Clary Shirky TED Talk about Cognative Surplus

Take Aways

What I take away from Clay Shirky’s TED Talk is that there are multiple paths for media abundance and that both are a form of creativity. He brought up the examples of LOL Cats and Ushahidi, which is a data mapping website, and compared their use to society. He illustrated civic and communal media abundance. Communal compares to when there are little clicks where the information is relevant. Civic is created by a community but can be enjoyed by a bigger group. What distinguishes something from nothing is also a little tidbit that I thought was very interesting. This implies that it is better to do something seemingly meaningless is better than doing nothing at all. This I was kind of intrigued at because in AWNM Pink didn’t even mention that you may not even think that your addition is not worthy to the world.

Application to You and to Education

These ideas are applied to education because he compares the value of communal information and civic information. In education there needs to be more civic information in my mind because if there is a focus on the communal then everything that us as students learn would only be applicable in education and its own little “community”. This most affects students because when they leave school to continue to college or start a career they need to be able to adapt to the real world and not be accustomed to sharing information inside a little community. Students will also need to be able to distinguish between the beneficial creativity and the unbeneficial (LOL Cats). Also affecting us is the fact that there is an abundance of information out there and no one person can harvest it. This is already taking place in our learning today, for research there is no way anyone could pull together all of the information straight from the sources; they always need to use a middle man like a textbook or a website. This is an example of Clay’s Civic information.

Speaking/Presenting techniques

Clay Shirky in my opinion had the weakest try at humor of all of the TED talks I have watched so far. He did however get his point across effectively and simply. He tried to incorporate humor into his speech but he made it too obvious and made it look like he was going out of his way to try to please the audience. But he was straight to the point otherwise and I was able to easily understand what his bottom line. For speaking techniques he talked slowly and paused while he was presenting his slides. This pausing with the slides was slightly awkward and hindered the forward movement of his talk. He did well outlining his plan though with three main sections. The first being specific stories.

Clay brings up the idea of cognitive overflow. This is the idea that there is too much information in the world and no one can keep track of all of it. This makes me ask myself, “will there ever be an instance when the world misses information because it just gets overwhelmed?” Would there ever be raw information that just gets lost in the masses of overload, and does this already happen? With all this information it sounds like it would be easily for some information to just be forgotten or overlooked by the whole of society. And a look into the future will there be any way to fully automize the spread of information. Would automation make more people more places be able to do more with their thoughts? Or would automation separate ideas from their origin and distort them?

Daniel Pink's TED Presentation Analysis and Elaboration

Speaking and Presenting Techniques

Daniel Pink, compared to the other TED talks I have watched, has used much more humor than the others and uses this to get his point across to the audience. He even started out his TED talk in a humorous manner, making fun of his law school past. Then to present the rest of the speech he pretended like it was a court case and he was making his case about motivation to the audience. He then engages the audience with a mental puzzle about a candle. He uses this audience interaction to demonstrate how an incentive narrows their field of view and dulls their creativity.

Summary

Daniel Pink was trying to explain to businesses all over the United States and all over the world that current motivation tactics are simply ineffective now. According to multiple tests and studies that Pink used to prove his motivation science theories, motivation needs to transition from external to internal. He refers to these motivation techniques as the carrot and stick method. In short, good behavior is rewarded with a payoff/reward (the carrot) and undesirable behavior is met with a punishment (the stick). Pink argued that this was an outdated motivational strategy and supported it with study results. He proposed a motivation system that allowed employees to reach the goal however they felt fitting and this would create internal motivation as opposed to external motivation.

Take Away

What I take away from this TED talk (and article we read) is that Motivation 2.0 just isn’t going to cut it if society wants to keep improving economically and culturally. Motivation 2.0 refers to the "carrot and stick" method of motivation. People need to be a bit more open to the fact that what worked a few years ago won’t necessarily work today and will almost certainly not be close to satisfactory in the future. I also got quite clearly how the carrot/stick motivation focuses the mind well, which is great for single dynamic tasks where steps are apparent, but hinders in more complicated tasks. Internal motivation instead leaves the blinders off and allows people to see the bigger picture and not be so focused on completing the steps. This difference is most noticable when the steps are not quite as apparent, here the internal motivation has a huge advantage. Daniel Pink highlighted that internal motivation in the workplace was expressed by enjoyment of the job and doing the job because of that enjoyment rather than for the salary.

Application to Education

Many of the ideas presented in Daniel Pink’s speech can be easily applied to education. Since business and education are similar, both have a management figure (teachers/boss) and then the working class (students/workers). The current system for grading for example closely follows the carrot/stick theory; students do what the teacher tells them and if they do it right they receive good grades and if they don’t, they receive bad grades. If the internal motivation system were to be implemented into the classroom I have a feeling it would look more like an open exchange of centered ideas rather than a lecture. This would also prepare High School students for college better because in college a person needs their own motivation to follow through with their plans. Even further down the road this motivation would help former students find jobs because they will search based on what they would enjoy doing as opposed to which one has the best “benefits”.

How do we apply it to Education?

There are two main approaches to tackling entwining this type of motivation into schools: remove the “carrot” but still put specific guidelines on the students, or put basic parameters on the schoolwork and grade the students on how far out of the box they take it. Both of these will require self-motivation. With specific guidelines the student needs to find a way to finish what they start since there is no external reward for finishing. Basic parameters require internal motivation because they need to come up with the subject and what they will do with it and they will enjoy their subject because they picked it. I am going to ask for people opinions in the comments section and I will keep a running vote of who thinks to incorporate internal motivation there should be specific rules but no reward, and who thinks there should be just basic parameters with no reward. There is no right or wrong answer so any comments are welcome.

Marcin Jakubowser's TED Talk

Marcin Jakubowski presented a TED talk about how open source could transition from software to hardware, and his personal open source hardware wiki. He started by explaining his personal wiki that he created to help common people build their own equipment. Him and his team had created a list of 50 machines that were would be hardest to live without. His list started with a tractor because without that it would be exponentially harder to harvest food and other laborious tasks. He built the prototype for the tractor by himself and then published the list of the other 50 machines and showed his tractor as an example. Increasing numbers of people visited the wiki and helped develop prototypes and designs for the other machines.

My personal thoughts that I take away from watching this TED talk mainly include the idea that open source doesn’t have to be confined to the internet and open source will benefit larger numbers of people and help spark creativity in some. Marcin’s wiki’s benefits wouldn’t just spread where the internet is available because hardware is easier to transfer to remote areas than software. Then the people in those areas would be able to expand on those ideas even without access to the internet. These hardware innovations are nothing new but they are cheaper to build, repair and longer lasting alternatives made with scrap metal and common items. Also the blog gives a wider variety of people the opportunity to express their ideas and contribute. Since it is open source, many people could work on the same project at the same time without every meeting each other but still being able to express themselves and help the overall image.

Marcin’s focus was less on his face to face speaking to the audience but instead more at directing the audience’s attention to the screen behind him. He displayed many images and time lapse video to demonstrate his progress on his project and the progress of hardware open sourcing as a whole. He talked slowly and precisely using simple language and personal words. This created an environment in which the person watching the video/audience could feel like they could easily connect to Marcin. He also talked in a way that anybody you meet could understand, enhancing the idea of open source being open to anyone.

This concept could easily be applied to education and is actively present the world around us (students). Open sourcing would be a very applicable education because as students their work is not usually accepted but open sourcing is open to anyone. This theory could also be applied to education to promote creativity in school classrooms and assignments. Openness would keep creativity from being “forced” on students. It could also encourage student collaboration and the willingness to work together.

You can see the full list of Marcin’s ecology prototypes and list of expected prototypes in the near future HERE. This does make me wonder, how much effort would it take for a group of high schoolers to start an open source project similar to this. Looking at the TED talk you can see a graph showing the progress of his project and once it had a few followers it gained ground exponentially and eventually he got invited to a TED conference. But looking at the transition from software open sourcing to hardware open sourcing it doesn’t seem to fit the trend of the conceptual age that Daniel Pink illustrates. It almost reverts back to the industrial age with the common man making his own tools, and the tools illustrated by Marcin are, for the most part, not new but rather more makeshift versions of existing ones. So do you think open sourcing will be part of the conceptual age? If so please specify whether it you think it would be more software, hardware or maybe neither?

Ken Robinson made one large point in the duration of his speech and elaborated with personal and news stories. I take away the fact that creativity is not given enough room to flourish. Schools are more focused on drilling information at students and creativity is viewed as unproductive. I also see how Ken views creativity as an augmentation to the left side of the brain but since not many people realize that he wants to show them how important it is. To make his point very apparent yet simple and straightforward, Ken Robinson used personal stories and created hypothetical situations to help illustrate. He also talked slowly and paced himself pausing and speeding up when he felt it necessary. This also makes him seem educated and well prepared. To present Ken tried to create personal appeal with the audience so he sounds less foreign to them. Hence the information he is giving them sounds practical and applicable to their lives. This matters because in every students lives they control very little of it and the teachers (adults) make all of the learning decisions. Implementing creativity into this makes those adults look critically at what education is really achieving. Then further down the road student’s education will affect their careers and lifestyles. But Ken Robinson never voiced his opinion on how he thinks creativity should be incorporated into education. So would it be better to just open up the curriculum and allow students to insert their own creativity or would the teachers pick “how to be creative”? Because with the second option the whole creative aspect is sucked out of the learning and is actually not being utilized. Another issue is whether or not the teachers or students can predict better where the future is going. Ken Robinson pointed out the issue of the unknown of the future but didn’t throw any solutions out. The younger generation might have a better understanding of the future since it will be the people around them that create it.