TED Research

1/2/2017

This literature review will cover four elements of communication theory: the power of real life spaces like conferences and community building, the influence of opinion leaders, and the potential of digital optimism. These four elements will be applied later be in the TED’s Case Profile and further examined in TED’s Case Analysis and Discussion.

5. Each book can be read in a single session. Just an hour or so. I see this as a terrific fit for our over-busy lives. One reason reading has been in decline is that it's just too daunting to start a traditional 80,000-word book knowing it will take hours and hours to complete. You could argue that traditional books are the length they are in part because people once had fewer competing claims on their leisure time, and in part because the physical nature of a printed product means that books have to be a couple hundred pages long to feel like value for money.
But today the question to ask of a non-fiction book is: what is the right length to explain this idea? There are many 80,000 word nonfiction books that communicate most of their value in a couple of chapters, the rest padded out because -- well, gee -- books just have to be a certain length. We're excited to offer books that are mostly in the 15,000 - 20,000 word range. And just as an 18-minute talk can often (because of the discipline of compression) be better than a 60-minute talk, so these short books encourage authors to offer focused gems of explanation.

6. Our authors rock! Most of them have given TED Talks (and these are included by the way, in each book as a video epilogue), but the books dig into their subject matter far more deeply than their TED Talk ever could. A TED Talk is typically 2,000 words. These are 10x more. From the future of humanity to the secrets of happiness, these books offer transformational thinking.

We certainly don't think any TED talk offers all there is to know on any topic. Of course not. But you can learn enough to get excited about knowing more. A TED talk is not a book. It is not a peer-reviewed scientific paper. It can't be either of those things. Nor does it want to replace them. On the contrary, it wants to amplify them and bring news of their significance to a broader audience.

But understanding the world isn't just about digging deep. One of the biggest problems of modern intellectual life is that everyone is buried too deeply in their own trench and has little visibility of what is going on elsewhere. Today's world of knowledge is simply too vast, too intricate for anyone to be at the leading edge in multiple fields.

And this has dangerous consequences. Most of our worst problems can't be tackled successfully without multidisciplinary thinking, which is impossible unless you can find a way for people to understand each other. One of the reasons people come to TED is to hear from some of the world's leading experts in a way that's accessible. If you want to be a psychologist, go to university. But if you want to get important insights on which aspects of modern psychology might be relevant to your life or work, you could do a lot worse than listen to Dan Gilbert. Or Barry Schwartz. Or Amy Cuddy. Or Danny Kahneman.

So in a world where ideas are pared to bite-size morsels and spoon fed via social networks, and people themselves aren’t really inclined to act on them anyway, what is the real-world value? What’s the point? The point is that ideas can and do matter. The world is a better place because people had ideas about equality and science and creativity. TED’s not wrong, some ideas are worth spreading (though I’d question whether or not TED is the best judge of just which ideas should be spread—they once had Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love deliver a talk on “genius”). But ideas require action to make a difference. If we care about something, clicking a “Share” button or a “Like” button is literally the least we can do and we shouldn’t be surprised to discover the world can’t be changed through the Facebook newsfeed.

Joshua Topolsky visits the TED 2013 conference to see how it's run. Read the full story here: http://www.theverge.com/2013/3/5/4061684/inside-ted-the-smartes...

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What a great question! You can browse a surprising number of blog posts and articles from the pre-2000 era, it turns out. Here are some favorites:

TED is just a conference, after all; one with entry fees and free juice. But as a conference, it struck me as one of the more enriching and engaging ones. One of the more legitimately valuable conferences I’ve attended. Are parts imperfect? Yes. Cringe-worthy? Perhaps. Is it out of touch sometimes? How could it not be? Are TEDsters in love with themselves and their ideas? Definitely.

But most people at the conference also seemed to be in love with ideas, full stop; with the value of ideas, and the value of intellectual discourse and discovery. For all its rules and regulations, the religious over- or undertones, the isolationism and cultish devotion, there is one god that TED attendees seem to pray to, by and large: the God of Questions. And the God of Questions is the perfect and best god we could be praying to right now — when the problems we’re trying to solve can’t always be answered by old science or old math, by old religions or even old philosophers. By old ideas.

What better kind of Temporary Autonomous Zone — what more useful kind — can you think of than one built on new ideas?

Don’t confuse listening “in public” with “public relations.” First, it’s not just about sharing your perspective (PR) but about being open to change that is prompted by the interaction (community building). With the former, you just want the crowd to feel better about your brand; with the latter, you want the crowd to work with you to solve problems.

So although Lara Stein, the TEDx program head, first joined the ValenciaWomen Reddit discussion with a flat explanation of policy (“While we do vet licensees carefully, we do not review or approve every speaker lineup....From time to time, a licensee gets it wrong....If we feel there has been a blatant disregard for the TEDx rules, we will not renew the license”), she and her colleagues eventually started engaging with critics, asking them questions and teasing out more-constructive feedback.

The TED team asked members of the “TEDx movement” for more feedback and for help monitoring the quality of events. The team also offered help with vetting speakers. The message was clear: Spreading important ideas was the shared purpose, improving quality was a shared problem, and it would take a shared effort to fix it.

Stein describes it as a collective teaching opportunity. “This was not a case of TED saying no, no, no,” she explains. “It was letting the people in the TEDx community say to one another that the trust had been breached, we had strayed from our shared purpose, and we had to get back in alignment.” TED’s role was that of adviser and shepherd, not director or dictator.

These two things -- great ideas and the human connections they create -- make TED a unique phenomenon. Other conferences, such as the World Economic Forum in Davos and D: AllThingsDigital in Rancho Palos Verdes, California, have similar elite A-list rosters. But TED, which takes place annually in Long Beach, California, is the only one that fully exploits the power of what you might call, with apologies to Cisco, the human network. In the nine years since publishing entrepreneur Chris Anderson bought TED, it has grown way beyond a mere conference. By combining the principles of "radical openness" and of "leveraging the power of ideas to change the world," TED is in the process of creating something brand new. I would go so far as to argue that it's creating a new Harvard -- the first new top-prestige education brand in more than 100 years.

Of course TED doesn't look like a regular Ivy League college. It doesn't have any buildings; it doesn't grant degrees. It doesn't have singing groups or secret societies, and as far as I know it hasn't inspired any strange drinking games.

Still, if you were starting a top university today, what would it look like? You would start by gathering the very best minds from around the world, from every discipline. Since we're living in an age of abundant, not scarce, information, you'd curate the lectures carefully, with a focus on the new and original, rather than offer a course on every possible topic. You'd create a sustainable economic model by focusing on technological rather than physical infrastructure, and by getting people of means to pay for a specialized experience. You'd also construct a robust network so people could access resources whenever and from wherever they like, and you'd give them the tools to collaborate beyond the lecture hall. Why not fulfill the university's millennium-old mission by sharing ideas as freely and as widely as possible?

If you did all that, well, you'd have TED.

I certainly hope this is true, and take that to be a sketch of an appealing possible world. But I’m not really sure it’s the most likely outcome. After all, as Brad DeLong likes to point out the “get a bunch of people in a room to listen to some guy talk” model of education was an organizational response to the high price of books. In principle, it would seem to have been made obsolete by the printing press and the public library. Yet obviously that didn’t happen. Colleges and universities managed to make themselves indispensable sources of credentials and social prestige. And though they’ve of course incorporated information technology innovations into their work, they still engage in an incredible quantity of pre-Gutenberg educating.
Which is just to say that I think there’s a need to not just let this process play out, but for alumni of the richest universities—people like Salam and Kamenetz and myself—to take some direct action. Simply put, people need to be told that giving money to fancy colleges mostly seems like a big waste rather than something praiseworthy. Money should be given to educational institutions (whether at the K-12 or “higher” level) that are doing good work helping children from underprivileged backgrounds (and, no, offering generous financial aid to kids from poor families and then not admitting any doesn’t count) or else to innovative programs aimed at diffusing knowledge much more widely than a pool of several thousand undergraduates. Institutions will change when people try to force them to. People give money to non-profits in order to elevate their social status—if we change social conventions about what constitutes praiseworthy donating, then things will change.

The success of TED doesn’t mean that traditional elite institutions don’t have a place. But it provides a very constructive kind of competition. As TED’s “mindshare” expands, we will hopefully see more efforts like MIT’s OpenCourseWare, if only because elite schools don’t want to lose their relevance and their influence. Eventually, the mission of these schools, with their vast resources, will focus more on the wider public than on their own enrolled students, thus delivering more educational bang-for-the-buck. TED is, in a small but important way, teaching educators how to solve the problem of scalability.

My story has occasioned a healthy amount of reaction around the web, including from TED and Chris Anderson himself.First, the snark: Maura at The Awl (a commentary site run by ex-Gawkers) calls the story "breathless" and TEDsters "smug". Most of the commentators admit that they enjoy watching TED talks anyway. I batted back with some snark of my own but also tried to answer what i took as her serious point, which was that TED seems just as elitist as the old-line institutions it's being compared with...

...Duly noted. Those are Fast Company's words, not TED's. Everyone I've spoken to there has been far from smug or grandiose; more like awed and humbled by the power of what they've unleashed in the community of folks--a vast majority of whom are neither famous, nor rich, nor Westerners--who are proud to call themselves TEDsters. But I stand by the comparison, because I think it brings up interesting and provocative questions, and that's what we're here for.

The point of the article is that the quality of the education TED provides (mainly for free) is of the same or better quality as you would get at a top university. That brings up the questions of how necessary a college education is today and what the future of education looks like tomorrow.

I think about this question all of the time for various reasons. For example, I have a college degree in Computer Science. I do not have a degree in music, and that hurts me in certain ways. I have no doubt that some speaking/performance opportunities may never open up to me in music unless I get a music degree.

Sometimes, I consider doing that. It is tempting. But then it occurs to me that I may not need one. After all, I study with a top college teacher already. He helps me with everything I really need to know from composition to theory to performance. I can't imagine that any theory class in any university in the country would be much better.

If I want even more, there is a wealth of information available in books and online. In other words, opportunities like TED are available to musicians too. For a very modest amount of money and effort, you can get a world class musical education without ever enrolling in a university. And if you go that route, you will not have to take classes that you don't want/need and won't have to deal with certain other things that waste time and productivity.

Explore how the principles behind open source--collaboration, transparency, and rapid prototyping--are proven catalysts for innovation.

Now granted, TED is taking a big brand risk. But brand strategy is all about taking calculated risks that may allow you to extend your brand in new and interesting ways.

I think TED did mitigate some of that risk by not allowing the community to use the main TED brand itself (which remains tightly controlled), but instead giving them their own (albeit dangerously similar) brand in TEDx.

In addition, the TEDx strategy has helped TED fix one of its main brand weaknesses—the perception that it is elitist. In one year, TED has transformed from a brand that you can "see but not touch" to a more open brand that allows anyone to participate.

It is truly amazing to see how the TED community has embraced the new approach. Just take one look at the page listing all of the upcoming TEDx events. Staggering.

The one place where I worry most for TED is in the experience of the TED brand. With 700+ events being held in one year, will everyone who runs a TEDx event do an equally good job in the caring and feeding of the brand?

My guess is, without some sort of TED or TED-community-based oversight, there will be a few bad brand experiences in that bunch. Hopefully the large quantity of good experiences will drown out the bad ones.

So to sum things up, was TEDx a brand risk in the traditional sense? Yes.

But in my view, the risk is so heavily outweighed by the community and brand-extending benefits that it was absolutely a risk worth taking.

The big brains at TED schooled their rabid audience Friday on the perils of pseudo-science. The ultimate warning: presenting bad science on the TEDx stage is grounds for revoking your license.

Random word associations have long been a part of the TED approach, but it’s called poetry, not science. And while no licenses have been revoked for presenting bad science yet (the Charlotte TEDx license was renewed even after the Powell incident), TEDx is giving its community fair warning that it’s an option they will exercise if necessary.

“I think it’s all in the context,” Stein says. “If something is being presented as art or an entertaining interlude that is fine, but if it is being presented as some sort of science that is not fine.”

As we wrote last year, some of the die-hard TED faithful have been grousing about audience fragmentation and cliques-within-cliques at the conference since its move to Long Beach a few years ago. People — especially some from Silicon Valley– have pined for the days when everyone was stuck in the same hotel in Monterey and there wasn’t much else to do except listen to speakers, have great conversations and get to know one-another.

Until this year, the only option was inventing a time machine or another conference with the same panache, A-list attendees and editorial chops. Both would take time. So entrepreneur and conference organizer Francisco Dao has a more immediately feasible idea: Rent out a hotel in Monterey, sign up for the TED live feed, get a bunch of huge screen TVs and bean bags and invite fifty of the most interesting people he can find to virtually attend the conference together. The idea is brilliantly obvious: No one disputes the quality of the TED content, it’s the breakdown of the community that has some attendees in a funk. So Dao isn’t remaking or reinventing the content, he’s reinventing the community in the mold–and even in the location–of classic TED.

March 24, 2012
"How To Deliver A TED Talk" is a complete guide for creating presentations that inspire others through your story. Based on intensive study of the most popular TEDTalks, this step-by-step playbook shows you how to select your topic, craft your narrative, master your delivery, and refine your design.

This logo creator is based on the original work by Yongho Shin, and maintained by Brian Alexander. Source is available on GitHub at https://github.com/ironprogrammer/tedx-logo-creator. If you encounter any issues, please let us know on the issues page.

Enter the name of your TEDx event then hit enter on your keyboard.

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There’s the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, for financiers, the Sun Valley retreat for media moguls, and Renaissance Weekend for the political set. Then there’s a range of TED offshoots and wannabes, from EG and TEDMED, both started and later sold by Wurman, to the ultra-hip techie fests such as South by Southwest, PopTech, and Techonomy. Wurman will add another three to the mix in the next three years: Prophesy 2025, the Geeks and Geezers Summit, and FEDMED.

The business model of hosting conferences has become increasingly appealing to various business sectors, particularly the media industry, as newspapers, hit by a downturn in advertising, look for new ways to squeeze money out of their brands. To the attendees who pay four to five figures to attend, sometimes six for premium tickets, and to the invitees who agree to be the bait for those who pay, the lure is the promise of being on the cutting edge of a new thought, one that hasn’t yet been committed to the internet or spread virally on social networks.

Soulellis.com is an online design journal founded in 2001, featuring ephemera, commentary and work by Paul Soulellis.

TED Talks In this funny and blunt talk from TEDxUW, Larry Smith pulls no punches when he calls out the absurd excuses people invent when they fail to pursue their passions.

The notion that TED posts 365 "ideas worth spreading" a year? Hah! As if.

What has been lost in all this kefluff and drang is that TED talks long ago quit being special. It has been several years since TED talks felt fresh and vital. It has, sadly, let a slew of TEDx talks water down its brand like a single bag of Lipton's in an 8 gallon water jug. Just look at this map of TED talks. Does that appear highly curated? It's no wonder Hanauer thought his talk was going to be posted. TED's bar has become staggeringly low.

Pick it up, Anderson & co. Start culling the herd and making your talks rare animals again—instead of just cash cows. Save me, save me, save me from yet another TED diatribe by an overly-coached tween.

TED Talks America was built by makers -- curious, enthusiastic amateur inventors whose tinkering habit sparked whole new industries. At TED@MotorCity, MAKE magazine publisher Dale Dougherty says we're all makers at heart, and shows cool new tools to tinker with, like Arduinos, affordable 3D printers, even DIY satellites.

On Sunday night, January 9, in Detroit, TED presented TED@MotorCity, an evening salon supported by Lincoln under the theme “New Tomorrows.”

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TEDxSummit Thursday Morning Sessionon TEDxWorkshop on Livestream - Watch live streaming Internet TV. Broadcast your own live streaming videos, like TEDxWorkshop in Widescreen HD. Livestream, Be There.