I am now addicted to the website TED and wonder why I have not heard of it before this week. I typed "internet" in the search field on the website and found several good videos relating to the topics of the week. Here is the link to one giving a poetical speech about the internet:
http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/rives_controls_the_internet.html
After this, I did a little more research on the website itself. TED was originally created as a conference to bring together ideas relating to technology, entertainment and design. It has evolved to much more. The website describes one of the conferences. I normally would not provide a quote this lengthy but it is beautifully written and makes me think of all of the things "that shouldn't work" but that do.
The website states "over four days, 50 speakers each take an 18-minute slot, and there are many shorter presentations, including music, performance and comedy. There are no breakout groups. Everyone shares the same experience. It shouldn't work, but it does. It works because all of knowledge is connected. Every so often it makes sense to emerge from the trenches we dig for a living, and ascend to a 30,000-foot view, where we see, to our astonishment, an intricately interconnected whole" (http://www.ted.com/).
The website also has a tab that has the questions whether it is "elitist" which I found intriguing. Why would a company website have that? What I found is that a person has to apply to attend the conference and once accepted the fee to attend is in excess of $5200. The audience in these talks we are seeing are all the top performers in their fields. I guess we should consider ourselves lucky that they are humble enough to post their videos online for the general public to view.
It really is a fascinating website if you are interested in short speeches that share very good information. I love learning about different topics especially relating to human or organizational behavior so I think this is a great resource.
Your post intrigued me especially the idea that "they are humble enough to post their videos online for the general public". You are definitely on to something there because I've set through social media conferences and they cover similar ideas to some of the TED videos, but they never are as good as the TED talks. DO you think it goes back to that idea of collaboration?
ReplyDeleteI, like you, had never heard of the TED website until this class. But I have found all the clips I have watched to be quite informative. I do see the TED website as being a good resource in the future. Thank you for sharing the information you learned during your research about this useful tool.
ReplyDeletePosted by Ande Gibbs