Joe – You’re absolutely right that the responsibility was largely on individuals to make the most of the generous free time. But something a bit more structured might have helped some members of the audience who are, as Jay Rosen put it (roughly), introverts who have learned to feign cordiality. The intimidation I would feel in approaching someone like Lessig is amplified by the dark auditorium, bright spotlight format of TEDxNYED, which makes ice-breaking structure all the more important.

As for the speakers’ points of view, a few have posted reflections:

• Dan Cohen on “academic theater”: http://www.dancohen.org/2010/03/08/academic-theater-reflections-on-ted-tedxnyed/
• Dan Meyer: http://blog.mrmeyer.com/?p=6176

What I think would have been interesting is small group discussion with the presenter as moderator during some of the breaks. I have no point of entry to go up to Jenkins or Lessig and actually engage in conversation as I (and I think a lot of people) are in awe of their work. But if you put me in a group with 15 others, perhaps than I could have engaged with these scholars.

Also, I wonder if the experience of TED was different for the presenters than it was for us as the audience? I would be interested in knowing what the presenters learned at TED.

Chris – Chautauqua as a frame of reference sheds light on what is best about the TED format: it’s a capsular, accessible introduction to a vast field of knowledge, putting an entire field in context for total neophytes. The peculiar thing about the ed focus at TEDxNYED is that very few in the audience qualify as newbies. The members of the audience are already practitioners – experts of a sort, though certainly with expertise that only partially overlaps with others’ in the room – and, moreover, are already to a greater or lesser extent familiar with the work of the speakers. So the specialization of TEDxNYED is at least somewhat at odds with the strengths of TED in general.

After your closing talk, Chris, another metaphor for TED (or at least TEDxNYED) came to mind: the old-time spiritual revival. Revivalists are literally preaching to the choir, but that’s kind of the point: focusing shared energy on some already agreed-upon premises can do a lot toward spurring people to further action. Some of the most stirring talks at the event (and I’d place yours at the top of the list in this category) felt very much like this kind of revival speech, telling us things we already believe but in a way that urges us to action. There’s a lot of value in this. But I’d wager that such a revival can only really be successful with some time to do small-group processing, so that you can walk away with some action items (if you’ll pardon the corporate-speak). TEDxNYED felt heavy on the inspiration and light on the practical details, which, at least for me, has a tendency to overwhelm in a less than ideally productive way.

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.

Elizabeth – I’m more or less with you on the elitism point, at least as regards availability of the lecture material. Also, touché on the lectures vs rote-learning distinction. But there’s still a tension, especially when you think about George Siemens’s position that learning = connection. The kinds of connections fostered by an event with TED’s structure are limited and to an extent one-sided. When connections happen between attendees, it strikes me as being despite the setup of the conference, not really because it. I should be clear, though: not every conference can be everything to everybody, and it’s not TED’s job to provide great content AND great networking AND great connection AND etc. Just that in this case the emphasis seemed less than ideally balanced to me.

Jose – Ditto on wishing we’d been able to talk about it in person. I suppose that while it’s sad that sometimes the conversations only bloom afterwards, it’s a good thing that we have spaces like blogs and Twitter that can contain them. In any case, if your point is that the conference is of different value for different people, then I agree 100%. I went in being quite familiar with much of the writing of around half of the presenters, and while it was fun to see them in person, the condensed time frame and reframing for newbies in some cases made the message seem like a caricature of their more in-depth work. That probably wouldn’t be the case for people who didn’t already know their work – so I guess the question is, were more of the attendees like me, or were many of the ideas new for many people?

Mikhail – Very glad you and I got to experience TEDxNYED together – it was great bouncing our analyses off of each other as the day went on. I like your distinction between the performance of ideas and the spreading of ideas, as the word “performance” really sums up for me both what is good and what is bad about TED. At its best (here I’m thinking of Chris Abani’s videotaped talk, which was not obviously all that relevant but was enchanting all the same) the performances that TED is all about have the ability to open up new ways of thinking or new areas of knowledge to you. In this sense performance leads to spreading. But at its worse, the performative tone of some TED talks can be so self-congratulatory and focused on the TED aesthetic that the content, the ideas, actually get buried. TEDxNYED was a mix of these two kinds of performance.

Matt – I didn’t mean to suggest that there were no argumentative talks, at the same time that I didn’t mean to suggest that having an argumentative talk indicated that the talk was not as good as it might have been. (I also didn’t go out of my way to mention which specific talks were better than others in which ways :) ) As an academic I am used to argumentative talks, and being used to them means that I tend to get a bit more out of them, but I recognize that my own views might be idiosyncratic. As for your (and Dan’s) point about collaborations: there is a lot to be said for the extent to which the tasks of the digital humanities projects Dan specializes in, as well as the larger education projects reflected at TED, are to a fault the result of necessarily collaborative processes. That seems to me to be at the heart of Jim’s post on “credit”. There is a tension between the format of TED, which is about celebrating the individual achievements of individual agents, and the collaborative nature of knowledge and education that emerged from some of the talks.