On TED: Just Admit It
Now trying to picture the geometries of a lateral rodeo orgy in a garage. Lost reel of Inception?
Posted on August 13, 2010 at 10:43 am
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On TED: Just Admit It
Maura, before you make too much of the Harvard comparison, you should note that I went to Yale.:)
I think your post is very well taken. Yes, we love to hate smug, self-congratulatory, elite institutions, but they still do very cool things for the world.
Cheers,
Anya
P.S. You INFERRED incorrectly that Stivers' quote IMPLIED that TED had something to do with EW.com.
P.P.S. Also, you look at EW.com and you still find TED too middlebrow?
Posted on August 13, 2010 at 10:14 am
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On TED: Just Admit It
Hi Maura--I actually think we have similar concerns about elitism vs. openness.
My contention is that many of the cool things that TED does spread more widely than the cool things that Harvard does, because of its attitude toward openness and its use of social media.
Harvard has a crappy open courseware site--it's very difficult to find and view many Harvard lectures online. MIT has the best open courseware site, but even the most-watched video lectures have been watched a few hundred K times, while the most watched TED talks have been viewed over 6 million times.
Lectures are admittedly a small percentage of the benefit offered by either TED or Harvard, but they're not nothing. The spread of the TEDx platform with over 600 events worldwide offers a way for ever-more people to participate, often for free, in a much closer approximation to the TED experience. I would love to see Harvard & Yale try something like that.
Also, I haven't spent much time on the site, and generally I enjoy reading it, but no I don't consider Awl's readership (or Fast Company's) to be "some sort of elite." Being smug, self-congratulatory, and insular is not enough; in order to be elite you also have to excel at something.