Back in 1984 a conference dedicated to “Technology, Entertainment, Design”, TED, was launched in Monterey, California. Every year since, roughly a thousand people gather for over four days to listen to fifty of “the world’s most fascinating thinkers and doers,” each of whom compress their ideas and visions into eighteen minute speeches.

Although the TED Conference has a $4,400 price tag and an invitation-only policy, in April 2007 its organizers decided to open up the discussion and release the speeches online. True to its motto “Ideas worth spreading,” TED Talks published all videos under Creative Commons licenses, and feedback and downloads are encouraged on its forum.

Several notable members of the commons community have made appearances at TED. Richard Baraniuk of Rice University shares his vision of a “Napster for education,” an open online repository for course materials called Connexions. His digitized system aims at minimizing expensive textbooks and instead focusing on modifiable educational material, available and edited on-demand.

Jimmy Wales held a TED Talk to explain how “a ragtag band of volunteers” could come together and compile the Encyclopedia of the Future—Wikipedia. He expounds on the wisdom of crowds and explains how the collaborative editing process works.

Other visionaries on TED Talks include Sir Ken Robinson, who uses wit to assert that our schools “are educating people out of their creativity;" the former Finance Minister of Nigeria Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, who tackles corruption and reform in Africa; Swedish global health professor Hans Rosling, who wows us with brilliant new statistics software from Gapminder to challenge conceptions of the developing world; and philosopher Dan Dennett, who unpacks the power of memes and dwells on human consciousness.

For anyone needing a daily dose of intellectual mega-speeches, TED Talks will not disappoint. Happy viewing!

tags: International culture conference presentation idea speech video

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