TED is On!

Tomorrow the TED conference begins. It should be awesome. Here is the line-up. Every year there are great presentations by amazing people from all walks of life that really get you thinking. Each presenter has a big idea to throw at the audience, an idea that is in its own right interesting, but that can also apply to much of the work we do every day. Here are a few of my favorites from last year:

Elizabeth Gilbert (Eat, Pray, Love) on Genius...we all have it if we let it in. But if it doesn't come to us, just showing up to do our jobs is great too! Especially when you are changing careers.

Ken Robinson on how schools kill creativity. I love how he talks about his own children in this. This talk is funny and so true! I recognize this formal education phenomena and remember so vividly my frustration after spending a year with five year olds building their sense of confidence in their unique gifts and ideas, just to have it hammered out of them as they ascended the grades.

Panav Mistry on Sixth Sense Technology. This one blew my mind. If teachers have trouble integrating technology now, and tech directors are struggling to block anything interesting on the web, wait until we have this amazing technology available to us. I love the idea of picking up a real newspaper, but "reading" interactive articles as it accesses the web. Ah, the NYT on Sunday can still work for me, but without all those trees being cut down.

These talks should be available to students -in school - one a week - for discussion, pondering, and inspiration. 

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