How does affluence influence biodiversity?  – asks Drew Thompson, inviting you to discuss the role of affluent societies in environmental harm. Sudni Rucks, also a student, challenges us to think and talk about the ecosystems we use: What are ecosystem services that you rely on everyday? Are you willing to pay for them?

These conversations run for one week and new ones will be posted every Monday and Wednesday every week until early June.

This is the second time that Jessica Green has involved TEDinClass Conversations in her class. Find more student-run conversations from Jessica Green’s previous course on Population Biology. We asked Jessica about her motivations in using TED Conversations to teach:

“University of Oregon students motivate me. The students in my Population Ecology this year are exceptionally gifted. Inspired by TED Fellow Nina Tandon’s experience, I brought the option of initiating TED Conversations to my classroom. The students have embraced the process wholeheartedly. It is clear that individuals and groups are the most creative when they take ownership over the learning process. I am motivated to continue teaching in ways that serve our continually evolving student needs. I think the students are slowly getting the hang of things — and they are getting VERY excited! This is so special for the students! I have never seen students this engaged. WOW. I’m inspired as a teacher.”

New Conversations from Biodiversity class can be accessed through special tags: TEDinClass, TEDinClassroom, Biodiversity class, or simply by visiting this page:

http://www.ted.com/conversations/topics/Biodiversity+class

All of the TEDinClass conversations so far can be found here >>

Here are some highlights of the back-and-forth:

Vanessa Borg : “Changes in digital technology has not only helped us but it has hindered us at the same time. Whereas up to until a couple of years ago you could enjoy a dinner with a person knowing that you have their complete attention, nowadays you know that as soon as their bag/ pocket/ jacket starts to vibrate they have a need to check what has happened. Ultimately I believe that what we are trying to achieve is social acceptance from our own social circle. Nowadays this acceptance is measured either by how many people like your status or by how many people share your image.”

Sherry Turkle: Dear Vanessa . . . I think you point to a really important point! The metric of who one is cannot be measured by how many Facebook friends who have or how many people like your status or follow you on Twitter. Yet now we have these metrics and they can be oppressive. This is such an important point!” Read more >>

Clayton Papillon:  Sherry, this conversation has answered a few questions I had after I watched your talk. However, you mentioned in your talk to take more time for yourself and have more face-to-face conversations/interactions. For the most part technology has allowed us to take more time for ourselves because you can respond to a question/text/email instantly. If we were to always engage face-to-face (like we used too) we would lose a lot of valuble time to complete other tasks and have more face-to-face conversations with those we adore. Also, your talk seemed to pin technology and communication in a negative light while ignoring the brilliance of it. As we have realized in the last few years more people in this world actually have a voice now because of the way technology allows us to communicate. Information through social media has the power to change the world. Through this realization I find that sometimes I have more in common with a person in South America then I do with my own neighbour, among other things.  Historically speaking, communication has limited the way civilizations interact, do business, and develop. Not to mention it has only served those who can communicate or are listened too. We are now living in a world interconnected by social media and although there might be small negative impacts, it surely brings a large positive light to our global civilization.Thank you for your conversation! :) “

Sherry Turkle: Clayton, I think you misunderstand me. I am very positive. But I think when we ignore what hasn’t gone right, we do so at our peril. That is my position. So, I honor what has gone brilliantly! But some things are not going so well. And I don’t want us to lose sight of them. I don’t want it to be an either/or thing.”  Read more >>

Samuel Cook : ” I also find that while digital communication helps us hide from the audible and physical side of the conversation, it reveals a different kind of confrontation. When people can see your words they can judge spelling and ability to express yourself legibly. This has a few impacts. I tend to judge people’s intelligence on how well they can spell now, and while it might be inspiring to converse with somebody who can speak with beautiful flow, that doesn’t always convert in text. It also has brought to the surface a huge problem with spelling that may not have been addressed on such a large scale in the past, but unfortunately when weaknesses are unearthed they are often justified and glamorized to hide them in plain sight. We are allowing these problems to grow on a large scale in the upcoming generation.” Read more >> 

You can access the full conversation here >>

Technology doesn’t create loneliness, it reveals it – Join the conversation here >>

Willis Phu: “When relationships become out of balance, would technology really fill the void or is it a vapid substitution? Like Dr. Turkle stated, the fantasies of technology have simplified interactions. When relationships become difficult, people look to technology as something quick to fill in the vulnerable gaps that they experience instead of dealing with confrontation. I think Dr. Turkle references technology as an isolating force because people often prefer to deal with interaction solely through technology. The idea of using technology to connect to an actual community is part of what Dr. Turkle would probably refer to as “first steps”. It is utilizing technology to affirm values in our own lives. If an individual is lonely, they may use these simple means to connect, but unless the individual takes further steps to foster actual human interactions, I believe that individual is still alone. The individual seeks out ‘virtual worlds’ that simplify interactions because the ‘real world’ is difficult to access, but when confronted with the ‘real world’ problems, that’s when the individual becomes turned off from dealing with their ‘real’ life, further perpetuating this vicious cycle towards isolation.”  >>

Matthew Ward: ”Technology can fill a gap that missing in your life, so if the gap is friendship it can help. If the gap is connecting with people that have the same or similar interest as you it can help…”  read more >> 

Do introverts make better leaders?   — Join the conversation here >>

Farrah Charanek Dassouki: “I watched Susan Cain’s Video as well. I found it quite enlightening and motivating. As an educator it solidified my belief that each child is special and unique with their own learning style. Susan Cain’s video was an invitation to celebrate diversity and encourage it at various levels in our daily lives. To ask the question whether introverts make better leaders is really to generalize and risk stereotyping. I believe it depends on the disposition, inclination and expertise of that particular person in a given profession. Leaders, introverts or extroverts must be visionaries always mindful of the big picture or destination and the means to accomplishing the end.”  Read more >> 

Is history an important subject in school? Or should we be focusing on the future?  – Join the conversation here >>  

Jason Pounds: “ I feel that history illustrates our failures, and without history, we do not have the tools to create a successful future.” — read more  >>

Alex Cordero: “It seems irresponsible to not study history–history of anything! But to think that we “learn” from history is somewhat of an illusion. I feel that we only learn selective elements in history and probably pay more attention to history when it cost resources such as time, money or material. As we say in my field (information), if you want to learn from history, indicate how expensive the mistake was. Yet sadly, no mention is ever made of how many jobs a mistake cost meaning that welfare is an insufficient learning motivator. I know that this sounds terribly materialistic and almost wrong but I assure you that it’s probably not–just difficult to realize. Think of the number of times genocide has happened in our recorded history and despots–even today–continue genocidal practices falsely believing that their regime is justified. Study history because it’s the responsible thing to do but also realize that we don’t necessarily learn from it.” Read more >>

For more conversations, check out the TED Conversations page.

Sarah Meyer:  So your students asked questions of the TED community as they studied? Did any of their conversations get particularly good responses? Did you or your students learn anything from any of the comments?

Nina Tandon: We’ve been just blown away from the response — our TEDinClass Conversations, for example, have been trending in the top five for 9 weeks straight, and each conversation is being viewed in up to 60 countries. And in total, the conversations are reaching about half a million Facebook users via shares. The students are also learning a ton content-wise through responding to comments. And then there’s the more-difficult-to-measure but equally important lessons in poise and maturity that comes from leading. It’s been amazing.

Emily McManus: What did you worry about most when starting this experiment, and how did you control for it?

Nina Tandon: When we first started, I was worried most about coming up with topics with the right balance between being general enough to relate to the TED community and yet specific enough to relate to class material. I decided to just be upfront about this with my students and to ask them each week to check in and let us know their thoughts. I’ve noticed that as weeks go by that the students are having more and more fun with coming up with these types of questions. One common way we traverse between the “super specific” and the “general” is via analogy. One student last week, for example, hosted a conversation loosely based on an analogy to muscle fibers. He’d noted that we have different types of muscle fibers with different “specialties”: fast twitch and slow twitch — so he drew an analogy to collaboration between specialists and asked: “Does society need more interdisciplinary work? Or more well-rounded individuals working together?” I could never have predicted conversations like this to come out of my class, but am so heartened to see it happen!

Melinda Dvisa: I’ve been using TED Conversations as journal prompts in my class for the past year. My students can use their journals to come up with topics for writing or as pre-writing. It’s proven effective. I’m now teaching developmental reading, and I often select TED Conversations to feature authors. Again, this has proven popular.

Nina Tandon: Wow Melinda, these are all great ideas! Thanks for sharing :)

Join the latest conversation from Nina’s class: “How does virtuality translate into reality?“

Check out all the student-run Nina’s Class Conversations: www.ted.com/conversations/topics/Bioelectricity

If you have further questions, or are thinking about using TEDConversations in your classroom, please email us at conversations@ted.com and we’ll be happy to work with you!

Can students learn better by sharing what they know? TED Fellow Nina Tandon believes in the power of sharing ideas and using TED Talks in her classroom. In addition to that, she is now using the TED Conversation platform in the Bioelectricity course that she’s currently teaching at Cooper Union in New York City. After hosting her own conversation on TED Conversations, Nina was inspired to use the platform in her classroom and let students take the role of sharing knowledge and leading discussions with the global community.

Here, Nina Tandon shares her motivation on using TED Conversations in her class:

“I’ve been hosting a class blog each year for the past four years as a way for students to share amongst each other, but this year I wanted to extend our reach into the global community, to have the students engage in “external participation.” I’m hoping that the students will learn by teaching, and will appreciate the unexpected lateral connections that may develop by engaging with the diverse TED community in the context of their developing classroom expertise! It’s an experiment, but I’m really looking forward to seeing how this experience contributes not only to the students’ growth, but hopefully to the TED community as well. Thank you so much to the TED Team for collaborating with us in this exciting endeavor!”

Each week throughout the semester, students will be starting new conversations. You can track them by searching the following tags: TEDinClass and Bioelectricity. Each conversation will be open for 1 week, until the next students starts a new one.

One of the students Samantha Massengill kicks off the conversation series with this question: How immune should science be from the political environment of its time?

And Ariel Habshush suggests an idea: Our bodies are amazing nano/micro electrical factories! and hopes to share his knowledge on this topic throughout the conversation.

You can access all these classroom conversations here as they are added, every week until mid-April. Students will be sharing what they’ve learned during the course on TED Conversations. Come to learn, participate and share, at ted.com/conversations/topics/TEDinClass.

As promised, Pranav and his team have open-sourced the code for anyone to use and contribute at www.code.google.com/p/sixthsense. Download the code and create your own SixthSense device, join a discussion group and augment the codebase.

At the TEDMED conference, TED’s own Nafissa caught up with writer AJ Jacobs, whose TEDTalk describes his “year of living biblically” …

What are the new projects you’ve been working on since your latest TEDtalk?

I just finished my book Drop Dead Healthy, about my quest to be the healthiest person alive. Also continuing to write for Esquire magazine. I recently wrote an article about one of my misadventures in Hollywood.

What are the challenges of living healthy? Would you like to continue with this healthy lifestyle even after you finish your project and publish your book?

One of the biggest challenges is finding time to fit in all the healthy activities you’re supposed to do. If you follow all the experts’ advice, it’s a 24-hour-a-day job. You have to exercise, prepare meals of whole foods, chew each bite 30 times, meditate, pet dogs (lowers the blood pressure), have sex (good for preventing heart disease), stretch, wash your hands thoroughly, floss, put on sunscreen (a shot glassful every four hours), nap (good for brain and heart) and on and on.

I’m not keeping all of my healthy habits, but I’m definitely keeping a whole bunch. For instance, I now try to move more. I walk, I climb stairs. I write and send emails at my treadmill desk. In fact, I find it hard to work at a regular desk nowadays.

Do you like a different person/different writer because you feel different? more healthy? :)

I’m definitely healthier. I lost 20 pounds. My wife no longer asks if I’m pregnant, which is nice. I’m also fitter (though admittedly, that’s not saying a lot, since I used to get out of breath while putting away the groceries).

Can you reveal what’s your next project to be?

I actually haven’t decided yet. A lot of readers suggest that I do all the positions in the Kama Sutra. But that won’t happen for a whole variety of reasons, including my wife and my back. So stay tuned.

Yesterday at TEDMED, TEDTalks favorite Paul Stamets gave an emotional talk about new medical uses for mushrooms — including a variety that, he says, helped treat his mother’s cancer. Stamets spoke about powerful medical uses for mushrooms and their extracts, from anti-tuberculosis effects (Agarikon) to Cordyceps, a treasure trove of potential medicines, such as cyclosporine, which prevents organ rejection in transplant patients, and the recently FDA-approved drug Gilenya, from Novartis, for treating multiple sclerosis (MS). He can even use mushroom compounds to steer the migration of insects across the landscapes and control diseases carried by insects and animals. The most heartfelt moment of his talk, though, was when he brought his mother to the stage and told how he was able to help her to go from stage 4 breast cancer to tumor-free.

Afterward,TEDBlog sat with Paul and his mother and asked for more of the story.

Paul, you talked about treating your mother who had stage 4 breast cancer with mushrooms. Could you tell us your personal story behind that?

Being able to help your parent is a great feeling. They gave life to me, and as the youngest child, being able to help one of them feels good. I could have helped my father too, years ago, but it didn’t happen. He was terminally ill, and in a coma at that point, and we were standing in the circle of doctors. I brought all the references, and they said: If you want to give this to your dad, we’ll give it to him through his feeding tube. We had a meeting with my brother and sisters, and they all said, Yes, we agree; let him try. But my father had remarried, and my stepmom said no. It was like: “I am coming back to rescue my dad, I can do this!” I had all the mushrooms with me and the references, and the doctors had been convinced. But my stepmother had the right to stop it. And I felt tremendously defeated, and it brought me sorrow for a long time.

When my mother ended up having cancer, I could do something, and I could help. It was like a balance; I could help one of them, you know. That makes me feel very good. And my family feels good. My mother had stage 4 breast cancer and now she is tumor-free.

What mushrooms did you use? and how do they work?

In my mother’s case, I used Turkey Tail mushroom (Trametes versicolor) [in combination with conventional medicines, including taxol and herceptin]. The Turkey Tail product we make is available at Whole Foods under the Host Defense label. Their use supports immunity.

I saw the picture of me and my mother standing on stage later on, and it still brings tears to my eyes.

Having been on the TED stage, it’s like introductions precede you. People know about you before meeting you in a way I have not experienced before. People say, “I’ve seen your TEDTlk!” Oh, OK then, I don’t have to introduce myself! People already know answers to the first questions, so that we can move right on to the important things that we want to talk about.

What have you been doing since your first TEDTalk? What’s new?

My 2009 TEDTalk on surgery was primarily about abdominal surgery and making it better. Since then, we have been going from hair follicles to toenails, looking at all the different places in the body where we can bring robotic surgery. It is a really interesting and fun thought process, and it led to my current thinking, which is what I tried to articulate in my TEDMED talk yesterday: Places where we are looking for a gap between what we can do currently with our existing technologies and what we’d like to be able to do for the patients IF ONLY — if only we had better diagnostic tools, if only we had better therapeutics, better drugs. Putting everything into that framework allows you to really make a decision on where technology like robotics could make a real difference in patients’ lives.

You were an engineer for a while and then you went to medical school — was it a complete change? And are you looking forward to moving on and taking the next stage, and if so what is it?

I would actually not say that it was so much of a complete change, because I took my engineering knowledge with me to med school, and I applied it. One of the things I talked about in my TEDMED talk yesterday was how experts gather a lot of expertise and they get a worldview that is very, very good at filtering between what they do and what they see as irrelevant. And once you’ve build up that filter for a while, you also get very good at filtering out disruptive technologies, things that don’t currently fit the way you think treatment should happen. Thinking about that, eventually I will be stale in what I am doing. I will be too highly trained to be able to be responsive to new things that will happen. So I will need to retrain in some way. I don’t know what it will be. I still feel like I am on a steep part of a learning curve, and you know, in medicine, there is always more to learn.

What’s happening with your green house, which you gave a TED U talk about?

We moved in! We’re doing a lot of stuff in permaculture and landscape gardening, and finally had our rainwater caching system, and the greywater wetlands, so everything is up and running. We’ve been in the house for almost a year now; at a year, I am going to analyze all the data on the house for the first year, and I’ll update the blog at that point with: ‘Well, I had these assumptions on what the house was going to be like, and what is it now compared to the assumptions.’ It will be really interesting to do analysis after a year and project what the house is going to be like. Will I get the payback that I calculated in my talk?
One of the interesting things for me is, I saw all kinds of projections and analysis, but nobody ever closed the loop and actually said how much did it really save you compared to what you had estimated.

How does it feel to live in that house? :)

It’s lovely. It certainly has something to do with sustainability and the feel-good aspect of it. And it is the space we’ve created for our family and it is designed the way we like to live.

The TED team is eagerly watching our content partner conference, TEDMED, happening now in California. (Look for TEDMED video fresh from stage in the coming weeks!) TED’s own Nafissa, is reporting from the conference; this morning, she caught a few minutes with TEDTalks favorite Charles Limb, who studies what creativity looks like in the brains of jazz improvisers and freestyle rappers …

What have you been up to since your talk (from TEDxMidAtlantic) went onto TED.com?

Over the past year, I have spent a lot of time acquiring more data on two main lines of experimental inquiry. The first is the neural mechanisms that underlie spontaneous creativity in musicians, and the second is the study of how deaf individuals who receive cochlear implants perceive music. Both of these areas of inquiry are deeply compelling to me. In terms of specific followup, we have completed functional brain image acquisition on jazz musicians who are having musical “conversations,” showing that traditional language areas of the brain are critical for this type of activity. Also, we have finished brain studies of freestyle rappers who are improvising, which will add further crucial insights into the neurobiology of creativity. We are now actively working on manuscript preparation in hopes to publish these exciting studies.

What are the projects you are currently working on that you’d like to share with the TED.com community

I am currently trying to work on a few studies — one is to see how mechanisms of creativity in jazz or rap generalize to other forms of spontaneous improvisation, such as in drawing. We are also trying to examine how these mechanisms differ in amateur vs. expert musicians, and children vs. adults. It is probably fairer to say that I am trying to work on getting funding for these studies, since they are in the conceptual stages at this point …”

What are your five favorite records?

My five favorite records? Tough question! How about five of my favorite pieces or songs:

1. Gustav Mahler, “Ich Bin der Welt Abhanden Gekommen” (recording with Janet Baker)
2. Astor Piazzolla, “Milonga del Angel” (from Tango: Zero Hour)
3. John Coltrane, “Lush Life” (with Donald Byrd on trumpet, no vocals; from album of the same title)
4. Miles Davis, “In Your Own Sweet Way” (with John Coltrane on saxophone)
5. Prince, “Adore” (from Sign o’ the Times)