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Yesterday,\u00a0I learned about the intersection of race, class, and (in)justice in the American legal system.<\/p>\n
The content was engaging and I felt, afterwards, ready to share my ideas and concerns with others. I felt like I was learning<\/em>.<\/p>\n All of this happened during lunch. While watching a single twenty-three minute TED talk<\/a>.<\/p>\n And in general, that\u2019s great. Right?<\/p>\n Sure it is.<\/p>\n Only \u2026 the thing is\u2026 I already studied this topic as a graduate student. It was a two-quarter long course and at the end I\u2019d read stacks and stack of books and written what felt like reams of paper on the nuances of the topic and after those 20 intense weeks of studying\u2026 I felt like I hadn\u2019t even scratched the surface.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n As the popularity of TED talks continues to grow, I sometimes feel like we are missing something in the truncated hyper-entertaining style. I don\u2019t mean that I expect everyone to jump into full-on academic geekdom around a topic instead of watching a TED talk. However, I do wonder what is lost in the snappy medium.<\/p>\n In the Critical Media Literacy course I am currently co-teaching, we showed Chimamanda Adichie’s TED talk<\/a> at the beginning of the quarter. It seems like her concerns of a \u201csingle story\u201d have probably been invoked by my students on a weekly basis. But her concerns are invoked in passing; my students have not tussled with seeking additional knowledge about Adichie, her writing, or the political circumstances she discusses. Similarly, I\u2019ve had numerous conversations with people about \u201cthe problem with schools\u201d based solely on Sir Ken Robinson\u2019s TED talk<\/a>. While I find this talk, too, tremendously worthwhile, I tend to feel like we are locked out of creativity and personal opinion when most of our talking points are pinned to 15-20 minute talks.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n I\u2019ve had these sneaking suspicions about TED for a while, but I do want to make it clear that I appreciate much of the content and the vision of what TED represents. It\u2019s not TED\u2019s fault that it\u2019s so popular. It\u2019s more a problem that it\u2019s so much easier<\/em> to embed or like or share or forward a 15-20 minute talk (or 30 minute propaganda video<\/a>) than look into the larger concerns.* Slacktivism<\/a> (as recently mentioned in a post related to #kony2012).<\/p>\n I bring up this navel-gazing whining about TED and \u201cLunchtime Intellectuals\u201d (did I just invent that? I hope so) because it is now directly impacting the teaching profession. Earlier this week TED announced TED-Ed<\/a>:<\/p>\n An invitation to teachers across the world to help us dial up the effectiveness of video lessons. As an initial offering, we\u00a0have posted a dozen lessons that we think show promise. And now we’re ready to assist teachers in creating hundreds more.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n I guess that\u2019s good, right?<\/p>\n And I really like John and Hank Green\u2019s Crash Course videos<\/a> that teach history and science via YouTube videos.<\/p>\n And I guess someone<\/em> likes this Khan Academy thing.<\/p>\n All of these might be doing something<\/em> somewhere. But I do know that, in the same week that more than 11,000 LAUSD teachers receive notices that they will be laid off at the end of this year<\/a>, it feels uncomfortable to have organizations helping in ways that basically suggest \u2018let\u2019s throw a bunch of snappy videos your way\u2026 figure out the rest.\u2019**<\/p>\n All too often, we tend to try to simplify the really (really<\/em>) complex challenges that teachers are in. At the DML conference last week, I took issue with John Seely Brown\u2019s keynote talk that tended to idealize the Montessori school system. Meryl Alper helps complicate this<\/a>\u00a0as well as point to an early-education blind spot in the DML community. This stuff is much more complicated than can be covered in an 18 minute ohhs-and-ahhs-filled video. This stuff is about our future and it’s about the youth in our schools and it\u2013thus\u2013deserves<\/em>\u00a0for us to try untangling it as a complicated mess.<\/p>\n It\u2019s not that TED-Ed is a bad idea. I\u2019m more concerned with the continued trend of non-educators being able to get high profile coverage for creating faux quick-fix solutions (or worse: another<\/em> community to work on solutions) for deep-rooted inequity that\u2019s been decades in the works.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n
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