Better Off TEDing

So what's it take to do a TED? No, not me presenting, but a bunch of real research people and hip academics. I just participated in a large "group-think" Future Search workshop on Friday and one of the best proposals was for Hampshire to put on a TED. I thought, wow, what a great idea and I started shouting TED, TED. It's just the kind of internal communication that we all would love to see. It would show us, in a fun and easily understandable form, what people, both faculty and students, on campus are really working on and have produced.

However. It's really hard work to get a presentation into such a compact and polished form. It's a little alien to the standard academic presentation no matter how hot the professor. It's a rehearsed intersection of content and performance, with enough popping exotic visuals to pull the thing along and develop as many "ah-hah" moments as possible and still keep it to 15 minutes. As I said, it's hard work, though it would "up-the-game" for everyone and that's always a good thing.

OK, maybe it's possible you don't know what TED is. Really? It's a conference of smart people, started in Long Beach (I actually thought it was in Malibu), but now in several places, too, that presents insightful, cutting-edge research work in quite a broad range of disciplines. It stands for Technology, Entertainment, and Design - all my favorite topics. How could you go wrong? Here's their blurb about them. Their web site has tons of past presentations on-line to watch. It's a great way to spend a little time - you're well rewarded. All it costs is 15 minutes of your time.

Now all we have to do is set up guidelines, ask for presenters, audition them, cherry pick the best, re-tool the worst and try it. One of the side benefits of all of this would be that everyone notices, or gets told, their level of sophistication in "presentation-land"; something that makes any class or lecture more enjoyable regardless of the level of content. Even that part, all by its self, would be a benefit to the community. What could go wrong? TED, TED, TED, TED...

gunther