I began to notice both a proliferation and reduction in quality of the listings on the TED site a year or more ago. My first concerns came up a few years back when we had a job applicant use a decent, but far from excellent, TED talk as part of their teaching demonstration. It was nearly pop psychology motivational concepts.
When a brand changes its basic style questions arise for me. Formerly, TED was a single conference: an eclectic collection of presentations by persons on the forefront of their fields tasked with keeping it brief and at the lay-language level. There was great stuff for use in the classroom for topics I cared about bringing into the classroom and definitely consistently interesting. Then, I noticed there was not just the original TED talks, but some from other locations. It seemed reasonable that more than one TED conference would be valuable and didn't think too much of it. Then, I noticed that it seemed to be more than a handful of new locations, and the quality bar had dropped dramatically. No longer was it persons on the forefront of their fields, and I saw some presentations that were by persons whom I believed to be fundamentally motivational speakers. Alarm bells began to go off in my mind. Now I see a series of articles in Wired Magazine that documents the extents of the problems that had thought I was seeing: TEDx is everywhere, all the time, about anything, by anyone and everyone. http://www.wired.com/business/2012/11/ff-tedx/?utm_source=Contextly&utm_medium=RelatedLinks&utm_campaign=Previous Pseudoscience presentations: http://www.wired.com/business/2012/12/pseudo-science-saps-the-power-of-tedx/?utm_source=Contextly&utm_medium=RelatedLinks&utm_campaign=Interesting Paul --- You are currently subscribed to tips as: [email protected]. To unsubscribe click here: http://fsulist.frostburg.edu/u?id=13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df5d5&n=T&l=tips&o=22250 or send a blank email to leave-22250-13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df...@fsulist.frostburg.edu
