On Fri, 25 Jan 2013 21:52:04 -0800, Jim Clark wrote:
Hi
Howdy,
I often hear or read about how "bad" or "outdated" or
whatever lecturing is. And yet TED talks appear to get
lots of good publicity. But aren't TED talks just lectures,
albeit very good ones (usually good, that is)? What do people
who disparage lecturing think it is that they are criticizing?
I admit to having seen only a few TED talks but what
impressed me about them was (a) their high production
value and (b) the focus on a specialized topic. It seems
to me that TED talks are more like "job talks" than
ordinary lectures where one, of course, really, really wants
to impress the audience in contrast to a giving a lecture
sandwiched between a departmental committee meeting
and a lab research meeting. I think that what is needed
is a comparison of how much time is devoted to making
up a TED talk relative to an ordinary lecture. I'll bet that
TED talk has many more hours devoted to them than an
ordinary lecture (unless one is at an instruction where all one
has to do is teaching ;-).
By the way, one TED talk that I ask my students in statistics
to watch is by Hans Rosling on "Stats the reshape your
world view" and point out that only descriptive statistics
are used; see:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVimVzgtD6w
NOTE: Rosling uses the software "Gapminder" for his presentation
and here is a link to the Wikipedia entry on the organization that
does research on/with it:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gapminder_Foundation
However, if you do a Google search on Gapminder, Google
warns that this website might have been compromised, so
one should be cautious in going to this website. Google
provides a tool called "trends" which is supposed to be
something like gapminder but I haven't used it much; see:
http://www.google.com/trends/
-Mike Palij
New York University
[email protected]
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