NEW YORK — The TEDxNYED Conference that took place here on Saturday was like the Lollapalooza festival for education technologists. Almost every speaker was a headliner in his or her own right.
The forum was a regional spin-off of the “billionaires-and-brains edutainment summit in California,” as one participant, Dan Cohen, of George Mason University, described the mothership TED conferences and the hugely popular videos of their presentations. The theme Saturday was how new media and technology are shaping the future of education. And the speakers — including Lawrence Lessig, Michael Wesch, Henry Jenkins, Gina Bianchini, Jay Rosen, and David Wiley — each had 18 minutes to deliver what sometimes felt like a “greatest hits” snapshot of their ideas, with the chance for future online glory if the videotaped talks go viral.
In the blogging frenzy that followed the blockbuster conference, that constrained, no-questions-from-the-audience format seems to have generated as much online commentary as the speakers’ ideas. Mr. Cohen produced a somewhat critical piece about how the format “pushes speakers like me toward theatrics,” and Jeff Jarvis, of the City University of New York, also criticized the setup in harsher language that you can read here (includes profanity). Talks by speakers like Mr. Wiley (Brigham Young University), Mr. Lessig (Harvard), and George Siemens (Athabasca University) are all online. You can also sample dozens of audience reactions by trawling the blog commentary aggregated on this site.
Writes Boone Gorges, a philosophy Ph.D. student at CUNY: “I saw a tweet in the middle of the day – wish I could find it now – that remarked on the irony of a day full of lectures delivered to a roomful of people who love to decry the utility of lectures as a learning tool.”
2 Responses to Some Participants Criticize Format of Blockbuster Ed-Tech Conference
yeidel - March 10, 2010 at 8:14 pm
There is no “irony” between “decrying the utility of lectures” in the context of 3-hour-a-week times fifteen-weeks with an end-goal of educating college students, and “a day full of lectures” to professionals with the end-goal of a few kicks in the pants.
arrive2__net - March 11, 2010 at 2:18 am
I don’t think the lecture will ever go away since it is a form of conversation. The lecturer talks to a group instead of conversing with each listener. Lectures take time to prepare, but are simple in that you mainly have to figure out what you want to say, write down how to say it efficiently and effectively, and practice saying it. And that many steps are only necessary if you are not the advanced, professional-type speaker who can just stand up there and throw the bull well. With ed tech media there is usually more steps of designing and dealing with the commitee, the equipment and the medium. Some messages are not complex enough, or they are too perishable to justify conversion to tech media. An off-the-cuff lecture can be still fresh-off-the-brain and has not had time to grow stale or outdated in a media can. Also … was it a lecture, a talk, a briefing, a speech, or a presentation. Is one better than another? I think the advance of educational tec and media is one of the most important developments of our time, but sometimes you might just want to ask the expert instead of waiting for the production. Freshness counts. Bernard SchusterArrive2.net