This is a stylisation of a slideshow originally created by Karl Fisch, examining globalisation and America's future in the 21st century. Our experiences and perspectives as educators are going to be shaped by the context we are in. However, the themes of Did You Know? are global in nature and apply to schools and children around the world. We want all children to be successful. We do not view the growing importance of India and China as negative but rather as additional opportunities for everyone in the world. The challenge is how can we achieve this?

TED Talks: Sir Ken Robinson - About this talk
Sir Ken Robinson makes an entertaining (and profoundly moving) case for creating an education system that nurtures creativity, rather than undermining it. With ample anecdotes and witty asides, Robinson points out the many ways our schools fail to recognise - much less cultivate - the talents of many brilliant people. "We are educating people out of their creativity," Robinson says. The universality of his message is evidenced by its rampant popularity online. A typical review: "If you have not yet seen Sir Ken Robinson's TED talk, please stop whatever you're doing and watch it now."

Thought-provoking questions - discuss these in the Talkzone:

• How could we better encourage the development of creativity in our education system?
• What needs to change in our curriculum, our assessment processes, our approaches to teaching?

This video was created by Dr Michael Wesch and the 200 students enrolled in ANTH 200: Introduction to Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University, Spring 2007. It began as a brainstorming exercise, thinking about how students learn, what they need to learn for their future, and how our current educational system fits in. A Google Document was created to facilitate the brainstorming exercise, which began with the following instructions: "... the basic idea is to create a 3 minute video highlighting the most important characteristics of students today - how they learn, what they need to learn, their goals, hopes, dreams, what their lives will be like, and what kinds of changes they will experience in their lifetime. We already know some things from previous research (and if you know of any interesting statistics, please list them along with the source). Others we will need to find out by doing a class survey. Please add whatever you want to know or present."

The ethnographer's job is to immerse himself in the culture being studied and participate in order to get a better understanding of their ways of life. By this definition Prof Wesch has accomplished a rather unique milestone by summarising the insights of his work in the digital arena into the short video Web 2.0 ... The machine is us/ing us, which digests this relatively new concept in a way that makes it accessible to those that are not part of the elite group at the forefront of the web evolution.

In this poignant, funny follow-up to his fabled 2006 talk, Sir Ken Robinson makes the case for a radical shift from standardized schools to personalized learning -- creating conditions where kids' natural talents can flourish.