Pleasures from the IdeaFestival

I took my third trip to the Idea Festival in Louisville. It’s hosted in late September or early October at the beautiful Performing Arts Center in downtown Louisville, Kentucky. Here are a few snippets from some of the sessions I attended.

“The Finland Phenomenon” by Dr. Tony Wagner from the Harvard graduate school of education was about how Finland moved from bottom to top in world academic achievement by moving from individual achievement to collaboration, from expertise to problem solving, from penalizing failure to taking risks, from “Sit and get” to working to create solutions, and from reward and punishment to inner motivation.
Lempäälä, Finland (Photo credit: 350.org)

This sounds too good to be true, but the concepts were about pulling things out of students and getting them curious, inventive, and exploratory.
“Shakespeare Behind Bars” is an amazingly successful vision that got launched by Shakespearean actor and director Curt Tofteland who went to Luther Luckett Correctional Complex in Lagrange, KY and began see huge rehabilitation advances in inmates who tried out for roles in rigorously performed plays.
Shakespeare Behind Bars-13 (Photo credit: Inkyhack)

By identifying with characters on stage, they get in touch with their own humanity, and some even are success stories now on the outside. One such man said, “By playing someone else, I became myself.” Kurt also adds the hope that says, “You don’t have to become what it is that you did,” meaning that a person can see beyond an individual act of crime and find an identity that is not based on past actions.
Jodie Wu told how 1.5 billion people live on less than $150 a month. Her program is that of “Frugal innovation.” For example she told how in Tanzania, maize had always been beaten with sticks. She helped design a device made by cutting up a bicycle and connecting it to a chair. The pedals then became the means of a new technology to beat out the maize. She helps people around the world come up with modestly priced technologies to increase efficiency but also disseminate them in an entrepreneurial way, giving indigenous people a way to start businesses in their areas.
#photoadaymay .15 love. Mental floss (Photo credit: haleypc)

The session by “Mental Floss” was fun because my office-mate, Dr. Karen Dougherty, has a son, Ethan, who is an editor for their magazine in NY. Founders Will Pearson and Mangesh Hattikudur were there, and they interviewed three of their “Golden Lobe” award winners. One was Sejal Vallabh, an amazing female high school student who found a way to teach tennis to the blind. We watched a video, and the technique is based on sound. The ball is a bit bigger and makes a certain sound, and the players get 2-3 bounces before having to hit, and so they locate the ball by sound. Sejal exudes a special love and vision, and the interview was special.