The Connected Learning Summit kicks off with a Q&A with comedian and tech innovator Baratunde Thurston, hosted by Joi Ito, director of the MIT Media Lab. Join us for a lively conversation on interest-driven learning, the power of comedy to open minds, and the limits and promise of tech fueled activism.
About Baratunde
Baratunde Thurston is a futurist comedian, writer, and cultural critic who
helped re-launch The Daily Show with Trevor Noah, co-founded
Cultivated Wit and the
About Race podcast, and wrote the New York Times bestseller
How To Be Black. Baratunde is is a highly sought-after public speaker, television personality, and thought leader who has been part of noteworthy institutions such as
Fast Company,
TED, the
MIT Media Lab,
The Onion, and the gentrification of Brooklyn, New York. Baratunde has an uncanny ability to crack the shell of any uncomfortable topic through a personal, accessible, and intelligent point of view.
The ACLU of Michigan honored Baratunde “for changing the political and social landscape one laugh at a time.” He was nominated for the Bill Hicks Award for Thought Provoking Comedy. The Root named him to its list of 100 most influential African Americans, and Fast Company listed him as one of the 100 Most Creative People In Business. He has advised the Obama White House and serves on the National Board of
BUILD, an organization that uses entrepreneurship-based experiential learning to propel underserved youth through high school on to college and career success. He also serves as an advisor to
Civic Hall Labs and the
Data & Society Research Institute.
About Joi
From
TED.comJoichi "Joi" Ito is one of those names threaded through the history of the Internet. From his days kickstarting Internet culture in Japan at Digital Garage, his restless curiosity led him to be an early-stage investor in Twitter, Six Apart, Wikia, Flickr, Last.fm, Kickstarter and other Internet companies, and to serve on countless boards and advisory committees around digital culture and Internet freedom.
He leads the legendary MIT Media Lab as it heads toward its third decade, and is working on a book with Jeff Howe about nine principles for navigating whatever the changing culture throws at us next. As he told
Wired, "The amount of money and the amount of permission that you need to create an idea has decreased dramatically." So: aim for resilience, not strength; seek risk, not safety. The book is meant to be a compass for a world without maps.
