Tag : ted

On Monday, I went to TEDxLondon, the London sibling of  TEDxChange New York, an independently organised TED event convened by The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The aim of the event was to mark the 10th anniversary of the 8 Millennium Development Goals. Entitled ‘the future we make’, the tone was firmly celebratory and optimistic…perhaps a little too optimistic for those of us for whom a question mark hangs over the common interpretation of aid and development.

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.

1. Service Design Tools: An open collection of communication tools for complex design processes.

2. Personas: A project from MIT, which mines data from around the interwebs to analyse what sort of personality you are. It decided that I like movies and music equally, which is actually true, if a very narrow description of my myriad interests. James was apparently arrested for felony in 1871, which seeing as how he didn’t exist then is rather amusing. Or he had an evil brother in the1800′s. I like the way they explain the logic behind the project though: “It is meant for the viewer to reflect on our current and future world where digital histories are as important, if not more important, than oral histories, and computational methods of condensing our digital traces are largely opaque and socially ignorant.”

Thanks to Graeme Douglas at W+K London, I was able to attend the Nokia-sponsored live-streaming of TED Global’s talks on Thursday afternoon. 

I’ve been a big fan of the TED talks for years, and this was as close as I could probably get to actually being there. Some of my favourite talks/performances: