Capturing Local Community Value using Global Learning Networks: Lynn Ilon at TEDxSNUSuwon

Foreign aid and higher education has, for so many years, been a unidirectional delivery of knowledge and ideas from rich nations to poor, carrying with it the implication that solutions exist at a global level and are applied at local levels. But today's world of interlinked global disease, communication, pollution, transportation, migration, social networks, political unrest and financial flows tells us that what happens locally affects the world globally - local context is important. Professor Lynn Ilon tells us that the failure of the top-down approach to knowledge creation has its origin in the inability to recognize the value of local knowledge dynamics and contexts. Together with her collaborators around the world, Lynn is setting up a new higher education and research center intended to combine the value of local context with global knowledge. This higher education and research network for poor countries is based on knowledge economics and has multiple nodes, where stake holders on all levels trade knowledge for knowledge, allowing relevant information to reach from local communities in developing countries to companies and agencies in the developed world. Students in the poorest parts of the world get world-class education for free, communities are engaged in active knowledge building and learning and both the global world and local communities benefit from the knowledge produced. This new balance will be made possible by a combination of internet technology, human networking, community involvement in learning, and an understanding that the knowledge of the poor is the knowledge that creates sustainability and stability for us all.

In the spirit of ideas worth spreading, TEDx is a program of local, self-organized events that bring people together to share a TED-like experience. At a TEDx event, TEDTalks video and live speakers combine to spark deep discussion and connection in a small group. These local, self-organized events are branded TEDx, where x = independently organized TED event. The TED Conference provides general guidance for the TEDx program, but individual TEDx events are self-organized.* (*Subject to certain rules and regulations)