TED Talks — Digital Literacy Project

My Favorite TED Talk: Are Schools Killing Creativity?

The TED (stands for technology, entertainment, and design) Conference, is held annually in Long Beach, CA. More than a thousand people attend and the event sells out a year in advance. Oh, and it costs $6,000 to attend and you must be invited. The presenters, the “world’s leading thinkers and doers”, are limited to 18 minutes. All the presentations are videoed and made available over a period of time for free. Actually, BMW is one of the major sponsors that make the recordings available online.

I surf the TED site from time to time to see if I can round out my cultural side. Most of the presentations are over the top for me and I have only found about 10 that I watched all the way through and felt like I was the better for it. This post is about my favorite presentation from TED.

This presentation is made by Sir Ken Robinson and is entitled “Are Schools Killing Creativity”. The bulk of his presentation was about how schools try to make students conform to a rigid set of rules and if they don’t, then there must be something wrong with them. I like his British humor but the hook for me was a story he told towards the end of the presentation about a girl that would not fit in. When he told the story about the dancer I could not help but think about young “gear heads” that also do not fit. By the time a post secondary educator gets these students a lot of them have been beat up pretty bad by the system.

It really made me think about the traditional education system. Well, you take a listen and see what you think. Remember you can post comments to this post by simply registering with the site.

TED Talks: The Challenge of the Last Mile

Here is an interesting TED Talk presentation that relates to technology being applied to the automotive industry.

So what is TED?

TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design. It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from those three worlds. Since then its scope has become ever broader.
The annual conference now brings together the world’s most fascinating thinkers and doers, who are challenged to give the talk of their lives (in 18 minutes).
This site makes the best talks and performances from TED available to the public, for free. More than 200 talks from our archive are now available, with more added each week. These videos are released under a Creative Commons license, so they can be freely shared and reposted.

This presentation is by Dean Kamen who landed in the limelight with the Segway, but he has been innovating since high school, with more than 150 patents under his belt. Recent projects include portable energy and water purification for the developing world, and a prosthetic arm for maimed soldiers.