Not TED

9. Web video sharing.

Hype can be counter-productive, can't it? By the time that must-see film arrives in town I've usually decided to see anything but simply because I'm sick of being told everybody's talking about it.
I know it's often my loss. Being told that I had to see 'Breaking Bad' didn't mean that 'Breaking Bad' was bad (quite the opposite, in fact).
Anyway, I've experienced the same sort of resistance to TED talks. I'm coming to TED late and now realise that I have been selling myself short. Or, 'cutting my nose off to spite my face', as my Gran would have said.
While resisting the pull of TED, I looked for alternatives. And they are out there - take a look at the list here at the blog TalkingSherpa.

One that I feel as though I should bang the drum for are The DO Lectures, if only because I live just around the corner from the HQ of DO. It's at Cardigan.
Lots of its 20 minute talks are thought-provoking, but when you watch there's a feeling that you're sharing ideas with a few friends - rather than TED's cast of thousands. TED talks can reach hundreds of thousands of people on Youtube, a DO speaker is lucky to get a few hundred views.
My favourite of the moment is a talk by an Australian tech entrepreneur called Will Dayble. It's at the bottom  He starts out by posing a question: 'How do we teach people to do things that haven't been invented yet?'
He shares experience of arriving at an institution to begin teaching a technology course and being handed course content that was two years old. It was so out-of-date it was wrong, he says.
Dayble has been involved in setting up an academy in Melbourne for fledgling entrepreneurs. It's called the Fitzroy Academy of Getting Shit Done.
How do teachers deal with the challenge of preparing learners for a world that we can't envisage? 
Part of the solution is, he argues, getting learners to work collaboratively to solve real-world problems. Dayble says the academy has worked best 'when you just made people work together with people they didn't want to work with on stuff they didn't know about'. 


Sources:
'How do we teach what has yet to be invented?' Will Dayble, DO Lectures (accessed December 31, 2014) Link 
The DO Lectures www.thedolectures.com/
Fitzroy Academy www.fitzroygsd.com
TalkingSherpa www.speakingsherpa.com
TED www.ted.com