My Day At TEDxPhilly!!!

Fab day at TEDx Philly! Well worth investment. Excellent speakers and topics! Philadelphia's Kimmel Center, a perfect setting! So inspiring, so emotionally moving, so intellectually challenging, such a great chance to network with kindred souls, ideophiles and world-changers, actual and aspiring!

My favorite speakers (http://tedxphilly.com/speakers) were:

Chris Lehman talking about schools training for life and citizenship more than just for work. (http://www.scienceleadership.org/)

Simon Hauger talking about project based education and students who innovate better than corporations and major universities and his desire to buildwww.workshopschool.org

Jay Coen Gilbert talking about B Corps (Beneficial Corporations) as distinct from C or S Corps (http://www.bcorporation.net/)

Nic Esposito talking about Urban Farming, Food Security and local Economic Viability (http://phillyrooted.org/)

Stanford Hamilton talking about links between music education and life achievement and moving me to near weeping tears with a live performance of his Philly Youth Orchestra (http://www.stanfordthompson.com/heart.html)

Key next steps are:

1. Lobby my local legislator about B-Corporation legislation.

2. Make time to educate underskilled, underemployed people I know about Urban Farming as an educational and economic opportunity

3. Make time to restart my piano lessons to I can be a jazz pianist by 55.

4. Find a way to support project-based education as a sponsor, coach, mentor, etc.

Key takeaways were:

1. You have to remember that you are an artist - Aptowicz. Budget, time, money and energy for this.

2. The world is no place for rest but for effort - Mutter

3. Nothing is denied well directed labor - Mutter

4. Schools should teach how to learn, live and to be citizens, not just how to work. - Lehman

5. Lehman's points: 1) ask questions, 2) seek answers, 3) build real stuff, 4) share and 5) change the world

6. Presently, humans are the most environmentally just and humane we have been in the history of the world (paraphrase) - Nic Esposito

7. We need to move from owning means of production to owning means of existence - Nic Esposito

8. We are moving from 20th century shareholder capitalism to 21st century stakeholder capitalism - JC Gilbert

9. We must harness the power of business for the purpose of civil society - JC Gilbert

10. We must bridge the curiosity gap in children, (and ourselves) - Stanford Thompson

11. You cannot teach critical thinking without critical conditions - Azeem Hill, W. Philly student & X Prize Competitor

12. New term of the day - "data exhaust". We all have it.

13. Our innovation birthright can reverse itself and become someone else's. (paraphrased) - Evan Malone

14. Hackerspace is the recreation of the future. - Evan Malone

It was certainly a productive day indeed! And one more bucket list item is marked off. :-D