This piece speaks for itself:

Think, Make, Tinker: Theo, Isaac, Leo, Max, Hannah, Nik, Sam, Jacob, Julie and Gever set off to test their inventions on Day 6 of Tinkering School. Nods to King of Hawaii for the groovy surf vibe.

Who is Neil Postman?

Wanna watch more? I sure did. Click here.

thinfilms is pleased to have the honor of working with Gever Tulley this summer in San Francisco.

Gever is a gifted, self-taught computer scientist and developer, having started his professional career at age 16. He is an inspiration to me and to many, many others. His work with the Tinkering School enables children as both learners and teachers, working towards the goal of bringing the next generations back into touch with play, discovery and the other whimsical tools that put our minds in closer natural proximity to innovation.

Here’s Gever’s most recent talk at TED, worth watching because he explains this like no one else can:

via @datavis:

This is an astounding metaphor for our culture and the gravity of our situation as lifeforms on a planet we know next-to-nothing about:
enveloped by the inelegance of our current technology, with wires and all kinds of ugly schwack running up and down the walls surrounding and protecting him, Ed Lu is aboard the International Space Station. Technically, he IS out of our atmosphere and orbiting in space, though, he is only BARELY off-world. Consider the resources and history it took just to get him THIS far.
Meanwhile, he engages in this arguably “unproductive” act of pure beauty, playing a sonata written by a composer who’s been dead almost 200 years.
Ever so slowly but surely, this clip seems to make it all worth it:

From Wikipedia:

Neil Postman (March 8, 1931 – October 5, 2003) was an American author, media theorist and cultural critic, who is best known by the general public for his 1985 book about television, Amusing Ourselves to Death. For more than forty years, he was associated with New York University. Postman was a humanist, who believed that “new technology can never substitute for human values.”

What was he like? You can get an idea from this brief interview

Mr. Postman worked closely with Marshall McLuhan

In 1977, Marshall McLuhan defined media ecology as:

…means arranging various media to help each other so they won’t cancel each other out, to buttress one medium with another. You might say, for example, that radio is a bigger help to literacy than television, but television might be a very wonderful aid to teaching languages. And so you can do some things on some media that you cannot do on others. And, therefore, if you watch the whole field, you can prevent this waste that comes by one canceling the other out.

Inspired by McLuhan, Neil Postman founded the Program in Media Ecology at New York University in 1971. He described it as:

Media ecology looks into the matter of how media of communication affect human perception, understanding, feeling, and value; and how our interaction with media facilitates or impedes our chances of survival. The word ecology implies the study of environments: their structure, content, and impact on people.

Author Michael Pollan says:

The tulip, by gratifying our desire for a certain kind of beauty, has gotten us to take it from its origins in Central Asia and disperse it around the world. Marijuana, by gratifying our desire to change consciousness, has gotten people to risk their lives, their freedom, in order to grow more of it and plant more of it. The potato, by gratifying our desire for control, control over nature so that we can feed ourselves has gotten itself out of South America and expanded its range far beyond where it was 500 years ago. And the apple, by gratifying our desire for sweetness begins in the forests of Kazakhstan and is now the universal fruit. These are great winners in the dance of domestication.

surely most of you have seen this before but i still watch it from time-to-time: