Randy Pausch's Last Lecture: Achieving Your Childhood Dreams

Randy Pausch's Last Lecture was a great lecture to watch. In the beginning of the lecture Randy tells the audience about numerous tumors he has located in his liver. Although most people would be absolutely horrified by this news, Randy Pausch was not. He was an extremely healthy man, and his ultimate goal in life was to teach people how to achieve their dreams. The three main points Randy Pausch covered in his lecture were his childhood dreams, how to enable the dreams of others, and how to use the information he was teaching to help you achieve your own dreams or enable the dreams of others. The first topic that he covered in his lecture was his childhood dreams.

All of the dreams that Randy had as a child, he set out to achieve. The first dream he talked about in the lecture was being in zero gravity. Randy did achieve this dream through a project he and his classmates did for NASA, and he said the feeling was absolutely awesome. The second dream he discussed was playing in the NFL. Randy, unfortunately, did not make it to the big time in football, but he did enjoy playing football as a child. He noted in his lecture that football taught him fundamentals and hard work, and it helped him learn important positive character traits such as teamwork and sportsmanship. Third, he talked about his dream to author an article in the World Book Encyclopedia. Again, Randy worked very hard to achieve his dream, and he was successful. He authored an article about Virtual Reality. Fourth, he discussed his dream of becoming Captain Kirk. Because he knew this dream would be extremely difficult, he changed his dream to just meeting Captain Kirk. He was able to achieve this dream, and he said it was very awesome to be able to meet his boyhood idle. The fifth dream he talked about was winning stuffed animals. Once again, he worked very hard and was able to achieve this goal. During his presentation, he showed many pictures of all the theme park stuffed animals he had won, and he brought a few on to the stage as giveaways. The last dream he discussed was his dream to become a Disney Imagineer. During Randy's first try to become a Disney Imagineer, he was rejected. Although he had hit what he called a "brick wall", he did not let this setback discourage him. He stated "Brick walls are there for a reason: they let us prove how badly we want things." Randy continued to strive to achieve his childhood dream, and eventually the good news came. He was able to go for a company he was working for and work in the Imagineer department on the Aladdin project. His job was to publish a paper about virtual reality pertaining to the Aladdin project. After completely his task of publishing the paper, Randy was offered a job as a real Disney Imagineer. He turned down the job as an Imagineer, stating that it could be overly stressful, but he continued to work as a consultant in the Imagineer department one day a week.

The second topic Randy discussed was how he could work to enable the dreams of others just like he had done for himself. As a professor, Randy was in the perfect place to be able to influence the lives of other people. The first person Randy was able to help as a professor was a student named Tommy. Tommy's dream was to work on a Star Wars film. Tommy worked doing undergraduate studies in Randy Pausch's class, but when it was time for Randy to move to Carnegie Mellon Tommy did not follow him. Tommy had achieved his childhood dream. He received an offer to work on the Star Wars films. In order for Randy to achieve his goal in greater depths, Randy Pausch created a course at Carnegie Mellon that was called "Building Virtual Worlds." To Randy's surprise the course turned out absolutely fantastic the first year. The students were extremely talented, and the course turned into a show for the entire student body and for parents. Many people were interested in the talents of the students in the "Building Virtual Worlds" class, and they would come down every semester to look at the work the students in the class had created. Through this course, Randy was able to show his students what it felt like to have work that people appreciated and enjoyed. All the students knew that they had made great accomplishments through their work in his class. After ten years, Randy handed his position down as the instructor of this course, and moved on to what he called "The Dream Fulfillment Factory." As part of the "The Dream Fulfillment Factory" Don Marinelli and Randy Pausch created the Entertainment Technology Center which enabled graduate students to obtain a two year professional master's degree in Entertainment Technology. In this program students did five virtual reality projects to promote Entertainment Technology. Because of the strength of this course at Carnegie Mellon, companies began writing contracts promising to hire the students who received their master's degree in this course. Two of the companies were EA and Activision. Again, he had achieved his goal because he enabled these students to fulfill their dreams of working in Entertainment Technology.

During the last part of his lecture, Randy Pausch talked about "Lessons Learned," and he talked with the audience about how to achieve their dreams and how they could help to enable the dreams of others. First, Randy discussed the role of parents, mentors, teachers, and colleagues. During this discussion Randy explained how these people can influence the lives of children and help the children achieve their dreams. As a good role model, these people can guide children during their younger years in life and encourage them to be all that they can be. It is the job of a good role model to remind children that they can do anything that they set their mind to. Next, Randy talked about many good things to do to help in achieving goals. Randy said everyone should always try to be like Tigger in "Winnie the Pooh" and be happy. He reminded people to never lose the child-like wonders, and he said people should always help others. Randy said that everyone should always remain loyal, and they should never give up. He said everyone should always tell the truth, they should apologize when they screw up, and they should focus on other people, not themselves. Other things he mentioned included finding the best in everybody, showing gratitude, always working harder instead of complaining, and always remembering that brick walls help to show dedication.

At the very end of the show, the audience learned something they did not intend to learn when Randy Pausch started his lecture. He had told the audience that they would learn how to achieve their childhood goals and how to help other people achieve their childhood goals. Although these are great things for people to learn, the purpose of Randy's lecture was something different. His lecture provided what he called a "head fake" which is a lesson that someone does not know they are going to learn. Randy Pausch said the first head fake of his lesson was that the people should have learned not how to achieve their dreams but how to lead their life. The second head fake was that the lesson was not really for the audience. He actually recorded his last lecture for his children.

International Blogs

The first international blog I looked at was Mr. Lamshed's class blog in Adelaide, Australia. Mr. Lamshed's class is the class from Australia that linked itself to Mr. C's class in Noel, Missouri that I wrote about last week. His class is an all boy class. Mr. Lamshed's blog was a blog that had a lot of great information about his class. Some of the things Mr. Lamshed included on his blog were videos, photos, learning links, notices and newsletters, and online tasks. When looking at Mr. Lamshed's blog, I was really amazed at all of the work he had put into his blog. Mr. Lamshed wrote at least once a week about what the children in his class were working on. He included everything from assignments for the students in his class to work on to videos recording what the students were working on.

The second blog I looked at was a blog out of Thailand. The name of this blog was Room 202's blog. Just like all of the other school blogs I have looked at, this class blog included videos, pictures, and information about what the children were doing in the classroom. The blog post that interested me the most was a post titled "Connecting with Canada." The basic summary of this post was that this class from Thailand was connecting with a class from Haultain Community School in Canada via Skype which is a free video conferencing tool. According to the blog post some of the things that the classes discussed over the video conference included temperature differences, class size and school size differences, and nationality differences. It was really amazing to me that these two classes could connect through technology to compare differences in between schools.

United States Teacher Blogs

The first blog I found was Mr. C's class blog. Mr. C is a fifth grade teacher at Noel Elementary School in Noel, Missouri. Mr. C had a great blog that had a lot of information. Some of the things that Mr. C included in his blog were class pictures, class videos, and notes from class lessons. The thing that most drew my attention on Mr. C's class blog was a post that linked his class to a class in Australia. Mr. C made it an assignment for the students in his fifth grade class to access Mr. Lamshed's class blog in Adelaide, Australia. Both Mr. C and Mr. Lamshed's classes were reading the book Holes. Mr. Lamshed had posted three reflection questions on chapters one through seven, so Mr. C made it an assignment for the children in his classroom to access Mr. Lamshed's blog and post a comment relating to one of the three reflection questions. To me this was absolutely awesome. It is great that technology has come this far in order to help students connect with students all across the world.

The second blog I looked at was Mr. McClung's class blog. Mr. McClung is a sixth grade teacher at Noel Elementary School in Noel, Missouri. Mr. McClung just like Mr. C had a lot of great information on his blog for the students in his classroom to see. Some of the things that he included on his class blog were slide show presentations, pictures and videos from school functions, and names of people in his class who received academic awards. The main thing on Mr. McClung's class blog that drew my attention was a post titled "Tulsa Update." Mr. McClung had to be absent for school to attend a coaching clinic, so he kept in touch with his students using the class blog. In the post Mr. McClung told his students that he was learning great information at the coaching clinic, but he also told them that he had been monitoring their behavior on the class live stream. The point of Mr. McClung's blog was that technology has now made life easier for teachers and substitute teachers. Mr. McClung was able to communicate with the class substitute using the class blog about instructions for student assignments, and he was also able to monitor how well the substitute was able to handle the classroom. This to me is another awesome feature that technology has brought to us over the past couple of years, and I think that it is great that more teachers are starting to use the resources they have available to them through technology.