TED tailors 'ideas worth spreading' for US PBS TV

PBS president and CEO Paula Kerger is shown in 2011 in Beverly Hills, California. TED conferences has teamed with the US Corporation for Public Broadcasting to create an education-focused version of its real-world conferences for a show set to air on PBS stations nationally on Tuesday and again on Thursday.

The prestigious TED gathering known for perspective-shifting presentations by the brilliant and famous is tailoring "ideas worth spreading" for a television audience.

TED teamed with the US Corporation for Public Broadcasting to create an education-focused version of its real-world conferences for a show set to air on PBS stations nationally on Tuesday and again on Thursday.

"Re-imagining education is the key to a more hopeful future," said TED curator Chris Anderson.

"What better time to gather some of the country's most respected and forward-thinking education advocates, and make this the theme of TED's first-ever original television broadcast special."

The program is hosted by Grammy-winning musician John Legend and features presentations by Microsoft co-founder turned philanthropist Bill Gates as well as by social activist Ken Robinson, the most watched speaker at Ted.com.

Online videos stemming from TED conferences—which are renowned for mind-bending mixes of creativity, passion and innovation—passed the billion-view milestone late last year.

The number continues to rocket, with more than a million TEDTalks watched daily, according to the organization behind the prestigious TED gatherings that give rise to the presentations made available free on the Internet.

The nonprofit Sapling Foundation behind the conferences began making its recordings of talks available online as podcasts in 2006, then began streaming videos free at a TED.com website the following year to reach a global audience.

The move to original television programming is another step on the path to reaching as many people as possible with ideas for making the world a better place. "TED, at its core, is about spreading ideas," said Juliet Blake, who produced the "TED Talks Education" program.

"Public television reaches a huge audience," she continued. "I hope people who watch the show on PBS come graze more videos at the ted.com website."

The PBS broadcast will be the first of more television programs to come, and a project is already in the works in Europe, according to Blake.

"The plan is not necessarily to do a lot of television; but to do tough, provocative, exciting television," Blake said.

The TED program on PBS will live on at public broadcasting and TED websites, available to anyone in the world with Internet access.

Funding for the PBS program came from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, according to TED.

"This collaboration between PBS and TED is a natural fit as our organizations both aim to educate, engage and inspire," said PBS chief programming executive Beth Hoppe.

TED started in 1984 as a private gathering in California.

With Anderson as its "curator," TED has become renowned for 18-minute talks devoted to mind-bending perspectives on anything from music or dance to climate change or futuristic technology.

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Martin Seligman is the founder of positive psychology, a field of study that examines healthy states, such as happiness, strength of character and optimism. Full bio »

Innovation: TED Video - DIY Rocket Science Project

Human Rights Lawyer Bryan Stevenson at TED - Injustice

In an engaging and personal talk, with cameo appearances from his grandmother and Rosa Parks, human rights lawyer Bryan Stevenson shares some hard truths about America's justice system, starting with a massive imbalance along racial lines: a third of the country's black male population has been incarcerated at some point in their lives.

These issues, which are wrapped up in America's unexamined history, are rarely talked about with this level of candor, insight and persuasiveness.

Bryan Stevenson is the founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, fighting poverty and challenging racial discrimination in the criminal justice system. Full bio »

Paul Snelgrove at TED: A census of the ocean

Oceanographer Paul Snelgrove shares the results of a ten-year project with one goal: to take a census of all the life in the oceans. He shares amazing photos of some of the surprising finds of the Census of Marine Life.

Paul Snelgrove led the group that pulled together the findings of the Census of Marine Life -- synthesizing 10 years and 540 expeditions into a book of wonders. Full bio »

Vijay Kumar showing off palm-sized "agile aerial robots" at TED

In his lab at Penn, Vijay Kumar and his team build flying quadrotors, small, agile robots that swarm, sense each other, and form ad hoc teams -- for construction, surveying disasters and far more.

At the University of Pennsylvania, Vijay Kumar studies the control and coordination of multi-robot formations. Full bio »

Bunker Roy: Learning at the Barefoot College

Sanjit “Bunker” Roy is the founder of Barefoot College, which helps rural communities becomes self-sufficient. Full bio and more links
 
In Rajasthan, India, an extraordinary school teaches rural women and men -- many of them illiterate -- to become solar engineers, artisans, dentists and doctors in their own villages. It's called the Barefoot College, and its founder, Bunker Roy, explains how it works.

Hans Rosling and the Magic Washing Machine

Hans Rosling states that the washing machine was indeed the greatest invention of the Industrial Revolution, enabling everything from economic development through electrical efficiency to intellectual growth by reallocating free time for reading.

An interesting parallel emerges when we examine Rosling’s talk in alongside Clay Shirky’s Cognitive Surplus: The washing machine is the antithesis of television, freeing up the same kind of “cognitive surplus” — excess human creative and intellectual energy — that, according to Shirky’s central argument, TV absorbed, a parallel that bespeaks the universal duality of innovation and the incredible potential of technology as a force of social change the polarity of which we get to choose.

Mistakes in Not Making Mistakes

The past year seems to have yielded various waves of content celebrating making mistakes. Advancing the “failure at the heart of innovation” theme seems to have become a cause célèbre for the creativity and innovation set.

Celebrating mistakes as part of innovation was the topic of a July Innochat on Twitter on innovation failure and, most recently, a Wall Street Journal article on “Better Ideas through Failure.”

I grew up with a clear perfectionist streak (or whatever term you would use to suggest whatever is deeper, wide, and more permanent than a “streak”), I wrestle with a gleeful attitude toward failure.

Yet between Kathryn Schulz’s TED talk “On Being Wrong” and recognition of my own experiences where learning from something that did not succeed as planned has led to much better future results, openness to errors clearly has its place in creativity and innovation.

However, I think celebrating mistakes in and of themselves is an easy banner for behaviours that don’t come easily to many people or many organizations, for that matter.

It’s not so much organizations are celebrating failure as the willingness to move forward on efforts before everything is figured out and an appreciation for learning when something doesn’t go right.


Being Bad at Making Mistakes
What really needs to happen in an organization to benefit from an apparent willingness to celebrate and reward failure?

Instead of listing behaviors for celebrating mistakes (which I started to do but failed to complete), it’s much easier to list mistakes individuals and organizations make at making mistakes.

Thinking through the personal perfectionist demons I’ve had to try (and still try) to slay, here are eight mistakes that can shut you off from productive failure:

1. Being afraid of fear
2. Not being able to manage or tolerate ample levels of risk
3. Becoming easily embarrassed – either personally or organizationally
4. Failing to properly frame and learn from experiments
5. Being uncomfortable with unanswered questions
6. Doing a bad job of making assumptions which allow you to keep making progress
7. Focusing too strongly on too much detail
8. Not being able to fix things as you go

To read the full article visit the Innovation Excellence website