thinking: relating- celebrating :-)

The latest TED conference starts this week and runs from 27th of Feb to Sat March1. This time presenters range from Craig Venter, through Bob Geldof , Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Isaac Mizrahi to economist Paul Collier and many, many others.

On the Friday night for example there is a debate chaired by Matt Frei of BBC on “How True is Your World View?“, which is both dissecting the media and being broadcast later by the BBC as part of an extended debate.

I’d love to be there myself even though the tickets are almost impossible to get, they cost around $US 6k and then you have to get from wherever you are to Monterey (& Aspen) so there are travel and accommodation expenses also. Luckily I do know a couple of the people who are going and we hope to hear back from them in due course.

I happen to think that most of the discussions and presentations are almost priceless and I know this because like many thousand others I have been busy downloading the videos from the TED site for the past year or more.

I have now watched something like 60 x 18minute videos. Some are much longer like that early Bono one (Who was going to tell him to stop!) They are almost always fascinating and would be keynotes at a wide range of conferences in a host of disciplines.

A recent video release by Chris Anderson the TED curator on the vision for the conference filmed in 2002 makes for great viewing now as he explains some of the back story and the vision for the future.

In the latest TED some of the key questions are:

Who are we?
What is our place in the universe?
What is life?
Is beauty truth?
Will evil prevail?
How can we change the world?
How do we create?
What’s out there?
What will tomorrow bring?
What stirs us?
How dare we be optimistic?
And the point?

As a creative generalist myself …I find the TED sessions wonderful to watch on video. I keep around 40 TED videos in various formats.

For a while I loaded them as QuickTime movies on CD’s for friends, as you are allowed to do under the Creative Commons license but from experience it much better to convert and save them onto DVD’s as not everyone is that savvy with managing video files (unless they are Mac owners.) And watching them on a TV is also much better!

Here are the details of TED for use in the classroom and beyond.

For example :

“5. If you’re a teacher, consider incorporating TEDTalks into your classes. They are distributed under a Creative Commons license, and are freely available for such use, so long as you credit the source and do not distort the speakers’ intended meaning.”

For this conference there is also an invitation to a live session from TED organisers see below.

“First and foremost, we are opening up one complete session of TED free to the world, streamed live over the web. It’s the dramatic session tomorrow evening when three remarkable individuals each unveil their TED Prize wish. (“One wish to change the world. No restrictions. Think big. Be creative.”)

I invite you to join a global audience as Dave Eggers, Neil Turok and Karen Armstrong share their inspiring visions, followed by the uplifting music of Vusi Mahlasela.

You can see the live TED conference video feed here on Thursday, starting at 5.15pm US Pacific Time and lasting a couple of hours. You’ll probably need a broadband connection to see the video properly. There’s a button below the video to select a full-screen view.”

After checking my World Time clock I can see that @ 5:pm (15mins before) is 2pm Friday 29th for NZ and other locations are as shown below.

Enjoy. If you are going to TED and want to report back on what you liked – please let us know your impressions as we’d love to post any insights here.

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