What is relevant education?

While we were busy getting the first pillars for TEDxZurich 2013 ready, we have been hearing a lot about education, especially around TED Prize winner Sugata Mitra and his wish to build a school in the cloud, empowering children to explore and to learn from one another.

Thinking about the challenges of education today, we have been pointed to a talk held by Emanuel Souvairan at TEDxUNIGE this spring. «We have been living through an age of mass production in education. (…) All over the world, the model is a western education that promotes conformity, not diversity.» is one of his main statements. And: «Our western system isn’t working for us anymore, so how do we expect it to work for somebody else?»

It’s well worth watching, check it out:

Sarah Ebling

          Sarah Ebling holds a professorship in Accessibility Studies at Zurich University of Applied Sciences (ZHAW) and is a senior researcher at the University of Zurich. Her research focuses on natural language processing in the context of disabilities and special needs, specifically, sign language technology and automatic text simplification. Her groups’ contributions involve artificial intelligence techniques with a strong emphasis on user involvement. She is involved in various international and national projects and leads a large-scale Swiss innovation initiative entitled „Inclusive Information and Communication Technologies“ (2022-2026; https://www.iict.uzh.ch/).