TED Presentations

The first thing I thought of when you mentioned the TED presentations was, "Thank God that's over." The project caused an extreme amount of unneeded stress, not because of it's content, but because of it's organization and collaboration problems. I thought that the speakers were on the whole, pretty interesting and most of the presentations (at least the ones I saw) went well. Many groups went over the time limit or did not use the 5 minutes allotted for questions. My group's presentation went considerably well, although we did not end up using a PowerPoint, like many other groups did.

During the period before the actual presentations, all of the sophomores seemed extremely frustrated with a lack of progress and input from other Academites. I know personally that in my group, there was a lot of confusion over the guidelines, the tasks and even the members themselves. I think one way to deal with this issues would be to have a few more all-level meetings, but unlike the one we had, make them shorter. To be honest, I don't think we actually got anything done at that meeting except somewhat explain what a task was. If we had a few shorter, more frequent meetings, I think we would eliminate a lot of the confusion, keep everyone on the same page and more efficiently remind people to work on the project continuously, rather than for hours the day before the presentations.

One common theme I noticed (which was also mentioned in the post-discussion) is that many of the speakers focused on helping others help themselves. I honestly don't remember how much this was covered last year, but it seemed extremely prominent this year. For example, in my group, our speaker was helping find more efficient ways for people to make charcoal, which could lead to profit and small-scale enterprises to boost local economies. Another presentation I saw was about a "Hole in the Wall" experiment, where children taught themselves how to use a touchscreen computer, and they could use it to look up new information and things important to their lives, such as weather and temperature.

I'm not sure what the actual outcome of the TED Project is; is it to just educate us about things people are doing to help the world? I assume it doesn't have anything to do with learning to collaborate, since that is something that seems to be needed in order to have the project function at all. Also, we really don't do anything with the results of our findings about each video. There would be no way to discuss each one with all four Academy levels in the time allotted, and I can't see any real way other than donating money to help with any of the issues or projects in the videos. According to the website, "The purpose of this collaborative project is to present to each other the stories of imaginative and intelligent people who are currently making a positive and profound difference all over the globe," but it almost seems as that could be accomplished by just watching the videos.