MORE Thoughts on TED 2009…

Posted on | February 10, 2009 | No Comments

I have returned from the TECHNOLOGY ENTERTAINMENT AND DESIGN CONFERENCE held in Long Beach California, February 3-7, inspired, invigorated and enthusiastic about the future.

TED is all about ideas that might provoke change in the way we think, act/interact, and go about doing things.

If you are unfamiliar with TED you must go and look at the website.  www.ted.com.

Over the course of the TED program I was twittering my experiences to my twitter account JamesEd_me on the site www.twitter.com. If you search TED2009 on twitter you can see mine and the many other posts.

Over the course of the TED program I was also posting some immediate reactions to the presentation and interactions on my own website www.jamesEd.com.

TED itself has chronicled press and social networking reports on its own site, http://conferences.ted.com/TED2009/, which is very useful.

Why were you at TED is a question that has been asked by many people as well as what could my trip to TED possibly bring to the University?

Let me start with the first question.

I have been using TED Talk videos in all of my classes for the last 2 years. TED Talks have not only animated but also enriched weekly discussions on the diverse topics of conflict resolution, creativity and effective public speaking.

In fact many TED Talks have become focal points of my classes.

When I saw that TED had opened 20 reduced rate academic memberships for the 2009 conference I knew I had to apply to not only use the TED materials as I have been but to take part in the larger community experience.

What makes TED work is that people like Bill Gates, Al Gore, Shai Agassi, Lawrence Bender, Tim Berners-Lee, David Kelley and many others who are at the top of their game in the broad fields of technology, entertainment and design are all in one place at one time and open to conversations, with everyone and anyone, about the shape of things to come.

I was part of conversations about information design, education reform, technology and society and the general idea of seeding change for tomorrow.

What does all this have to do with Zayed University?

TED could be seen as charting the path towards a model of liberal arts education for tomorrow’s world.

In fact the final 2 speakers, Elizabeth Coleman President of Bennington College, and Barry Schwartz Professor of Psychology Strathmore College, re-framed how we might better understand and interact in our constructed education environments.

What was gleaned from these presentations was simple.  Students need to respect learning and teachers need to understand they are always teaching.

A sharper attack was made on the education process with the suggestion that the silo approach to modern education is failing to demonstrate the interconnectedness of things.  In fact it was suggested that broad thinking is actually discouraged through the professionalization of education and the quest for specialization.

Elizabeth Coleman ended the final presentation of the conference suggesting that social values need to be part of education not just extra curricular activities and that students need to be provoked to think in terms of frameworks of action and to engage in sustainable and substantial actions.

There is no question that what I am about to write may be read to be idealistic.

TED has awakened me to the broader possibilities of taking what we do in the corridors of the academy and relating it to the real and present world that is both designed and substantially infused with qualities of entertainment.

Alex Tabarrok, Professor of Economics George Mason University, said it very well when he said new ideas drive growth and the problem today is that we are using old ideas to try and address issues that do not respond to the old models. This idea was punctuated with examples of the current financial crisis and over laid onto the canvas of current global education models.

What we need are more idea creators and it is through education that these people will be found. The problem is, as Daniel Libeskind the architect of the Freedom Tower in New York put it, resistance to change.

What we need are new spaces and wonder and for me TED has created just that a sense of wonder and the mental space to engage that wonder in my work.

I look forward to the opportunity to present to my colleagues on both campuses TED from my eyes.

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