Tag : jeff jarvis

Recently, Jeff Jarvis’ post on how the ‘one to many’ format of Ted talks is ‘bullshit’ caused a bit of a ‘hear hear’ reaction online. His point is that the educational system has not changed to accommodate the “crowdly” influence of the web,  that the lecture format where one person speaks and the rest of us listens no longer makes sense, because today we’re ‘many to many’, ‘co-creators’ of knowledge.

Most of us agree that the educational system desperately need to change, but why attack TED’s format? This seems like a cheap shot, dragging a great name into the mud just to gain a bit ofattention.Most of us agree that the educational system desperately need to change, but why attack TED’s format? This seems like a cheap shot, dragging a great name into the mud just to gain a bit of attention.

We were milling about at @LenKendall‘s @the3six5 meetup at The Ginger Man here at SXSW last night when Greg Christman, aka @reelspit, came over to say hello. Greg had recently taken part in a creative workshop we held at BBH NY to generate ideas and test thinking for the next phase of Metrotwin, a site we created and run for British Airways. What a dude.

The place was packed with South By’s itinerant freak scene of start-up makers, innovators, journos, digital and new model advertising folk. I was hanging out with Utku from Mint Digital and, in jest, we discussed how awesome it would be if this group could be a country or city-state. This prompted Greg to whoop loudly that we should call it the Kingdom of Awesome and design our own awesomeness flag, and run the whole place using Foursquare. As an aside, I’ve heard a few people recently suggest that the word “awesome” is over. My friends, you misunderstand the meaning of awesome if that’s what you think – but that’s another blog post.