Ted Talks and the Infovores

~ Laura

Alright. I admit it. I love TED. I even have a TED app on my iPhone. I hate being predictable.

TED are 18 minute lectures by smart, interesting, and pretentious people. They use PowerPoint presentations to amp up their talks. Their talks are devoid of the usual stuff that makes smart people boring, like facts, citations, graphs, numbers, nuance, evidence. I particularly love the lectures on topics that I know nothing about. It provides me with chatter topics. I find lectures on topics that I know a lot about really frustrating and facile.

The audience for the TED talks probably neatly correlates with New Yorker readership. And blog reader demographics. Sigh. Sometimes I think I need to stop collecting random bits of information like Cliff Clavin. 

Anya Kamenetz from Fast Company talks to Chris Anderson about TED. She writes, "By combining the principles of "radical openness" and of "leveraging the
power of ideas to change the world," TED is in the process of creating
something brand new. I would go so far as to argue that it's creating a
new Harvard — the first new top-prestige education brand in more than
100 years."

James Joyner doesn't think that watching videos of a lecture could ever replace a university.

The information in these TED talks is too thin to be a real lecture. They aren't really designed to replace a college class, but they could be. It's not too hard to imagine a TED-style University of Phoenix with the superstars giving lectures and an army of TAs grading tests.

While it isn't a proper lecture, Anderson sure has built up a successful brand. 

http://video.fastcompany.com/plugins/player.swf?v=a86a331403bed&p=fc_social

Published by Laura

9 thoughts on “Ted Talks and the Infovores”

  1. “I find lectures on topics that I know a lot about really frustrating and facile.”
    I do it the other way around. I monitor how well writers tackle subjects I know something about (where I have some hope of catching them if they are pulling a fast one). If they earn my trust by doing well with those familiar subjects, I am willing to follow them trustingly into less familiar waters.

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  2. I’ve been using TED Talks in the classroom as a basis for a research project (ugh, I refuse to teach the research paper, so I reformulate it into a research project, kind of like a cubist research project). I’ve also used them to supplement readings in the comp textbook.

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  3. I forgot to mention: actually, I tend not to watch the TED Talks. I prefer to read the transcripts. This means I’m often a bit behind on the newest ones because I have to wait for a transcript unless I *really* want to see it.

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  4. I’m like Amy. So, I don’t really enjoy the TED talks because there’s no repeat performance to validate with. Some TED talkers have written extensively enough so they can pass the test, but they’re TED talks are still not all that interesting to me. I think the insight that they’re targeted for people who want to know a little bit but don’t want to get bored explains why I didn’t end up liking them.
    I personally like getting bored, and think that anything worth learning about is worth spending quite a bit of time on (i.e. my kids’ schools expert project or this week’s boredom inducing interest, the specifics of how VAM scores are calculated for teachers). I bore other people when I get interested in a topic, and have just now realized that’s cause they want the TED talk version, even if they’re actually interested in the subject. :-). I’ll have to learn to amuse myself by doing the regression analysis on teacher scores and then work up the 18 minute non-boring talk on the subject.

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  5. I bore other people…
    I used to bore other people, then I discovered heavy drinking. I may still be boring, but I don’t care.

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  6. I like some of them but a lot of the speaking quality is awful and I get all hung up criticizing the rhetorical strategy and miss the talk content.

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  7. My favorite is the guy who did the talk on data using birthrates and life expectancy charts. It really is a great talk, and no he doesn’t use powerpoint.

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