A couple of weeks ago my friend, Tara Hunt, posted a list of her 10 favorite TED Talks. She’s inspired me to do the same, except I’m limiting myself to just five. Why five? Well, if I go over five, I’m just as likely to go over 10. And so on. I pretty much like everything I view from TED, and it’s definitely an event that I want to attend one day.
TED strikes me as an odd event — full to the brim of inspiring and inspired people, many of them very powerful and totally capable through the money or social capital they have access to of making a real difference. For a regular person like me, I imagine TED is incredibly exciting to attend, yet almost disheartening as you return to real life afterwards and realise that your individual capacity to drive the sort of innovation and change TED aspires to is rather limited.
That’s perhaps a little bit of a dark view, so I’ll let it just slip on past. Without further ado, my five TED favorites are:
- Ken Robinson says schools kill creativity
- Ben Dunlap talks about a passionate life
- Larry Lessig says the law is strangling creativity
- Al Gore’s new thinking on the climate crisis
- Johnny Lee demos Wii Remote hacks
What about you? What about TED inspires you and gets you to think differently?
Jul 09, 2008 @ 13:20:34
Sir Ken gave an hour long keynote at an international education conference in Brisbane a couple of years ago put on by the Dept I worked for at the time. They brought back a DVD of his speech for all the staff who weren’t allowed to go to Brisbane (which is most of those involved).
Before that keynote, I didn’t believe I could ever be mesmerised, challenged and stimulated by a man who simply stands there in the middle of the stage and talks. How wrong I was. He’s the most amazing speaker I have ever seen. It’s good to see you’re number one TED talk is the same as mine
He’s damn well right, too, and I wish the education systems would actually listen to him rather than engage him, read his reports and then go back to the same old way of doing things.
Jul 09, 2008 @ 17:03:45
I’ve only got one, because (putting my educators hat on) it had a strong resonance for me.
sadly it seems to have fallen off the TED listings. it’s Dr Sugata Mitra discussing his “Hole in the Wall” project.
some core info here:
http://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/stories/india/thestory.html
a really bad recording of a similar talk of his
http://design-notes-deepankar.blogspot.com/2007/11/sugata-mitra-can-kids-teach-themselves.html