TED Talks: Clay Shirky

1. What are your take-aways from this video?
 People value social consequences over those driven by simply contractual obligations.


2. What are the speaker's effective speaking techniques?
The speaker uses level and easy speaking tone with a continuous flow. He also repeats his facts at the end to make sure his point gets across and then gives them application.

3. What is his/her presentation style?
 He employs solid examples and uses a scientific study to show just what exactly his point was and why it is true.




4. What matters from this video? How does it connect to you personally? To education? To the world?
Free time is an amazing tool. It can be used to achieve great things. If I could channel my own free time into something constructive, I could have a lot done. Many people would say that education would be best served in one's free time. However, I disagree. If education was left to one's own free will, he would not learn anything. The same goes with the world. People would not simply work on productive things if given all the free time in the world. They would sit around. Incentive needs to be give. Communism is bad.

TED Talks: Daniel Pink talks about motivation again

1. What are your take-aways from this video?
Rewards only work for tasks that require minimal creativity. But when something arises that requires creativity, incentives do not work. In the 21st century, businesses need to be restructured to accomidate 21st centruy needs.

2. What are the speaker's effective speaking techniques?
Strong emphasis and humor. He gets very worked up about his main points. He also bashed Americans constantly to an audience that would find that kind of humor funny. He diffuses opposition by mocking it before people can see it as ligitament.

3. What is his/her presentation style?
Loud and occasionally funny. He starts with a moto and sticks with it, defending it with every example. Towards the end, he recaps and then brings the discussion to a higher level, giving the speach purpose.

4. What matters from this video? How does it connect to you personally? To education? To the world?
Mr. Pink's presentation style is effective and factual. He has a way of grabbing the audience with a strong voice with reasonable points. It also helps to be preaching to the choir. That is to say, Pink was talking to the TED crowd, one that is open to anti right-wing humor. This could be taken to say that it is more effective to give a speach to an audience that is more inclined to believe the speaker. Grades in classes like art should be handled carefully. If effort is put into the project, it should recieve the appropriate amount of credit, rather than grading based on how good the peice actually looks. Pink's theory of de-incentivising the world may be a bad thing. As we've experienced through the years, communism doesn't work, which is essentially what he is preaching. While this incentive business may apply to a small environment, the world would not take well to this type of living.

TED Talks: Daniel Pink talks about motivation

1-What are your take aways from this video?

Autonomy creates a healthy environment for conceptual thinking, unlike incentive, surprisingly. People work for fun as long as they don't see it as work. Great things are reaped from people isolated from the purpose motive (e.g. money).

2-What are the speaker’s effective speaking techniques?

Strong straight-forward voice leads off the presentation with a myriad of pretty drawings and cute white board handwriting.

3- What is his/her presentation style?

Enters the mind of the listener and asks the critical questions to himself-- and then answers them cohesively. He takes his points and raises his voice to hammer them into the audience.

4-What matters from this video? How does it connect to you personally? To education? To the world?

Everything I do is for a purpose. Seeing that people work better without a purpose sends me into a tailspin. Students would perform better if not given grades to strive for? Doubt it. I would sleep in class unless it really mattered to me. Communism does not work!! People don't work "just 'cuz!"

 

TED Talks: Ken Robinson says schools kill creativity

1-What are your take aways from this video?

I realized that the way the school system is set up, it is all about right versus wrong. While many things in life may be black and white, being creative is a whole slew of grey. Humor goes a long way towards keeping the audience engaged.

2-What are the speaker’s effective speaking techniques?

The speaker uses humor to engage the audience, playing off of common ground such as being bored sitting listening to people talk. He goes off on tangents to make jokes and keep the audience involved.

3- What is his/her presentation style?

He starts with something we can all agree on, spews some irrelevant facts, and then moves on to the controversial matter. From that point forward, he brings the audience back in with cute stories of innocence. Granted, this does play into his theme of creativity in children being important.

4-What matters from this video? How does it connect to your personally? To education? To the world?

This video goes to show how to win an audience on a controversial subject: humor. I enjoy this type of witty humor and could attempt to implement it into daily life. Education is challenged in this speech. It preaches how the process through which education is being implemented is wrong. Many students would respond by not trying on objective based tests. However, one must also keep in mind that the world is still structured by right and wrong answers. 

Creativity is measured in percentages, apperently

Recently I took an online quiz that supposedly measures my right-brained thinking to my left-brained thinking. Here were my alleged results:

Left Brain	Right Brain
42%	58%

This information absolutely terrifies me. Right-brained thinkers are not the most successful people in Western society. I come from a family of heavily left-brained thinkers: electrical engineers (essentially rocket scientists). They expect me to be the great math brain that they both are.

I had begun to suspect this horrible fait since the end of middle school. I was not good at algebra. I hated my math class. And then I got into geometry and it just made sense. That scares me. Right brained thinkers are the starving artists and poets and college alumni with nothing more than a degree in French literature. Today’s society is centered around left-brained thinking, no matter what Daniel Pink says. Sure, I can see a day and age where right-brained thinkers rule the world, but that time is not the present and is not the time in which I will be making my living. Left-brained people have the advantage, an advantage I need to be successful.

For a very long time, when people ask me what I want to be when I grow up, I always tell them that I want to be an architect. Supposedly, this is essentially right-brained for concept and right-brained for application. This still is a reality for my life. Maybe this is not as bad as I had thought, but rather a realization of what I had always known.