Tuesday, October 19, 2010

Schools Kill Creativity

Ken Robinson Says Schools Kill Creativity:

Watch the video at http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity.html

Ted.com - Ideas worth spreading: TED is a conference where experts are invited to share discoveries, new findings, or just anything that they think is worth telling others about. The original conference is held in Palm Springs and Long Beach California. The speakers give anywhere from 2.5 minutes up to 36 minute presentations, however the large majority of them are 15-20 minutes long.

The Speakers generally keep in mind 2 audiences when they are speaking.

1. Presenters usually give their talks to packed houses in large auditoriums with seats for as many as 2,000 or as little as 150. Speakers present with this in mind. They know that they will be giving a timed presentation to a group of very knowledgeable and well educated people who have also been very successful themselves. Speakers are given free access to the conference whereas regular citizens can participate, but tickets usually cost around $1,500. This means that the people in this room are very affluent. Whether they're other speakers or businessmen who have come to learn about new industry trends or to get ideas for investments, the live audiences in the room are of a very specific demographic.

2. Presenters know that their talk will at some future date be uploaded to the website www.ted.com. These talks will then be available free to viewers all over the world. Some of the most popular talks are translated into as many as 32 languages and are viewed all over the world. TED also holds smaller conferences in different places around the world such as England, India, among others. There are also TED conferences earmarked for specifically for certain demographics such as TEDwomen, TEDhealth and TEDglobal. The talk that I will be analyzing was given at the regular conference, but know that these talks reach a huge audience once they are made available online.

Your typical online viewer is slightly more often male than female, is between the ages of 18 and 34, has no children, has a graduate school education, and browses ted from a work computer as opposed to a home or school computer. (Alexa.com)

In short, these are very educated and successful speakers speaking to a similarly huge, diverse, well educated and successful audience.

1 comment:

  1. You did a really good job of specifying the audience and covering all your bases. That's crazy people are willing to pay that much money just to listen to a fairly short talk. Whatever they say there must be pretty good, probably a tough audience.

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