In his talk at TEDGlobal 2010, Conrad Wolfram championed a radical new way of teaching mathematics: removing the notion that math is the same as calculating, and completely redesigning the curriculum around the new possibilities opened by computers. He’s now launched a website to collect ideas, and in November he will be hosting The Computer Based Math Education Summit to kick-start the project.

We caught up with him in his office near Oxford, England to talk about education reform and the importance of creativity in technical fields.

How did you get interested in reforming math education?

We’ve been building software for 20+ years, software to do computations. One place I’ve seen this applied, or really not applied, is in math teaching. I got increasingly frustrated. What is it that they’re teaching? Is it really the best thing that we can be teaching under the circumstances? And ten or fifteen years ago I was asking these questions, but realistically although a lot of the underlying technology was there, the interaction with it wasn’t, and it wasn’t ubiquitous. People didn’t have computers everywhere and it was hard to see how one could practically put that in. Now, it seems so obviously discrepant with what one needs to do. So, I can’t really point to an individual time, it’s been growing over a long period and observing what’s happened, and seeing these discrepancies build up between education what’s happened outside education.

You had no previous education background, right?

No, I’ve not gone and taught people. Now, that’s a mixed blessing. Obviously I don’t know some of the practicalities if you’re a teacher every day. On the other hand, it’s tricky to see what one would do differently if you’ve been teaching inside the curriculum that we currently force everyone to do.

The reaction to my talk has been very positive, perhaps more so than I expected. People have managed to come out of their boxes of what they’re doing, and say, “Yeah, I’ve been doing this for twenty years, but I can see there’s a problem.” I think that’s great, when we can encourage people to think outside like that, but not everyone can do that.

That seems to be one of the key questions, how do you get buy-in from the teachers and policy makers?

There are several steps. One is to build a community of people who are interested, and who can contribute ideas.

But the second major step, which we’re doing in parallel, is to build what I call a blue-skies curriculum: consider what you would do if you were starting with a blank sheet or a blank computer, cut all the baggage from the past with what’s been done with math, start again and start writing some modules. Try to work out, what would you do with the student, the teacher, and the computer to optimize the output one wants?

Now, these modules may not be immediately implementable in today’s schools. I’m trying to go to the far extreme, to go up into the stratosphere and figure out what you’d ideally do. I think that hasn’t been done very much. Most of what’s been done with math education reform, and I understand why this is, is people saying, “We’ve got computers now, what can we imagine doing next semester?” That’s also a valuable exercise, but it’s not what I want to do. I want to put up a beacon of what could be possible.

Once we’ve done that, the next step is to find a place where one can pilot that. I think there are countries, or states within countries, which are interested. In the end, I would love to see some of the major countries do this first. I expect that we’re going to see a smaller country really take this on-board fastest, because quicker decisions can be taken. But I’d love to be proved wrong on that, too.

There really isn’t anywhere in the world where math education looks like this.

That’s correct. We are starting from scratch. Every math curriculum in the world is based on the idea of hand-calculating, and most of what you’re teaching is how to calculate. And I think the resistance to this is very variable. In some places it’s, “I basically agree with you, but how are we ever going to get this implemented?” Other places it’s, “This has been an ancient thing, we need to go on teaching the ancient tradition.” They don’t put it in quite these words, but that’s the gist of it. Other places are saying, “This is interesting, let’s form an idea of what we can do here.” And we’re starting some of those discussions now.

One of the huge barriers is the question of standardized testing. It feels like this is something that, here in the USA at least, would take 20 or 30 years to get enough support.

I wouldn’t count on it, but neither would I claim this is anything other than a long, hard road, particularly in a developed and large country like the US. What’s the exact timeline? I wouldn’t like to predict. I think the world moves faster now than it did fifty years ago.

One of the key problems is that everyone teaching math today was brought up with the current system of math education. Now, people argue to me, “Don’t you have to wait for a whole new generation of teachers to make this change?” And I don’t think that’s true. There’s certainly an issue of helping teachers to move to a new way of thinking about things, but there are also new methodologies one can employ. You don’t have to have the teacher teaching the whole lesson. There are remote links, there are specialists, you can pull them in. There are things you couldn’t do twenty years ago that you can do now.

So, I wouldn’t want to put a time-frame on it, but I think we’re at a particular point now where there’s more will to change things than I’ve seen in my lifetime. People see the problem and they see the necessities and they see the rise of China, and they think, “Hang on, we’ve got a real problem we need to deal with here.”

Another problem is that there’s an integrated system assuming certain math education. Have you had a response from teachers at the university level?

Yeah, very much so. At the university level, computers have slowly been adopted more in everything outside the pure mathematics curriculum. So, although they wouldn’t have immediately suggested the theory in my TED talk, ways to improve mathematical understanding are very welcome.

One thing is for sure: most of the people admitting candidates to universities for technical subjects are pretty dissatisfied with the level of math education. Most countries would say the same thing.

In the cases I’ve talked to, we’ve had a very positive reception to the idea that: “Well, we’re going to be using computers with the folks when they get here. We’re trying to teach them engineering, or physics; we don’t need them to know the theory of proving this particular relationship. What we need them to do is be able to apply the mathematics.”

They can see that being able to do that, with or without a computer, is what really matters, and they can see that what I’m suggesting gets a lot further towards that than the traditional way has.

It’ll clearly be a driver of reform if those admitted to the best technical courses in universities studied computer-based math rather than traditional math. That will be a good way to build on initial successes and draw people through to doing computer-based math.

So getting the universities on board could lead the way.

Absolutely. Again, this sort of thing varies a lot between countries. The detailed system of how you get a new course established, who’s got the push and the pull in that, how involved is the government?

Another interconnected piece is obviously teachers and their training. On this topic, it’s an interesting idea that there are teachers in subjects outside math itself: other STEM (Science, Technology, Education, and Mathematics) subjects, maybe even things like geography, social sciences, and so forth that might well be able to teach the kind of math I’m talking about and can’t teach the traditional sort as well. It’s not all in one direction– that we’re going to lose a group of teachers that aren’t able to teach this new kind of math, and we won’t pull them in from anywhere else. I think there are opportunities, just like there are with students. There are students who will be able to do computer-based math much more effectively than the current math, there are teachers who will be able to do that too.

What would be the consequences of not changing the curriculum, if we keep going with the status quo?

I think what will happen is that math at school will become more marginalized. I see it going a bit like latin, where it ended up becoming a very specialist, niche subject. Now, the funny thing with latin, and the reason I brought up greek rather than latin in my talk, is that the use of latin in the world outside education was declining. The case with math, which is so frustrating, is that the use of math is massively increasing. So, there is a subject that is very mainstream, which we should be teaching, and then there’s the subject we’re teaching which is becoming less and less mainstream.

If we go on along this path at some point people are going to say, “This math, that no one likes doing, that we’re spending hundreds of millions of dollars teaching, and that universities and others don’t really want: you can’t justify doing that for everyone.”

It could become a niche subject that folks who go to fancy schools will study. Or alternatively—which is often happening now— it gets dumbed-down into purely a vocational subject : just teaches essential “math procedures” that are supposed to get you through life, but aren’t providing you deep understanding that you can really apply or use as a key skill. So, that’s the long-term danger.

It’s like everyone has started speaking Italian, and they’re still teaching Latin.

Yeah, that’s right, but the two are even more unrelated than that.

Just to emphasize, I’m sometimes accused of saying that we should stop anyone from learning current math, what I call the history of hand calculating. I’m not saying anything of the sort on an individual basis. If an individual student gets excited about the history of hand calculating (as I call much of our current math curriculum), that is a great thing for them to study. It’s a very interesting field. It just isn’t the mainstream field that the majority should be pushed to take

There’s been a trend of people learning to use abacuses recently.

If folks, and particularly kids, get excited about getting good at something, whether it’s learning their times tables, or playing with an abacus, or playing a didgeridoo, I think that’s great, I think they should be encouraged—just because it’s fun, it’s exciting. It doesn’t have to be “useful” per se. But it’s no good believing everyone should be force-fed this traditional kind of math in case a small number happen to find it fun.

I noticed you’re a photographer and a piano player, and I wonder if that’s influenced your approach to math education?

No, I’d put the whole thing the other way around. I’d say that, because I’m a mathematical kind of guy, the way I look at the world is a math/physics kind of way, and that definitely influences everything I do. So, when I look at a business problem, I’m running the scientific process on the whole business problem. That’s my way of thinking about it. If I’m looking at playing something on the piano, I like thinking about that in a fairly logical way “what’s it saying if I go louder of softer at this point” even if it’s an emotional thing I’m thinking about. So, I do feel math and feel science, and that’s the way I look at the world. And I think it’s quite a good way to look at the world, as long as you understand its limitation. It’s also probably led me to things that I think I can understand from that point of view. Photography is one of those: I can understand the theories of lighting. For example, if you put big lights next to a small object then you’re going to get a nice diffuse light. Things like that where I can understand how it fits together I find fun. Perhaps that helps me to be creative, perhaps not.

I would say there’s another interplay, which a lot of people since the talk have mentioned to me. They say that what you’re really talking about is not math, or even STEM subjects, it’s really creativity in education. I think there’s a lot of truth in that. Don’t teach people the processes of calculating, teach them the creativity of problem-solving in a math arena. In a sense that’s no different from teaching them creativity in the study of history, or any other subject.

It’s surprising for people, because we’ve been brought up to think that science and math are unemotional. The kinds of things you’re proposing here are about building a visceral connection to math as well.

There have been very noticeable scientists and mathematicians who show a lot of emotion. One that always comes to my mind is Richard Feynman.

But that’s different from the way it’s presented in schools.

Absolutely by most teachers. But part of the problem is, in testing, a calculation is often right or wrong, but that’s not true of wider questions of education. What’s the best way to represent this data? How does that communicate the idea of the data? or skew it one way or the other? To my mind those are math questions, but they’re not questions which have a definitive answer. So if you turn everything into a multiple-choice question, and you can do this with English as well, it becomes a kind of unemotional process. So, although I believe the world is in a sense a quantitative place, in practical terms with the data one has, the world’s a qualitative place, and one needs to make judgments and apply intuition one’s built-up without precise quantification.

Certainly also true that people have emotions to things that are built using math. I mean people now days have a lot of emotions about technology. But, for example some people are very emotional about their cars — now, are they emotional about how the spark plugs works in the engines? Well, you may find some geek who is, but it’s a much smaller fraction.

And so I think, if you zoom in to the mechanics of everything, that tends to limit the number of people who are emotionally attached to it.

It reminds me of diagramming sentences in English class. That’s the same mechanics, and where I was brought up we almost never did it. I don’t think I’ve suffered.

I had a strange thing with that, which is that the only English grammar I know is from learning latin. It’s slightly weird we were taught latin and it’s grammar in great detail, but never ever English. Now, I would have found English grammar somewhat useful. But in the end, you’re right, it’s a mechanism which is useful for the end, which is “how do I communicate in English?” One needs to get the goals clear from the mechanics. In my view that’s the biggest thing that got lost in Math. Computers affect other subjects too, but the effect in math and STEM subjects is so dramatic.

TED speaker Omar Ahmad died this morning of a heart attack in San Carlos, California, where he was the Mayor. A Mayor with a very open line to his constituents. In December 2009, when he pitched us what would become his short talk for TED University at TED2010, his suggested title was: “How to effectively lobby elected officials and move them on issues you care about.” Now, coming from an elected official, it could have been a quip, a wisecrack, a provocation — but it was in fact an invitation: an invitation to get involved, to learn about the political system and about raising issues properly, to “add weight to your views” in the eyes of politicians. In other words, Omar wanted everybody to contribute to a better polity.

Omar was close to completing a TED Book titled Citizen Advocate: How to Get Government to Move Mountains and Change the World just before his passing. We hope to release that work soon.

He will be badly missed.

In this reel, TED recaps an amazing year of talks from three conferences, a bunch of smaller TED events — and a powerful year of TEDx. Dive in, and then follow up with talks that intrigue you … You’ll see, in order of appearance: The LXD, Chris Anderson and Julian Assange, Bill Gates, Chip Conley, Naomi Klein, John Underkoffler, Marcel Dicke, Van Jones, Deborah Rhodes, Rufus Griscom and Alisa Volkman, Brian Cox, Diane Laufenberg, Clay Shirky, Hillary Clinton, Craig Venter, Laurie Santos, Raghava KK, Jamie Oliver, Hans Rosling, Miwa Matreyek, Rory Sutherland, John Kasaona, Sheena Iyengar, Michael Specter, Sir Ken Robinson, Barry Schwartz, Jacqueline Novogratz, Jody Williams, and Beverly and Dereck Joubert.

Philip Zimbardo (watch his other TEDTalks) introduces the Heroic Imagination Project at TED University 2010. Zimbardo, whose work has studied the depths of human evildoing and the heights of heroism, is passionate about inspiring people to take heroic action. Learn how to practice everyday heroism.

Learn more about the Heroic Imagination Project >>

Since your TEDTalk, you’ve managed a full run of Evoke, you social entrepreneurship game.

It was really exciting! We were just formally announcing Evoke at TED. That was our first glimpse to see if people would be interested in it, excited about it. We were able to run the game a few months later, a ten-week crash course in changing the world. Our original goals were to try to enroll a thousand students in the game, and we wound up enrolling just under 20,000. We had them from over a 130 countries, all playing the same game and collaborating with each other, which was really amazing.

The most eye-opening outcomes were how many real-world businesses, real-world social enterprises were founded by players of the game over the course of the ten weeks, and then actually launched in the summer following the game. We have more than fifty social enterprises started by gamers. Companies that were designed to deal locally with issues like food security, clean water access, women’s education. That was pretty much a first; the idea that you could come play a game and ten weeks later wind up with a real social enterprise.

One example is this great project called Libraries Across Africa. The idea is basically, what if there were a McDonalds of libraries? What if you could have a franchise for libraries and that the people who would implement and start a library in a village, or anywhere, that it would be a money-making venture, a self-supporting venture, and that other enterprises could pop up around the act of lending books to people: selling them food, selling them phone service or internet access. What a super-creative, novel idea to try to franchise libraries. That came out of the game, and it’s actually in development now. They have their first library prototype in the field.

That’s fantastic. It sounds like you’ve gotten a great reception.

Yeah, when I talk to the media they really sink their teeth into these problem-solving games, but I want to say, the first half of the book is about the way that games integrate into our real life, to improve our health and happiness. What you would call ordinary video games. When I talk to readers that’s the part they’re interested about, but when I talk to media we almost never get to that.

The subtitle is “Why games make us better, and how they can change the world.” I’m really interested in not just these world-saving problem-solving games, but also in how games like Angry Birds, Farmville and World of Warcraft can actually make our lives better. So, the first half of the book is full of science, looking at things like the fact that people who play Rock Band and Guitar Hero are more likely to learn how to play a guitar. This is fascinating, to see that games, rather than distracting us from our real-life goals, seem to be a springboard to real-life goals. There’s science that shows that when we play cooperative games we’re more likely to help strangers, friends, family members in real life. Thirty minutes of playing a co-op game changes for an entire week how cooperative we are in real life. We’re more likely to see opportunities to help someone, and more likely to act on them.

Playing with avatars that are powerful in a game world, or avatars that we find attractive, makes us more confident and optimistic, so that we’re more likely to successfully flirt with strangers or negotiate in a workplace meeting. Just ninety seconds of playing with an avatar can change your odds for success in a real-world situation for 24 hours.

So, there’s all these ways we’re starting to see that the line between the games we play and the lives we lead is much more porous than we imagined. I think this is really great news. It shows that we don’t have to play fewer video games in order to lead the lives that we want to lead. There are all kinds of games that can actually support our real-life goals, strengthen our real-life relationships. That’s such a transformative way to look at games, to realize that they’re not distracting us from our lives. They’re filling our lives with more strength and better relationships. Even the tiniest game, like Angry Birds, can power us with optimism and resilience throughout the day. It’s really remarkable.

Why do you think the default assumption is the exact opposite?

I think it’s two things, one is very old and one is very new. There’s this old, old sense that there’s a divide between productivity and play, and that playing games is somehow not productive. In fact, my research shows that playing games literally produces some very good things. It produces positive emotion. It produces social bonds. It produces more ambitious goals. Yes, it doesn’t produce economic capital; it doesn’t produce consumer goods. But we should ask ourselves, why does “productive” mean producing economic or consumer things? Why isn’t productive producing things that really matter, like improving quality of life? But that’s an old thing, that goes back before video games — games were seen as not productive.

Then, for the last twenty years there’s the idea that the virtual is somehow removed from real life, that we have avatars that are “alternate identities,” and that’s not who we are really are, we get to be somebody else. Of course, we are the same person when we play games. It’s not like we dissociate and become somebody else; it is us. The games increasingly are real in physical ways. Like the X-Box 360 Connect, and how amazingly physical that is, and how real the dancing is. It’s not fake dancing, it’s real dancing. You look at how many people are playing games on Facebook with their real-life friends and families. I’m playing Cityville with people I know in real life, people I really like. it’s not like playing with “strangers on the internet.”

We have this misguided notion that somehow games are just totally virtual. At the very least, the feelings they produce in us are real. The science shows that it doesn’t matter where you get your positive emotions; if you feel a positive emotion it has the same impact on your health and happiness regardless of where it comes from. We need to stop thinking that just because something is digital that it doesn’t have a real impact on our minds and bodies and hearts.

You had a very personal experience with that, designing a game to help yourself recover from a severe concussion.

When I first decided to make this game, I had a very epic, important meeting with my doctor. It had been about a month, and I was having very slow recovery from the concussion, so they diagnosed post-concussion recovery syndrome. She said that if I was feeling stress and anxiety or depression or loneliness — that these emotions get in the way of the brain healing itself. They see in a lot of patients this vicious cycle. You get depressed because you’re not getting well, and then that depression slows you down even more. You have to break that cycle. If you miss the first month of recovery, then on average it’s three months, and if you miss that window then it’s six months, and if you miss that then it’s a year. I was looking forward to possibly a year of not being able to think straight, of not being able to be in public spaces. It made me so depressed and anxious and despairing that I thought there was no way I was going to break the cycle.

It just came to me, coming home from the doctor, I have to make this a game. If I don’t make this a game I will never get out of depression. I’d already written the first few chapters of the book, and those are largely about the idea that gameplay is the opposite of depression. Clinically speaking, depression is a pessimistic sense of your own capabilities, and despondent lack of energy. The opposite of that, an optimistic sense of your own capabilities and an invigorating rush of activity, is the perfect textbook definition of gameplay.

So if I could just make this a game, I could do it. I couldn’t play regular video games because it was aggravating my concussion symptoms. So I was still in this mental fog, and there are these crazy videos of me from that day online on YouTube where I’m trying to design the game out loud, and you can see how much of a fog I’m in, and how much joy.

It was interesting even in that state to be able to reach into game design and design my way out, but it wasn’t until after I’d been playing for quite a while and was better that I was able to redesign it for other people to play. I started having friends test it for things like asthma, diabetes, knee surgery, chemotherapy. I started to get a lot of anecdotal and subjective feedback about how it was working.

The main point is to take the despair out of a diagnosis. You can use the strength of positive emotions and social connectivity to make the process of trying to get better, much, much better and faster.

I’m actually developing a personal version of this game that will be available to the public this summer. And we’re working right now on clinical trials to demonstrate the scientific medical validity of this game. That’s very exciting because there aren’t many games that have been through clinical trials.

There’s a lot of research now on the placebo effect, and how to harness it. It sounds like this is a way.

It’s interesting, somebody was asking me, “Isn’t it just a delusion? In games, to fly, or have an avatar with magic powers coming out their fingers? It’s just a fantasy, it’s an illusion of power.” But what the science shows is something very similar to the placebo effect, that having this imaginative capacity, that you somehow have this power, activates in us that we feel the positive. When the placebo effect is working, people are looking for positive outcomes, and that’s what they see. I think games — hopefully they have real impact — but even if we are just tapping into the power of people’s imaginations to imagine themselves better, that seems like a really good way to go.

Well, even if you are worried about the social transformation part, getting people used to using games to do things is a first step.

Exactly. The social transformation is a 10- to 25-year project. So, in the meantime we’re building these competencies and these skills.

Back to Evoke, with twenty thousand players, thousands interested in mentoring, it sounds like there’s been a good reception.

The reception was great. That’s the thing. When people ask me, “What’s different about the gamer generation?” I say it’s a sense of wanting to rise to the occasion, a sense of heroic purpose: If there’s a heroic mission and I could be the one who’s destined to fill it, I want to do that; I want to be that person. I want to be on a journey; I want to be on an adventure, or part of an adventure. And when we reach out to people, particularly in that gamer generation, and give somebody an opportunity to do something heroic — and it’s something authentically challenging. We weren’t asking people to donate five dollars. There’s nothing challenging about that other than if you don’t have five dollars — but actually to do something, they do rise to the occasion. That’s where a lot of my optimism comes from. We’re still in very early days of trying to harness what’s amazing about games and gamers, and so there’s a lot we really haven’t figured out yet.

The thing that evokes the most skepticism in the comments on the talk is, how do you translate solutions in the game to solutions in the real world?

That’s a great question. I should really take a lot of responsibility for this misconception. I didn’t really talk about my games in the TEDTalk very much.

The great thing about these games is that you don’t have to translate the solutions in the game to solutions in the real world. The game is all about doing things in the real world. So, in World Without Oil, you’re living your life as if there were an oil shortage. You are doing the things that would be the solution; you’re changing the way you eat and cook food, you’re changing the way you get to work. In Evoke you’re going out and you’re actually starting a community garden. You’re transforming how your laptop is powered from regular electricity to solar, or your iPod is getting powered by riding on your bike. You’re actually doing stuff, and it feeds back into the game.

I’m not a fan of simulations. Where, ‘Oh, we’ll go play a simulation of world peace and figure out how to make peace’ and then somehow magically that will get translated into the real world. No, that’s not the kind of games that I make. The games that we make, if it’s going to be a game about world peace, it’s going to be a game in which people go out and actually make friends with people that they’ve had disagreements with; they’re going to go out and do something to actually make a difference.

So, it’s not about simulation, but more about attaching the things about gaming that give people this sense of accomplishment to real-world activities.

Right. Real-world activities needs to be at the core of it.

– Interview by Ben Lillie

Watch Andrew Bird’s performance on TED.com where you can download it, rate it, comment on it and find other talks and performances from our archive of 800+ TEDTalks.

Every year, TED is simulcast to an intimate gathering of doers and thinkers in Palm Springs called TEDActive. Here, attendees watch the all the talks from the TED mainstage as they happen and attend workshops, activities and social events driven by their needs. This year, several of TED’s most prolific translators became an integral part of this community, inspiring everyone with their incredible dedication to providing TEDTalks to everyone in the world in as many languages as possible. Here are a few of those translators, remembering the experience in their own words:

What was your experience at TEDActive like?

Dominik Weickgenannt: It felt like coming home, even though it was my first TED conference — 500 people that are as excited about meeting you as you are about meeting them. Watching TED Talks at home is awesome, watching the four-day webcast of TEDGlobal was already transformative, but engaging in a crowd of like-minded people, watching talks, talking about them and life in general is an entirely different experience that I find hard to put into words. The best way to describe it is maybe the difference between listening to your favorite song at home alone and going to a four-day music festival with your best friends.

Jenny Yang: TEDActive was my first TED conference. Being able to interact directly with TED translators, TEDx organizers, speakers and experts is where the TED memories were made for me. The energy in the crowd was amazing. I was especially overwhelmed by the level of appreciation and respect given to the volunteers. I can’t remember how many times the translators were asked to stand up and we received the warmest applause and standing ovations from the crowds. I can feel the emotion run down my spine and it makes me feel proud and want to do more. The whole week of events was packed with interesting activities and remarkable discussions — it is truly a place where we share our unique gifts in a way that enriches us, and others around us.

Bill Hsiung: I’m sure you all are very familiar with the expressions that people usually use to describe their experience at TED, such as “awesome,” “amazing,” “fascinating,” “overwhelming,” “drinking from a fire hose,” etc. For me, the experience was just beyond what words can describe. All those big adjectives are absolutely correct but still far from enough. TED is nothing like your ordinary conference. The experience of TED actually started months before the “conference” took place with email, the TED Blog and the TED Bookclub to help you prepare and get in the mood for the big event. Also, TED community tools for the attendees (the Google group and Twitter list) help you reach out and connect with people even before you meet. It’s also about the energy in the atmosphere — a typical day at TEDActive literally starts at 7 am and lasts all the way till midnight, non-stopping. People slept very little during the whole conference, yet everyone looked full of energy and nobody fell asleep in the middle of a talk. However, it’s mostly about people — all the attendees that I met at TEDActive were very friendly, open minded and positive. They spontaneously and generously offered to organize events and to share their knowledge or professional skills with others. Not to mention each and every one of them had a unique personal experience, story or idea that they were ready to share. Lastly, the experience didn’t end with the conference either. During the conference, you met a lot of people and also made lots of new friends. Most of us will keep in touch with each other via email or social networks (such as the Facebook group or Ning group). Some of us even started our own monthly local TEDsters meetup. All in all, TEDActive is really a life changing experience and it just keeps getting better!

What was it like to meet the other translators in person? Did anything come out of discussions you had there?

Dominik Weickgenannt: – Eye-opening on so many levels. One of the conversations that stuck in my mind is that some translators really have to decide carefully which talks to translate and which not because of possible consequences they might face in their home country. Other than that, it was really interesting to hear peoples perspectives on translating, why they do it, how they approach it. The discussions motivated me to do two things: Translate more — after all, if you hear that Anour translated a talk on his ride from the airport to the hotel, how can you not feel lazy? — and second, pay even more attention to the exact words I use, because it does make a significant difference to the readers.

Rodrigo Herrera Vegas: Some translators had an amazing track record, I couldn’t believe how many talks some people handled! Some shared innovative ways and tools to optimize their translations.

Bill Hsiung: To meet with other translators from all around the world is just amazing — oops did I use that word again? :P Our experience in translating TEDTalks is so much alike, yet we can have different solutions to a common problem or struggle, so we all learn from each other and together we can make this translation project better. Also, knowing other translators did such wonderful jobs on their part is a big motivator for us to want to do better. One of the big things after TEDActive for us was that Masahiro (a Japanese translator) shared a tool that his friend developed with us that largely improved the efficiency of communication between translators and reviewers and made the reviewing process much quicker and easier. Things like this wouldn’t have happened if we didn’t meet and have discussions in person at TEDActive.

What’s one thing you’ve learnt from translating TEDTalks?

Jenny Yang: Line by line translating TEDTalks is different from just listening to them. You learn so much more by immersing yourself in each sentence, each word. It creates an intimate exchange with the speaker and the topic. Usually I will try to look up some other materials related to the talk during translation, and drift into reading many other good books and articles. It eats untold hours of my life, but it’s truly a wonderful “lost in translation” experience. Most of my translations were done late in the night. When everything is quiet, I can hear myself reading the subtitle I just translated, and that brings me great satisfaction. I think the most important thing I learned from translating is to take action to do what you truly love. We often gain more by giving. I am a very busy working mother, I never thought I would have extra time to work on translation projects, but translating TEDTalks really made me a better mother. I have fed my 7-year-old many TEDTalks I worked on. We played the “marshmallow problem” together. He cooked his first meal when I was working on Jamie Oliver’s TED Prize wish: Teach every child about food. I really hope by helping plant small TED seeds, it will help grow wise and humble hearts.

Dominik Weickgenannt: The power of writing: To translate something, you really have to understand every detail of a TEDTalk, so you end up reading Wikipedia and thinking about word alternatives a lot. But, because you actually write every sentence and word down, you make new connections in your brain and the talk comes to your mind a lot. This really ingrains the message in your life and you start living them. As sad of a statement this is for the current educational system, I can honestly say that I learned more for life translating 30 TEDTalks than I did in three years of college.

A year into translating TEDTalks, did you expect to see this many translations? Or to have translated this many yourself?

Rodrigo Herrera Vegas: I’m not surprised at all considering the success and quality of TED. I feel honored to have translated every one of the talks I did.<

Bill Hsiung: I probably didn’t expect to see this many translations that have been completed, at least not in the first place. But believe it or not, I was hoping that I could finish more than that I have translated now. :P

If you could name one goal for the next year of the OTP (Open Translation Project) what would it be?

Dominik Weickgenannt: Get it into education even more. In schools, from high schools to universities, when learning a new language we often use random texts that we hardly care about. This is not only boring, it also isn’t that good for learning. And I think we shouldn’t wait for anyone else to do this, instead talk to people you know that are learning a language and show them TED. If they like it, they can suggest it in class. That way, you not only spread the ideas you love and care about, but also ensure high quality translations reviewed by a “professional.”

Jenny Yang: Today all the TEDTalks are given in English. I think we should start a project to create one TEDTalk in each native language, and then translate them to other languages. It could be a symbol to show that the world can talk and listen to each other through this open platform.

Bill Hsiung: Of course we would love to know if the usage of non-English subtitles is hugely increasing when people watching TEDTalks on TED.com, but it’s hard to set a goal on that. The easiest way and also the most straightforward way to set a goal for the next year is probably still based on the number of translations that have been completed. Dominik (a German translator) actually suggested that we set our goal to have 10,000 translations completed by TED2011, which is still nine months away from now. But based on the statistics of that number in the first nine months and the first year of the OTP, we now know that in the first nine months, we completed almost 5,000 TEDTalks. And we finished more than 7,000 in the first year. So, even being very conservative, I would say the estimated number of completed translation should be at least 12,000 by TED2011. And, I want to suggest that we bump that number a little bit higher, say 15,000. I think that should be a reasonable and practical goal for us to pursue. :)

A special TEDActive shout-out to all the translators who attended this year: Dominik Weickgennant, Ali Mooeny, Anour Dafa-Alla, Masahiro Kyushima, Hristo Aloksiev, Sophal Ear, Mihail Stoychev, Rodrigo Herrera Vegas, Jenny Yang, Hanseok Ryu, Bill Hsiung, Albara Alohali and Javier Fadul. And, thank you to all the translators for bringing TEDTalks to to the world!

Watch Sebastian Wernicke’s talk on TED.com, where you can download this TEDTalk, rate it, comment on it and find other talks and performances from our archive of 600+ TEDTalks.

Watch Kevin Bales’ talk on TED.com, where you can download this TEDTalk, rate it, comment on it and find other talks and performances from our archive of 600+ TEDTalks.

At TED2010, Chef Dan Barber drew a standing ovation with his unlikely love story about fish: sustainably farmed, outrageously delicious fish, which offers a model for the future of food production. A key figure in the farm-to-table movement, Dan occupies an unusual space as chef-scholar: His op/eds appear regularly in The New York Times and elsewhere; and he prepares genius menus nightly at his two Blue Hill Restaurants — one in New York City and one at the Stone Barns farm in Pocantico Hills, NY. We caught up with Dan in New York to better understand the meaty issues he raised in his talk.

In your talk, you made it clear that you hate the question, “How are you going to feed the world?” But you sure answered it convincingly. So — at the risk of alienating you — can local, organic farming feed the world?

Here’s what I know: Conventional agriculture has never succeeded in feeding the world, and it’s never produced anything good to eat. For the future, we need to look toward alternatives. Does that mean a world full of local and organic farms? Yes, those ideas will certainly become more important as we move forward—they’ve been proven to work (just look at the recent International Assessment of Agricultural Science and Technology for Development, the most comprehensive study to date on the future of agriculture), and they’re critical to conserving the planet’s natural resources. But I also think we need to radically reconsider what agriculture looks like—perhaps it involves models like Veta La Palma, or agroforestry, or perennial wheat polycultures, like the ones being developed at The Land Institute. These are systems that demonstrate natural resilience and ecological stability, which are essential for facing the challenges ahead.

Your TEDtalk presents itself as a really gentle tale, but it’s actually a pretty radical proposition for rethinking food production. Talk to me about where you think agriculture has gone wrong.

When you say that agriculture has gone wrong, it sounds like you’re advocating for a system that’s 200 years old. I couldn’t be further from that; I love technology. But I do think we’re heading for a vastly different food experience, in our lifetimes. I think the conventional food system — which is based on lots of cheap energy, lots of cheap labor, lots of available water, lots of soil erosion — is going to be a dead man walking 20 years from now. And that’s because the things it relies upon are not going to be available.

If you look at the carrying capacity of agricultural areas throughout the world, their ecological habitats are changing. So I think we’re looking at — in our lifetime — great collapses of food services. We need the humbleness and clarity to see that our food, while benefitting from technological advances, has benefitted even more from free ecological resources: Cheap energy, lots of water everywhere, and a stable climate. But studies have shown these are eroding. And if you take these away — if you don’t have those in abundance — you’re not only going to NOT feed the world, you’re not going to be able to eat the way we do now. We’re going to be forced into a new system. The question is: Is that going to be a traumatic transition, or are we going to start preparing for it now?

The typical and very loud argument against organic farming is that it can’t scale, that the yields aren’t high enough. How do you respond to that?

Yield is a tricky topic, especially if you have an agenda. I know this from our own farming: You can look at yield a lot of different ways. When a study says that conventional farms produce more per acre than organic farms, they’re talking about yield, not total output.

Yield is generally defined by economists as yield for a particular crop. When you farm in a monoculture, that’s easy to measure. But when you farm organically, you grow several different crops. So your yield per individual crop is lower, but your total output of caloric foods is higher.

Read more after the jump – including the single most important thing you can do to improve your food supply >>And then there’s the transaction cost of getting from the farm to the marketplace: THAT’S the expensive part; that’s the problem for organic farmers. It’s much more expensive to distribute products from diverse farms. Monocultured farms are much easier — one variety, one pick up, one drop off to Walmart, etc.

So you argue that acre-for-acre, over time, the yield on an organic farm surpasses that of conventional farms.

Yes. The TOTAL CALORIC yield on an organic farm far surpasses a conventional farm. That’s on every credible study out there. That’s not even an issue.

Let’s talk about grain. Because if you’re talking about feeding the world, it’s really about grain. Now, if you’re an organic corn farmer, by definition, you can’t grow corn every year. You have to get nitrogen back in the soil. So you’ll grow corn, and then you’ll grow a legume, and so you’ll fix the nitrogen and improve the soil structure. Now, if you’re a conventional farmer, you’re growing just corn and nothing else but corn. So you might look at this system and say the conventional farmer got more corn. But what that doesn’t show is that the organic farmer also got soybeans, switchgrass, vetch, alfalfa …

So an organic farm will absolutely yield less corn, but that doesn’t mean you’re yielding less food. It just means you’re producing less corn.

And presumably this is a healthier system, right? If you have greater diversity of crops, you have a greater diversity of food that the population is eating.

That’s a really important point. Because the reason the conventional corn farmer is doing what he’s doing is because of our diets. It isn’t just the agribusiness corporations pulling levers behind the curtain, it’s also the decisions we’re making as individuals. If we diversify our diets — if we eat less processed food, or switch to animals raised on grass instead of corn — it supports a healthier system.

So that’s why I think it’s important to get people to realize they have a very powerful set of decisions to make when they eat. And those decisions have a huge effect on how the world works. That’s very powerful! I mean: How many issues raised at TED can one get up from their seat and say: “Today I’m going to do something about that.” With food, you can vote for the kinds of food you want three times a day.

Let’s talk about those decisions we’re making. You’re obviously extremely diligent in researching just how sustainable a particular fish is…

I know. It’s annoying…

It’s not annoying. It’s just time-consuming. So for the rest of us who aren’t experts — but who want to eat responsibly and healthfully — what are a few things we can do that will actually make a difference?

Buying at a farmers market is the biggest difference you can make overnight. People complain that cities don’t have fresh, sustainable food, but it’s just not true. In New York, San Francisco, LA — everywhere, there’s an explosion of farmers markets. So the number one thing to do is to shop at these markets, because generally you’re dealing with farmers who are local and small-scale. And if they’re small-scale, they’re generally diverse. They’re generally trying to figure out how to produce the best food with the least input cost – in terms of ecological resources. And that’s a very exciting system to support.

The second thing you could do is grow your own food. It sounds crazy, but it’s not. If you’re across the street here, in New York, you could grow herbs in your windowsill. If you’re in the suburbs, you can plant in your back lawn. It’s not about providing 100% of your food; it’s about doing something that connects you to a natural system, and gets you closer to the food you’re eating.

Another thing is to talk to the manager at your local supermarket. They’re very responsive in trying to procure the kinds of fruits and vegetables that you want. And there are also political outlets, in terms of who you vote for. It’s like what Gandhi said, “Almost everything you do will seem insignificant, but it’s important that you do it.”

It’s interesting: 10 years ago you wouldn’t have had me at TED, and we wouldn’t have been sitting here talking about this. There’s been a huge change in consciousness.

Along those lines: At TED we think a lot about how ideas spread. You’ve been involved with this particular idea on many fronts — through your restaurant, your farm, your op/eds… What are the key ways that the idea of the local food movement has spread?

It’s all about the flavor. Because when you taste really fresh, delicious food — food that’s been grown the right way — you become greedy for more. And then you are by definition being an environmentalist, because that’s the food that’s the most ecologically responsible, and by definition you’re a nutritionist — because that’s the food that’s the most nutrient-dense. And you’re being a community activitist, because you’re engaged in the kind of community system you want to support. So a lot of important things flow from good food. But at the end of the day, it’s about food that tastes good. This idea has spread through hedonism.

Why does conventionally raised food taste so bland?

Well, there are a couple of reasons. The main reason is that it’s bred for yield. If you’re breeding a tomato — or a carrot, or a sheep to produce lamb — you can choose from a lot of characteristics. The characteristic of choice for the last 40 years has been yield. The second characteristic is: How long can it travel? How long can it last on a supermarket shelf or in your refrigerator? When you’re breeding for those characteristics, well, those are the characterisitics you’re going to get. It has almost nothing to do with farming, actually. It’s all about breeding.

The second issue is that conventionally raised produce takes a long time to get to you, so the flavor diminishes. And they’re picking fruits and vegetables when they’re not ripe. In a small local system, they’re generally picking it the day before they go to market.

Another factor is that conventional farming relies on chemical additions to the soil. These boost yield, but do nothing to boost flavor. You get flavor from flavinoids, and you get flavinoids from biologically diverse soil — this means there are nutrients in the soil that are feeding the plant, as it’s being grown, and you’re tasting that.

With animals, too, conventional systems aim for the greatest yield. So we’re raising animals in the cheapest possible way, and that includes feeding them really cheaply. When you’re feeding corn to a pig that normally thrives on a diverse diet, or to a sheep that’s naturally an herbivore, you’re going to get flavors that are really dumbed down.

Like the salmon in your talk: The one that tasted like the chicken it had been fed.

Right. That’s a good example. You get a salmon, but you don’t get a salmon with good flavor.

What are some of the new technologies or new techniques being used on modern organic farms — at Stone Barns for example — that excite you?

Stone Barns is not a Shaker village, and we’re not Luddite in our methods or practices. While we support organic farming, we do so in a thoroughly modern context, employing the most innovative, up to date, and efficient technologies to move food forward. One example is the refractometer—a small, handheld device that measures Brix, the sugar content of a fruit or vegetable. Traditionally it was used to help winemakers determine when to harvest their grapes. But it also provides a tool for testing the nutritional value—and, from my perspective—the flavor of a simple carrot. By testing with the refractometer, farmers can make sure their vegetables have an adequately high sugar content before they harvest, and, if not, have a chance to correct the error. Likewise, I know grass-fed beef purveyors who are using ultrasound machines to perfect the consistency of their product. They ultrasound the animal between the 12th and 13th rib to check for marbling— if it’s not sufficient, the farmer can change the animal’s diet or ultimately decide to switch to a different breed entirely.

Genetically modified foods are often invoked as a necessary ingredient for feeding the world. I suspect you’re generally opposed to the practice. Are there cases where it makes sense? Golden rice, for example?

I’m not radically opposed to the science of genetic modification, but so far there’s been no evidence of significant progress, in part because it’s embedded within the same tired agribusiness thinking. Yes, there is a way to use biotechnology, but the research needs to be conducted independently (not for profits and patents), and understood as one tool in a toolkit, rather than a silver bullet. Autar Mattoo, a scientist who works for the USDA, exemplifies that. Autar argues for what he calls a “bio-sustainability” solution—marrying genetic engineering with sustainable principles. His research has shown a synergism between transgenic tomatoes and organic cover crop. It’s brilliant stuff.

Do you find yourself over time delving deeper into the chemical nature of the food you’re working with?

I do, I’m so regretful that I wasn’t a better biology student. If I had it do over again, I’d spend more time on that. Because at the end of the day, it IS about the biology.

You were an English and Poli Sci major at Tufts. Did your family worry you were throwing your education away when you decided to become a chef?

When I told my Dad I was going to be a chef, he said, “Son, I love books. But I don’t read for a living.”

But he was also very supportive in the end. You know, it was also a different decision back then. Chefs weren’t rock stars. There was no Food Network.

In your earlier talk on TED.com, you make a controversial case for foie gras. I hear you also raise and serve a veal that even non-veal eaters (like me) can stomach. Is there any food that’s black-and-white? Anything you absolutely won’t cook with?

Tomatoes in February.

Do you have any guilty pleasures, food-wise?

People always ask me this. I should come up with one! But the thing is, I feel guilty about everything. I’m an upper East Side Jew. What don’t I feel guilty about?