Kyra wins local talent competition @ Don't Tell Mamas in NYC

Liz Danico opened her workshop WAYS OF SEEING: INSTRUCTIONS ON GETTING LOST by examining the way Americans peel bananas to discuss the limits on the ways we see or perceive things. This was the STAR MOMENT of the afternoon at the Day of Interaction Feast Workshops yesterday. http://www.feastongood.com/Events. I will never look at a banana the same way ever again. Thx Liz!
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A FILM SHOOT FOR TED FELLOWS
This past Saturday, July 11th, I participated in a professional film shoot for an ad that will feature TED Fellows. The shoot featured eight Baruch students and I acted out a class discussion to launch the next phase of our One Laptop Per Child/Class Fundraising campaign this fall. Last December 2008 we raised almost $700 dollars (I inaccurately mentioned $800 earlier) and made a viral video for the beta of the campaign to exponentially increase our fundraising. Since we did this the last week of classes, were did not do any promotion or marketing of the YouTube video. But the amount we raised with only two classes (52 students) allowed us to easily donate 3 laptops in the first phase.
The simplicity of the game is that any class--including faculty--can band together to donate a laptop for just $10 or less per person (20 students + instructor @ $10 per person; 100 students + instructor @ $2 per person). With this project we can provide access to education for the 5 billion people who do not have the luxury we in the core nations have. Roughly 1 billion of the 6.8 billion ppl on the planet have access to a computer. Access to a computer can lead not only to education but self-sustaining development in peripheral economic nations or what we once called the Third World.
Carlos from Dominican Republic:
That's about 700 pesos and you could pay for a month's rent or a month's worth of food.
Two men of Haitian descent, one from US and one from Canada
Wesley from US: I would pay for cell phone bill (Kyra: would it cover it?) Ye...NO!
Steven from Canada: In Haiti, a $199 would probably buy ...about 20 meals, 20 good meals, good Lambi a seafood meal. And in Canada...I would buy a iPod. I would buy something to put my music on. This big (he articulates with his fingers about 2 inches).
Xiwe from China:
I am from China...Sichuan. For most people they can live for one month, a whole family. About a family of two.
Critics of the OLPC project focused on two things. Firstly, that developing countries need development, food and medical aid, not laptops. Secondly, that what they describe as "cut-down computers" are patronizing to people there. To answer the first point, the goal is to provide education, not simply computers. Educated people don't stay poor people for long, and lack of education is behind many of the developing world's problems. The second point shows how little people in the first world -- myself included -- understand the infrastructure of the developing world.
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TRICKS
This is a film by Peyton Wilson whom I will meet this weekend as part of a post-TED opportunity that came my way. Speed and Angels is the name of the film. Description: From dogfights in the Nevada desert, to night landings on aircraft
carriers in the Atlantic what begins as a story of realizing a
childhood dream turns into a story of fighting for one's life.
Peyton will be filming me this weekend for a documentary by a major telecomm company affiliated with the TED Fellows. I am so grateful for the post-TED opportunities that keep coming my way. This is the way life should work for my students. Heck, for all students in US colleges and universities. Being able to expand their network of influence to leverage opportunities that really change the way you see what's possible in the world--that's when real change happens--and students today are so deprived of that amazing moment when people come together and something incredible and unpredictable comes of a connection with someone you just met, or sat next to at TED or in the classroom, or randomly made conversation with a stranger for 5 mins and that connection becomes a collaboration for life. That's the TED magic. The TED moment to me. The trick is to be ready to make something happen when the moment comes and to not resist because you are not sure what it might look like. That's TED!!
PITCHES
Learning to pitch your idea to an audience of influence or to your colleagues who don't get what TED is about is an art. As a professor at a public university, I am expected to publish not perish. And while I resist that game at times, I realize that getting the word out about my thinking--and I do have some wonderful things to write about from research with Africans and African Americans in a Harlem nightclub or hip-hop or black girls' musical games--is key. Pitching how other people think about your ideas is even more key. It's the tonic of scaling up your idea, if I can borrow a musical analogy (tonic: relating to or being the keynote of a major or minor scale; the central pitch of "tonic harmony").
This week as I prepare for the film shoot with Peyton, who is from LA, and others coming from London, as I coordinate bringing some of my students into the mix of the documentary, I had to deal with pitching the opportunity this documentary can be not only to my college and its administrators who don't get what TED brings to all whom it touches, but I also had to pitch the educational value of being involved with a documentary made by a major telecomm company. I learned that saying "commercial ad" vs. "documentary" changes the entire listening for what's possible with the Chief Legal Counsel who has to give us a site license for approval to use the college. The commercial ad suggests a particular reaction. He wrote: "I hope that _____ hasn’t been led to
believe they can just walk on campus and start filming."
What I am learning from all this is that when new things come our way, the only thing we have to relate it to is the past and that breeds a kind of cynicism as if people are only out to take advantage. All this came from me throwing a loose pitch to my administrator about a commercial (a base hit) instead of what it really is a documentary (strike 1!) about me (strike 2!) but about my students ingenuity (strike 3! Next batter up!). The aim is to win the game of getting new ideas to students, faculty and administrators that the use of social media and user-generated content from collaborations between a professor who is a TED Fellow and her students can make a world of education come alive (HOMERUN!)
TED FELLOWSHIP
Here's a bigger glimpse of what's come from having TED Fellowship (LONG BEACH CLASS OF 2009 RULES!!). "TED Fellowship" can be heard as an award or as a verb, an action. So far, I have fellowshipped with other TEDsters in the following ways:
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SUPPORT DISABILITY RIGHTS & SUPPORT LIVING LIFE FULLY
TO VOTE VISIT: http://www.dariusgoeswest.org/how-to-vote-for-darius-to-win-100k/
———————————————————————-
KYRA D. GAUNT, Ph.D.
What I am working on in 2009: RACISM AS A RESOURCE (Agree to be Offended and Stay in the Conversation)
Henry Ford once said, “Failure is only the opportunity to begin again more intelligently.”
My website: http://kyraocity.com
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I'm just back from winning the outstanding poster award with a revision of my TED Fellows talk renamed HOW TO TRANSFORM YOUR VIEW OF RACE IN 3 MINS or LESS (video coming asap) at the 2009 Conference for Global Transformation (#CGT09) in SF sponsored by Landmark Education. It was called Racism as a Resource
at TED2009 but this is more like a Racism in Plain English Common Craft
video. Encourage all the fellows and others to learn how to give a 3
min talk because you can carry it anywhere and call it a poster! LOL
If you want to know more about #CGT09 follow my twitter updates from May 15-17 at http://twitter.com/kyraocity. You might also be interested, esp. if you are in NYC, in my tweets from Baruch's School of Public Affairs #Nonprofit Seminar on Arts & Cultural Orgnizations in Times of Financial Crisis that took place May 18, 2009.
My real purpose for blogging this morning is to announce a new video about us TED Fellows
that I am so excited about. Really captures our energy and the spirit
of the program. Just got it minutes ago and sent it out as quicktime
and flash in earlier version of this post but just got word moments
later that we should wait for embedded version later this week.
Stay tuned for another GREAT UNVEILING in video form.
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Be curious what others think about that the US Administration will not be attending the UN Conference on Racism this year. This despite the US Attorney General Eric Holder stating we are a "nation of coward" (See my previous post).
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A polymath (Greek polymathēs, πολυμαθής, "having learned much")[1] is a person whose knowledge is not restricted to one subject area. In less formal terms, a polymath (or polymathic person) may simply refer to someone who is very knowledgeable. Most ancient scientists were polymaths by today’s standards.[2] (From Wikipedia).
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