Patrick Awuah makes a passionate case for why a liberal arts education is vital to help educate leaders in Ghana.

I think his idea is transferable.  Here in Scotland there are now far too many courses around these days that teach you how to do one thing in one way.  They don’t teach you how to think, to problem solve or to create.  That works if the thing you are trained to do never changes.  But that’s not life as we know it.

Chris Abani’s amazing, moving and inspiring TED talk, Stories of Humanity.

A long time ago I started to write a book.  By started I mean that I wrote down a couple of chapter titles and a few thoughts.  The title of one of the chapters was “Paralysed By Choice - the paradox of post-modern youth”.  Now I wish I’d written it.  But because I didn’t I can recommend Barry Schwartz brilliant TED talk on the same topic.

Choice fascinates me.  In lots of ways I like choice.  At least I think I do.  I have the choice to spend my evenings doing lots of different things, so why do I spend them watching House or working or nothing much.

I think the church suffers badly from choice overload.  It seems that in places where there is one flavour of church that the church does ok.  People go.  They don’t question if it could be better.  They commit to making the most of it.  Is that our problem?  Too much choice?  And does that choice raise our expectation?  I think it does.  And I’m not sure that’s always a good thing.

Maybe Calvin has it right.  Lower expectations lead to less disappointment.  But it also stops us wondering what might have been.  I loved the cartoon in Schwartz’s talk showing the guy at work thinking about golf, when he’s playing golf thinking about his wife and when he’s making love to his wife he’s thinking about work.

There is something very important about being present.  Being in the moment.  Not thinking about what you could have won (in a Bullseye fashion!).  That doesn’t mean settling.  It means committing.

Is that the price we pay?  More choice = less committment?  I think it might be, and I’m not sure the choice is worth it.

Another brilliant TED talk… this time from Chris Jordan who shows his fantastic art which depicts some shocking statistics.  What I liked most about this talk was his passion about highlighting our lack of a sense of anger and outrage about some of the horrific things happening today.

I’ve posted talks by Clay Shirky before.  This one is from TED a while back but seems somehow more relevant now than it might have been a few years ago.

His ideas about collaberation seem to chime with my own thinking about the church as an institution and the problem it faces.  The church is an institution seems based on knowledge and control of that knowledge and access to it.  There is of course nothing wrong with striving to deepen our knowledge but my concern has always been that to set apart a whole class of people as the keepers of that knowledge devalues the insights and discoveries of anyone outside that group.

It seems to me that Shirky is talking about the same thing when he talks about the potential of open source collaboration and free access.  The problems for the church in that prospect are the same as for any institution.  If anyone can contribute and if that contribution is to be valued, or at least proves to be valuable, where does that leave the institution as it no longer has a monopoly on knowledge, insight and understanding.

If the church has set itself up based on that mediation of knowledge and structures itself to maintain that mediated access then Shirky’s vision of open source, open comment, the long tail and grouping knowledge and information through tagging and sharing means big trouble for the institution… but a big future for communities of believers.

Sir Ken Robinson gives a challenging talks on education and creativity to TED.  Go make a cuppa and spend 20min watching.

There are few conferences that I really wish I could go to, but TED is one, and not just for the very cool conference bags! The TED 2008 conference is almost here. You can follow the build up at the TED Blog and watch some amazing talks like this one from Isobel Allende and this one from LOST creator JJ Abrams:

I wonder… what would you talk about given 15 minutes with some of the smartest people on the planet?

I know this has been around for a while but TED (Technology Entertainment Design) have been busy updating their content and there’s loads of great new talks to inspire and amaze.  Well worth a look.