By George Siemens In the past few years, Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have become a lens used by educators, entrepreneurs, education reformers and venture capitalists to view the higher education system. They are now a proxy for our hopes and fears for education; how we speak of MOOCs increasingly says more about our personal […]
“I sometimes look back at the TED Talk and I try to think of where we were at the time. We had four university partners, about a half a million students, 37 courses. Now we have more than six million students, more than 550 courses and 107 institutions that are working for us. And ‘MOOC’ […]
As you may know, we’re redesigning TED.com. It will be the same TED you love — just a little better and much more able to address the needs of our global, mobile audience. Part of our work in creating TED 2.0 includes reevaluating how we measure things. Especially, video views. “Number of views” is a widely shared […]
Whatever your opinion of them, you can’t deny that MOOCs have come a long way in the last few years. To help put the massive online courses into some perspective, Alex Cusack, a contributing writer at Moocs.com, a blog that covers news about MOOCs (edited by Zachary Davis, a producer for HarvardX, a spin-off of […]
Scratch the surface of online education, and you’re destined to run into the names of two men. The first, Salman Khan, never intended to be an education icon. Instead, he simply watched with increased interest as videos he had uploaded to YouTube to help his cousin learn math were seized upon by a world apparently […]
When Anne Milgram became the Attorney General of New Jersey in 2007, she was stunned to find out just how little data was available on who was being arrested, who was being charged, who was serving time in jails and prisons, and who was being released. “It turns out that most big criminal justice agencies […]
Whenever something is declared the subject of “the year of,” you know said subject is ripe for a big fat backlash. So, when The New York Times declared 2012 “the year of the MOOC,” it thus came to pass that massive open online courses should next become the subject of massive, open, often online criticism, as critics gathered to […]
“Questions Worth Asking” is a new editorial series from TED in which we’ll pose thorny questions to those with a thoughtful, relevant (or irrelevant but still interesting) take. This week: “What’s next for MOOCs?”, those online courses that have thrown a techno-bomb at traditional higher education. Here, a primer to catch you up if you’ve somehow managed […]
Maya Penn is a tiny, vibrant force of nature. She’s an entrepreneur, philanthropist, fashion designer, animator, blogger, writer and illustrator. She runs a budding eco-friendly fashion business and a nonprofit for environmental awareness, and her mind churns constantly with new creative projects. And we should probably mention — Maya is only 13. Maya’s story began […]
Larry Lessig is about to complete a 185-mile walk across the state of New Hampshire. He began this journey on January 11 and has walked despite rain, sleet, snow, ice and freezing cold, as the temperature in this state ranges anywhere from the lower thirties to the negative teens in the month of January. Lessig […]
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2B-XwPjn9YY&w=586&h=440] Thirty years ago today, Steve Jobs introduced the Macintosh 128k at an Apple shareholders’ meeting. Excitement was high after the airing of the now-classic commercial “1984” during the Super Bowl two days before, and the demo — complete with the “Chariots of Fire” theme song — lived up to the hype. The unveiling was […]
TED2014 Fellow Jorge Mañes Rubio is an artist and perpetual tourist who investigates invisible, forgotten places — Chinese cities submerged by the Three Gorges Dam Project, a little-known Pacific island paradise destroyed by mining. He creates art that reimagines and revives these sites as attention-worthy destinations. Here, Rubio describes to the TED Blog his latest […]
Love isn’t so much an emotion, says Helen Fisher in her TED Talk. No, love is a brain system — one of three that that’s related to mating and reproduction. It’s those other two systems that explain why human beings are capable of infidelity even as we so highly value love. We see infidelity on […]
“The political and the sexual are intimate bedfellows,” says Shereen El Feki in yesterday’s talk. “That is true for all of us, no matter where we live and love.” For five years, El Feki talked to people across Middle East about their bedroom behavior, and what she found over and over was a seemingly deep-rooted […]
In the opening of Miwa Matreyek’s TED performance, a pair of shadowy hands wave over a plate, and an apple halves itself. From there, goldfish swirl around the plate, before morphing into birds and flying away. For the first minute, you think you are watching video — an intricate blend of real-life footage and animation. […]
In his TED Talk, “The shared experience of absurdity,” Charlie Todd shared the hilarity he creates for his fellow New Yorkers through flashmobs like the No Pants Subway Ride. The flashmob idea has, of course, spread widely. In the video above, watch one coordinated by the organizers of TEDxAden, a spontaneous musical performance in the […]