Sugata Mitra talked about his various unsupervised learning projects with children. Showed us how they can learn english, answer anything from simple questions to complex questions about biotech (!!!) if given proper tools for exploration and collaboration. He also told us about his “granny cloud”, a network of grandmothers who spend one hour a week on skype answering questions or making these children learn english. Love it. More on his experiments on his wiki. Standing ovation.

Conrad Wolfram did a talk we had already seen at TEDxBrussels in 2009 about why we should stop teaching calculating and start teaching real maths. Use computers where they beat us and focus on the other, more interesting parts of solving math problems. There was much less Wolfram Alpha demos this time and more focus on education, which was nice.

Ralph Simon did a short talk on the lives of 2 great songs, from Doug Fieger and Bobby MicFerrin. Nice anecdotes.

Tom Chatfield talked about the power of virtuality and how gaming is spreading into a lot of our activities and even jobs. Crowdsourcing problems through gaming. Want + Like = Engagement. Reward schedule. Spoke about how Everquest players collaborated to create Dragon Kill Points.

Finally TED’s own Chris Anderson talked about Crowd Accelerated Innovation. In full Prezi steam, he showed why video is a powerful media enabling circles of improvements: people successively watching and improving. Light + Crowd + Desire. With video everyone can be the teacher.  We’re about to launch a new learning cycle in history, and TEDTalks are only a small part of this unstoppable movement. Everything was extremely well presented (of course everybody had high expectations…) and Chris made a perfect final, unveiling a duplex with TEDxKibera that was both highly relevant to his topic and very emotional. Full standing ovation and my own congrats to Chris for inspiring us for a few more years in just one talk ;-)