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We are saddened by the news that ocean photographer, filmmaker and storyteller Mike deGruy died yesterday in a helicopter crash in Australia. Mike was truly one of the great teachers and advocates for the oceans, as you can see in his TEDTalk, filmed aboard Mission Blue in 2010:

In this talk, as in his photography and his many films, you can sense Mike’s infectious humor, his passion for the oceans — and his example of a life well and richly lived.

Photo top: Mike deGruy at Baltra Airport in the Galapagos Islands, April 2010. Photo below: deGruy holds a pair of shoes decorated by Jim Toomey, aboard the Mission Blue Voyage. Courtesy James Duncan Davidson.

The new feature “State of the X,” on the TEDx Tumblr, runs the numbers on TEDx and the great video coming from these worldwide independently produced events.

To start — how many TEDx events happened in the past month?

TEDx events by the numbers: January

• 77 TEDx events happened around the world
• 67 cities hosted one or more TEDx events
• 29 countries hosted one or more TEDx events

TEDx by the numbers: All time

• 3190 TEDx events have happened around the world
• 800 cities around the world have hosted one or more TEDx event
• 126 countries have hosted one or more TEDx events

One of the things we love about TEDx, here at the TED Blog, is how much astonishing video comes in from around the world. Brené Brown, Simon Sinek, some of our favorite TEDTalks were recorded at independent TEDx events, and we’re always scanning for more. Check out these stats:

TEDxTalks by the numbers: January

• 785 new talks added to the TEDxTalks library
• 3.5 million views of the TEDxTalks YouTube channel and the TEDxTalks website
• 22 talks were featured on TED.com (twice as many as in December, our previous record month)
• 4.2 million views of the TEDxTalks on TED.com

TEDxTalks by the numbers: All Time

• 12,900 TEDxTalks
• 27.6 million views of the TEDxTalks on the YouTube channel and the TEDxTalks website
• 122 talks featured on TED.com
• 45.8 million views of the TEDxTalks on TED.com

The huge number of talks in our library can be overwhelming but if you focus on just a few, you can uncover surprising connections. Here are two that were featured on TED.com in January:

Philosophy is extremely difficult to illuminate, but Julian Baggini nails it. In this absorbing talk from TEDxYouth@Manchester, Baggini tackles one of the oldest questions: What makes you, you?

Drew Berry asks many of same questions as Baggini, but his approach to finding the answers is different. At TEDxSydney, Berry animates some of the astonishing processes that happen inside everyone at every moment of every day ? revealing that what makes you, you, is more elaborate and much more beautiful than what the naked eye can see.

Explore TEDxTalks on TED.com and our Weekly Editor?s Picks from January and discover connections on your own.

Late in January, Robin Ince tweeted:

And here is what he wrote:

Every year I attempt to say yes to things that are out of my comfort zone. These are never physical things such as parachute jumps or mountain climbs — I am not so keen on actual death, I am happy to make do with the death of my own self-regard. A TED talk was one of those leaps into abject terror I made in 2011. I had admired these talks for some time and frequently fallen into bouts of voluntary insomnia playing TED talk tag until dawn.

My mistake was that I had never watched the funny ones. I didn?t even know that they existed. So I spent my first month of preparation for TED mulling over how I could create the illusion of being smart. This has been made even more difficult now you are no longer allowed to smoke a pipe onstage, a surefire device to create the illusion of thoughtfulness as successive British Prime Ministers demonstrated.

About a week beforehand I suddenly realized I had gone in totally the wrong direction. I had been asked for to provide levity, not compete with people who were clearly qualified to talk of astrophysics and the evolution of empathy. The wastepaper basket was rapidly filled and a new notebook opened. I gathered together some words on whether it was possible to be happy if approaching the world scientifically. In 8 minutes I hoped to cover love, death and the strong anthropic principle. As it was, I had to drop the strong anthropic principle due to time constraints. It appears that love and death take up more of your allotted eight minutes than you might imagine.

The night before my morning session (“morning session” is a term that strikes terror into the hearts of the predominantly nocturnal comedian), I sat alone in the hotel bar, scribbling and re-scribbling until I had nervously chewed all the ink from the pen.

The blessed relief of not overrunning, and saying most of what I had planned, meant I didn?t start mulling over the talk until I was on the train home. But by the time I walked through the door I had demolished all I had said and, as so often on these occasions, the clear picture I had wanted to see in the buildup only became transparent in the aftermath. To attempt eight minutes summing up happiness through science was preposterous. I now knew the TED talk I should have done, which was about the daily problems I face of attempting to write comedy routines about contemporary physics which both I and a reasonably broad comedy club audience can understand. A world of quark-based conundrums and neutrino dilemmas flooded my mind with a revelation at 7 minutes 34 seconds, which would have been like opening a box and a cat leaping onto your lap.

There is not time for regret — actually that?s not true; if you read French literature you?ll find it can occupy your life. Nevertheless I can?t look back too much and wish I had done something else. The process of terror was in itself fascinating, and I got the chance to enjoy coffees from around the world while listening to speakers who hotwired my mind (coffee and hotwired minds is a stimulating mix). And thanks to Hugh Everett and the many-worlds interpretation, I can be safe in the knowledge that in another world I did deliver the speech I wished I had, and also safe in the knowledge that in that other world I walked off and wished I had attempted something about happiness through science.

– Robin Ince

Watch his TEDTalk, which is really very funny >>

Take us through the Breaker process — how does it work?

Each three-month Breaker project convenes a multidisciplinary group of young people between the ages of 18 and 24 to design product or service solutions to a global challenge. Projects are led by two visionaries — experts in the field who provide inspiration and context to the challenge. The first project we did, the Future of the Book Challenge, addressed the rise of functional illiteracy in the US, and asked the team to consider how emerging technologies might be harnessed to get adolescents reading. Our current Urban Agribusiness Challenge addresses the need to help urban agriculture grow from small-scale ventures to having a wider social impact.

Over three months, the Breaker team works with a series of collaborators — leading innovators in the field inform the research; industry experts guide the team throughout the process. The team approaches problem-solving using design processes they learn from IDEO, fuseproject, Frog and more; they?re exposed to start-up perspectives by working inside innovation ecosystems like AOL Ventures and QLabs. The project concludes by having the team pitch its products to an audience of all the existing collaborators, as well as members New York?s venture community. We set the bar high, but we also bring in the best of the best to support the process, offering the team access to the people and companies driving innovation in the space.

Tell us more about the Urban Agribusiness Challenge.

The idea for this project grew out of a conversation I had last year at TED with Majora Carter, Founder of Sustainable South Bronx, about the challenge of and opportunities in New York City urban agriculture. I later invited her to participate in a Breaker challenge as a project visionary. We chose Danielle Gould of Food+Tech Connect as a second visionary to complement Majora because she has an IT-fueled approach to innovation. Once the Breaker team was chosen, we invited a wide range of urban agriculture innovators across New York City to participate. In fact, TED Fellow Viraj Puri?s Gotham Greens — a hydroponic greenhouse — is one of more than 20 research sites included in the first phase of the project. The team will survey sites across sectors — from grower to shipper, seller to consumer. They?ll be identifying needs in various stages of production and consumption, and develop products that might better satisfy these needs and help scale up urban agriculture.

What do you look for in applicants?

We look for tenacity as well as a proven ability to collaborate. Individuals are chosen to represent different skill sets. We?re looking to assemble a team with diverse domains of intelligence who will come at the problem from various perspectives. We like to have a visual artist help synthesize ideas during the messy collaborative process. We want someone with a programming background, and somebody else with experience in business. We like outliers who have a passion for creative collaboration even if they have no prior experience in design or entrepreneurship — even if they have little content knowledge specific to our challenge.

What?s been the most remarkable or successful outcome you?ve seen from a Breaker session?

The mandate to design a commercially viable product is a huge driver — but launching it is not a necessary condition of success. Still, I think the fact that the products that came out of the Future of Book Challenge — Mobo (a service for receiving, sharing and engaging with stories via text messaging) and Unbound (a video reference tool) — continue to be developed speaks to our success. The participants who continue to push forward with them are stepping into unfamiliar roles that unveil unseen potential — both for them and for the world. At the end of the three months, some team members decide they?re done and are moving on to something else. But either way, all the participants come out of Breaker with an entrepreneurial mindset and a toolkit for designing solutions to the problems they will encounter — both large and small — for the rest of their lives.

What problem did you set out to solve with Breaker? Were you mostly concerned about education?s failure to nurture creativity, or did you see young people disengaged with social challenges?

I?ve been working to influence public school reform in NYC for fifteen years — as a teacher, a professional developer, a professor, and a leadership coach. I know firsthand how a culture of high-stakes testing quells curiosity and creativity, burns teachers and kids out and disrupts family life. The current iteration of Breaker is post-secondary, but the applications to secondary are there. As we grow, we?ll develop partner programs at the high school level that work in tandem with the Breaker teams — connecting them around similar lessons in designing for social entrepreneurship.

There are so many talented young people — some of whom have not been successful in traditional schooling — who know that have something valuable to contribute, but can?t find opportunities to apply their skills to meaningful work. Even students who have successfully navigated the college track complain of a disconnection between content learned and the skills needed for today?s economy. What we?re hearing from participants is that Breaker is seen as an alternative-learning pathway for those who?ve chosen not to go to college after high school, or as an experiential supplement to college coursework, or as a transitional opportunity for early career professionals. We see all three types applying to our program.

Breaker will gradually expand to cities across the US and abroad with the aim of establishing concurrent programming in sister secondary schools.

Tell us about your own kids and how they affect and shape your work

My kids go to a public elementary school in New York City. My 4th grader works out of a Kaplan Test Companion workbook every night for homework, and has little opportunity to apply these discrete skills in substantive ways – through no fault of her teacher or the principal, they?re only complying with a whole host of system-wide mandates and pressures. Alternative models exist in the city, but they come with a price tag a middle-class family like ours can?t afford. Suffice it to say that I?ve got a five-year plan to get the Breaker model into the NYC public high schools!

How has being a TED Fellow changed or affected your work?

It wasn?t until I began attending TED in 2009, as a Fellow, that I began to rethink my long history with project-based learning in terms of design thinking and social enterprise. I found that user-centered design required the same rigorous research, interviewing and empathy work that was the central to the projects I taught; I appreciated the permission to fail inherent in an iterative methodology; and I was attracted to the idea of designing solutions within the constraints of the marketplace. In other words, I began to see problems and their solutions not only as academic exercises, but as opportunities for product and service development. And I saw the educative and entrepreneurial potential for students.

There are many aspiring social entrepreneurs out there who are trying to take their passion and ideas to the next level. What one piece of advice would you give them, based on your own experience and successes?

Maintain a learning stance. It takes the pressure off getting it perfect, and compels you to find the lessons in your failures.

Can students learn better by sharing what they know? TED Fellow Nina Tandon believes in the power of sharing ideas and using TED Talks in her classroom. In addition to that, she is now using the TED Conversation platform in the Bioelectricity course that she’s currently teaching at Cooper Union in New York City. After hosting her own conversation on TED Conversations, Nina was inspired to use the platform in her classroom and let students take the role of sharing knowledge and leading discussions with the global community.

Here, Nina Tandon shares her motivation on using TED Conversations in her class:

“I’ve been hosting a class blog each year for the past four years as a way for students to share amongst each other, but this year I wanted to extend our reach into the global community, to have the students engage in “external participation.” I’m hoping that the students will learn by teaching, and will appreciate the unexpected lateral connections that may develop by engaging with the diverse TED community in the context of their developing classroom expertise! It’s an experiment, but I’m really looking forward to seeing how this experience contributes not only to the students’ growth, but hopefully to the TED community as well. Thank you so much to the TED Team for collaborating with us in this exciting endeavor!”

Each week throughout the semester, students will be starting new conversations. You can track them by searching the following tags: TEDinClass and Bioelectricity. Each conversation will be open for 1 week, until the next students starts a new one.

One of the students Samantha Massengill kicks off the conversation series with this question: How immune should science be from the political environment of its time?

And Ariel Habshush suggests an idea: Our bodies are amazing nano/micro electrical factories! and hopes to share his knowledge on this topic throughout the conversation.

You can access all these classroom conversations here as they are added, every week until mid-April. Students will be sharing what they’ve learned during the course on TED Conversations. Come to learn, participate and share, at ted.com/conversations/topics/TEDinClass.

The best moments at TED have often come from unexpected places. But this year, we’re pushing that to an entirely new level. We’re staging a global talent search to bring together the most remarkable lineup in TED’s history. A series of public auditions in cities around the world will reveal voices, talents and ideas that delight and surprise. As a result, at least half of our TED2013 program will literally be crowd-sourced through what we’re calling the TED2013 Worldwide Auditions.

Public auditions will be happening in 14 countries on six continents — in Amsterdam, Bangalore, Doha, Johannesburg, London, Nairobi, New York, São Paulo, Seoul, Shanghai, Sydney, Tokyo, Tunis and Vancouver — between April and June 2012. The auditions will be official TED events, and we’ve tapped local TEDx organizers in each city to produce.

Online audition applications, which include the option to upload a short video, will be available for each city at least two months before the audition. From those submissions, TED will invite 30 of the best applicants to each audition, where speakers will have 3-6 minutes to deliver a proposed talk in English. Anyone ? with the exception of those who have already spoken at an official TED Conference or have a talk on TED.com ? is eligible to apply to auditions in his or her nearest city. In some exceptional cases, TED will contribute to travel costs.

Learn more about TED Worldwide Auditions >>

Ten years ago, educator Sugata Mitra and his colleagues cracked open a hole in a wall bordering an urban slum in New Delhi, installed a networked PC, and left it there for the local children to freely explore. What they quickly saw in their ?Hole in the Wall? experiment was that kids from one of the most desperately poor areas of the world could, without instruction, quickly learn how the PC operated. The children also freely collaborated, exploring the world of high-tech online connectivity with ease. The experiment (which provided the inspiration for the Oscar-winning film Slumdog Millionaire) was the dawning of Mitra?s introduction to self-organized learning, and it would shape the next decade of his research. Beyond the Hole in the Wall: Discover the Power of Self-Organized Learning is an important update to Mitra?s groundbreaking work, and offers new research and ideas that show how self-directed learning can make kids smarter and more creative. Mitra provides step-by-step instruction on how to integrate it into any classroom. and the book includes a foreword by Nicholas Negroponte, founder of both MIT’s Media Lab and the One Laptop per Child Association.. Beyond The Hole in the Wall offers important lessons that could reshape our schools and reinvigorate our educational system. We recently spoke with Mitra about his ideas.

What is self-organized learning?
In most schools, we measure children on what they know. By and large, they have to memorize the content of whatever test is coming up. Because measuring the results of rote learning is easy, rote prevails. What kids know is just not important in comparison with whether they can think.

Self-organized learning is a process where children in groups take on a topic or question which they then research using the Internet. While doing it, they have myriad discussions with each other that deepen their understanding of the answer. Along the way, there is no adult supervision or guidance of any sort.

How is this form of learning better?
Experiments show that children in unsupervised groups are capable of answering questions many years ahead of the material they’re learning in school. In fact, they seem to enjoy the absence of adult supervision, and they are very confident of finding the right answer. Ultimately, they retain the learning effortlessly and for years, much longer than what we see with rote memorization of facts and figures.

What are the barriers that stand in the way of its widespread adoption?
The existing Victorian system of education was created to mass-produce identical human beings, mainly to serve an aristocracy, and, in modern times, an industrial elite. Governments find it difficult to move away from this model, because it has worked. But in a tech-driven knowledge economy this method is not needed anymore, and it will not serve us. But too often we see that teachers and educational administrators feel threatened by self-organized learning. They, therefore, think it is not learning at all.

Does the idea of self-organized learning work better with today’s child, who is often highly wired and making a wide range of online choices each day?
Yes, it does. Right now, we have a generation of children 16 years old or younger who have never known a world without many of the connecting technologies that we take for granted and rely on heavily. How do these devices affect, and even improve, how we absorb information? Self-organized learning would not work at all without the Internet. Educationists have suggested this type of instruction as a method for years, but the resources were not there until recently. Now, with the Internet, we have the means and the capabilities to watch self-organized learning flourish. It’s a very exciting time.

Beyond the Hole in the Wall: Discover the Power of Self-Organized Learning is part of the TED Books series, which is available for the Kindle and Nook as well as on Apple’s iBookstore.

In the 1970s, Diana Nyad set long-distance swim records that are still unbroken. Thirty years later, at 60, she attempted her longest swim yet, from Cuba to Florida. In this funny, powerful talk at TEDMED, she talks about how to prepare mentally to achieve an extreme dream, and asks: What will YOU do with your wild, precious life? (Recorded at TEDMED 2011, October 2011, in San Diego, California. Duration: 16:58)

Watch Diana Nyad’s talk on TED.com, where you can download it, rate it, comment on it and find other talks and performances from our archive of 1,000+ TEDTalks.

Learn more about our content partner TEDMED >>

Watch more talks from our friends at TEDMED on TED.com >>

TEDx events — powered by passionate volunteer hosts and committed audience members — are hotbeds of innovation, and we’re constantly looking to them for what’s next in event planning, audience participation and outreach. Each month, the TEDx team picks 10 great event ideas bubbling up from the TEDx community, highlighting them in a newsletter and on the TEDx Innovations page on the TEDx site.

We’ve picked five of our January favorites below — see all 10 on the TEDx Innovations page, where you can also sign up for February’s newsletter.

(And if you have a TEDx innovation to share, email tedxstories@ted.com.)

During TEDxValencia, attendees wrote out ideas and thoughts on Post-it notes, which were displayed on a wall during the event. Afterward, the notes were scanned and compiled on an interactive microsite. Learn more from TEDxValencia >

Dez Propaganda commissioned an 18-minute composition for TEDxValedosVinhedos, written by Valmor Pedretti Jr., with vocal contribution from Luiza Caspary. Attendees got a copy of the song on a CD in their gift bags, and you can hear it here >>><

At TEDxDelft, sponsor Senz let attendees test their storm umbrellas — designed with one side longer than the other — against a giant wind machine just outside the venue. Result? Hilarious pics >>

The TEDxAmericanRiviera stage was covered with rectangles of Mylar stretched across iron tubing. During rehearsal, speakers were given white pens and asked to write their “idea worth spreading” on the mylar. The makeshift boards were covered by the end of the day, and gave an amazing close-up when captured on video >>

On TEDxYouthDay, TEDxYouth@Chisinau held a viewing party for 47 young people at the juvenile prison in Lipcani, Moldova. At the end, the group was asked to write what “youth” means to them on a piece of paper, and then to fold a paper plane and fly it through the air. As youth reporter Alexandru Lebedev writes: “Some of them drew prison symbols, others wrote the names of social networks that they have heard about, and some wrote that they want to fall in love, or to love, or to have a family, or to have a house and a place that could give them warmth.” Read the full story on the TEDx blog >>>

See all 10 innovations on the TEDx Innovations page, where you can also sign up for February’s newsletter.

2012 may be the year of 3D printing, when this three-decade-old technology finally becomes accessible and even commonplace. Lisa Harouni gives a useful introduction to this fascinating way of making things — including intricate objects once impossible to create. (Recorded at TEDSalon London, November 2011, in London, UK. Duration: 14:50)

Watch Lisa Harouni’s talk on TED.com, where you can download it, rate it, comment on it and find other talks and performances from our archive of 1,000+ TEDTalks.