Some years ago, I watched a TED talk given by the Swedish statistician and physician Hans Rosling and his son. Hans and Ola Rosling: How not to be ignorant about the world | TED Talk.
I also started reading his book ‘Factfulness’.
In his book, Hans Rosling discusses the reasons for why people are wrong about many current issues – from environmental themes to demographic developments, socio-political matters, global health and medical provisions, poverty, education and many more. Partly due to misinformation by sensation seeking media, people tend to be stuck in the past, still believing states of things that actually have changed – sometimes to the worst, but more often than not, also to the better.
Hans Rosling believed a more truthful and realistic assessment of states of matters was important. If we believe things don’t change, no matter what we do, if we believe, things are worse than they are, then we might stop putting energy, effort and resources into trying to make things better and instead become hopeless. Or we might invest effort into the wrong projects. In any case, according to Hans Rosling, the consequences of distorted and skewed worldviews can be dear.
Hans Rosling was adviser to many global institutions like the World Health Organization (WHO), Unicef and the United Nations, sharing his insights into the current states of developments. Together with his son and daughter-in-law, he created the web page gapminder in 2006. Today gapminder is run by a whole team of engaged specialists.
In the beginning of his book ‘Factfulness’, Rosling puts readers to the test. In 13 multiple choice questions he asks for our assessments about the world. The sets of questions are from a wider range of more you can find on ‘gapminder’, which provides an enormous range of topics and resources.
Needless to say, those questions are a great source for discussions. I shared the pages from my kindle and together we tried to answer all 13 questions, with surprising results. If you have an e-book reader and teach online, get the book and share the quiz. If you teach in presence, get the paper version and copy the questions.
Or go to gapminder.
On gapminder, Ola Rosling gives an 8 minute introduction to the SDGs of the United Nations. SDGs are Sustainable Development Goals created by the Agenda for Sustainable Development in 2015 and adopted by all members of the United Nations.
Besides providing a huge range of topics with an equally large range of vocabulary, the amount of issues connected with SDGs is inexhaustible. SDGs also an interesting topic for in-company courses as many companies have a set of SDGs on their corporate agenda.
I have created several spin-off lessons from gapminder questions. One I will provide in the sequel to this post.
Plastics
Follow up TED talks:
Michael Green: The global goals we’ve made progress on — and the ones we haven’t | TED Talk (added October 2024)