus also explore the new imaginative educational approaches which this technology offers for instance to conflate synergistically with, rather than replace, traditional ones.
A first initiative in the UK, www.vega.org.uk, is now a fantastic archive of recordings by outstanding scientists and its spin-off is the Global Educational Outreach for Science, Engineering and Technology (GEOSET) initiative (www.geoset.info) which is aimed at capturing the ingenuity of teachers to explain specific topics which can be used by other teachers elsewhere on the planet.
It also enables students to contribute creatively to the great humanitarian endeavor of building the “Global Cache of Knowledge” and at the same time improve greatly their career prospects. GEOSET turns the dynamics of the teaching process round by 180 degrees and focuses on the educator capturing what the teacher wants to teach.
Our new related initiative is assembling Teacher’s Tricks of The Trade, focused nuggets of teaching genius to be streamed from the new www.TToTTs.com website for other teachers to employ in their own lessons and lectures.
Prof. Sir Harold Kroto, Nobel Laureate (1996), Chemistry
Speaker Introduction
Professor Sir Harold Kroto FRS, was knighted in 1996 for contributions to chemistry and later that year, together with Robert Curl and Richard Smalley (of Rice University, Houston, Texas), received the Nobel Prize for Chemistry for the discovery of C60 Buckminsterfullerene – a new form of carbon. Fellow of the Royal Society (1990), Foreign Associate of the National Academy of Sciences (US), President of the Royal Society of Chemistry (2002-2004). Longstaff Medal of the Royal Society of Chemistry (1993), Faraday Lecturer 2001 (Royal Society), Copley Medal of the Royal Society (2002), Erasmus Medal of Academia Europaea, Freeman of the City of Torino, 29 Hon Degrees.
* The Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology (Skoltech) is a private graduate research university in Skolkovo, Russia, a suburb of Moscow. Established in 2011 in collaboration with MIT, Skoltech educates global leaders in innovation, advances scientific knowledge, and fosters new technologies to address critical issues facing Russia and the world. Applying international research and educational models, the university integrates the best Russian scientific traditions with twenty-first century entrepreneurship and innovation.