TED Talk
In this personal talk, author John Green shares the community of learning that he found in online video.
Some of us learn best in the classroom, and some of us … well, we don’t. But we still love to learn — we just need to find the way that works for us.
…I went to this school, Indian Springs School, a small boarding school, outside of Birmingham, Alabama. And all at once I became a learner. And I became a learner, because I found myself in a community of learners. I found myself surrounded by people who celebrated intellectualism and engagement, and who thought that my ironic oh-so-cool disengagement wasn’t clever, or funny, but, like, it was a simple and unspectacular response to very complicated and compelling problems. And so I started to learn, because learning was cool….
…But a lot of the learning that I did in high school wasn’t about what happened inside the classroom, it was about what happened outside of the classroom….
John Green is the author of Looking for Alaska, An Abundance of Katherines, Paper Towns, and The Fault in Our Stars. He is also the coauthor, with David Levithan, of Will Grayson, Will Grayson. In 2007, Green and his brother Hank ceased textual communication and began to talk primarily through videoblogs posted to YouTube. The videos spawned a community of people called nerdfighters who fight for intellectualism and to decrease the overall worldwide level of suck.
