So I was lucky enough to present at TEDxNYED last Saturday, and I’ve been a bit baffled by some of the negative commentary that I’ve seen ever since. (For the record, I think my favorite reflection has been Pat Higgins’ post “Wherever You Go, There You Are.”) The TEDxNYED folks did a really good job of faithfully working within the TED format to create a thought-provoking, interesting day that was aimed at education. What I don’t understand is how people thought it was supposed to be something more than that.

TEDTalks are a funny thing… some are amazing, some are not so amazing, some are somewhere in between. And chances are, with a few exceptions, you wouldn’t necessarily find universal agreement on which talks were which. “Amazing” is in the eye of the beholder, especially when you are talking about 18 minute talks about esoteric stuff.

What I love about the TED format is that it is a chance to learn about something you may not know a lot about. The trap is thinking that you’ve learned a lot about that topic, because you haven’t. But I know that there are a bunch of TED Talks that have caused me to go explore new ideas. And that’s what it should do. It should cause you to think. On Boone Gorges’ reflection, I left this idea in the comments:

 

I think about TED as a modern take on the old-time Chautauqua. It is a day of short talks, with opportunities to talk about them in between.

When we at SLA took the opportunity to design a conference, we did EduCon which has a decidedly different format. (Conversation-based, 90 minute long sessions.)

 

And I love doing discursive workshops a lot. But I also recognize the power that a good speech can have. I didn’t love every talk, but I took something from every talk, and I loved several of them.

 

I think the TED format is the TED format. There are times when it’s the way I want to learn (and I’ve watched dozens of TED talks – and some have been amazing and some haven’t) and there are times it’s not. What I thought was amazing about what the TEDxNYED folks did was that they created an event that really had the feel of what I imagine *the* TED must have. And they did it around education, which I thought was also wonderful.

I admit, running a TEDx isn’t something I want to do. When left to our own devices, the SLA-ers created something very different in format. But that doesn’t mean that that I can’t appreciate the power of the TED format. It’s just different.

And I don’t think that the TED format lends itself to collective action then and there. But that’s o.k. — I’m not sure that’s what conferences do.

If the ideas at TEDx pushed you.. opened you up to a new idea… deepened an understanding of an idea you already had… or challenged you to learn more about something… just gave you a bunch of things to think about… or just gave you a new lens or a new language about something you already thought, then the conference was a success. For some folks, ideas they heard were epiphanies, for others, they were things they’d heard. For some, I’m sure, hearing what I talked about was hearing an evolution of ideas they’d heard from me in the past. For others, it might have been a chance to hear SLA’s story and our ideas for changing education for the first time. Either way, I hope everyone got some small piece new out of it.

There are some hard things about a TEDx event about changing education, not the least of which is that the practical solutions to combating the current movement of public education are complex and hard to see, and the mechanism to fight the battle isn’t in place. So we are left with “Ideas Worth Spreading” and some ideas for change (and for the record, I would love it if every teacher who heard my talk started using the language of “I teach kids <subject>,” rather than “I teach <subject>” I do think that is the kind of small change that can make a difference, and it’s not a bad place to start.

So what’s the point of this post… I think we have to stop thinking that every experience has to be transformative. It’s why school could never be as powerful as a one-day or three-day conference. School happens every day. It is the routine, and the trick is to make the routine meaningful, but that doesn’t mean that you can achieve the level of engagement that you had on your best day every day. The trick is to find the value in everything you do, even when you don’t walk out of a classroom (or a conference) transformed. Many of the twitter/blogger/conference attendee/speaker folks may have to realize that the epiphanies will be smaller now… that we’ve heard many of the ideas, and now we have to work harder to find the powerful ideas… or we have to work harder to figure out how to make change… and we can’t expect one day to change the world. And I do think we do have to change the world. And this, to me, could be a place to start… (and I first wrote this as a comment on Dan Meyer’s blog entry about the conference:)

 

This may be idealistic, but if I could talk about what I’d want for a TED Prize, it’d be to spend a year getting a 1,000 conversations going about what we dream education could be all over the country – and to record them all – and catalogue parents and students and teachers best hopes for school, so that we could have an action plan about where we need to go, because I don’t know that we, as a nation, know what we want or how to get there. But I’d love to find out what it might look like, and I’d love to think that the folks at TEDxNYED would have something to add to the discussion.

 

Thanks to TEDxNYED for making me think and pushing me to continue to refine what I believe and how I present my idea. You all did an amazing job of creating a great day of what Dan Cohen called “Academic Theater.”