My Favourite TED Talks
I love TED (this is Jay typing). It stands for Technology, Engineering and Design and is the brand name of a series of conferences. The basic idea is, the conference speakers are captured on video when they speak, and these videos are released for free for anyone to watch. The speakers are all talking about ideas, and the work they’re doing to propagate a new idea, or to prove it (there’s more about TED on Wikipedia). The videos are all short – a few minutes up to about 20 minutes. If you’ve never seen one, here’s an example to whet your appetite:
There’s now a huge catalogue of videos, and many of them are inspirational and thought provoking. Head over to TED and have a look, or here are a few of my personal favourites:
- Enough pessimism about the future; watch this optimist at work (watch on TED).
- The cyborg is born: using the CAPTCHA to merge humans with computers (watch on TED).
- Consigning the wheelchair to history (watch on TED).
- Using web video to transform education (watch on TED).
- Incredible camouflage on underwater creatures (watch on TED).
- Making complex data easier for us to understand (watch on TED).
- More on data visualistion: making medical data understandable (watch on TED).
- Our world is weirder than we can expect ourselves to understand (watch on TED).
- We should never, ever give up on people (watch on TED).
- 3D printing – more than a toy but a serious paradigm shift (watch on TED).
Do you watch TED videos, or know of another similar resource? I’d love to hear from you on your favourites; there are just so many to trawl through now; just add a comment below.
Cheers! Jay
just checking out ted.com now after hearing so much about the ted talks. x
Hi, love your site and as we are in the very early stages of planning a grand tour of europe we hope it will prove very useful.
Also like TED very much. Have you seen the two by Sir Ken Robinson?
Regards
Kevin
Hi Kevin, just fired up TED and am saving the Sir Robinson videos for later viewing, thanks very much for the tip! Cheers from the Lauterbrunnen Valley! Jay