EdCircuit Staff 
What began in 1984 as a mild-mannered conference about technology, entertainment and design has emerged as a juggernaut of a media company that in some ways dominates the education space like nothing in history. Its parent entity, the Sapling foundation, had an adjusted net income of $42.7 million in 2015 – a not too shabby return on a very simple idea: build a clearinghouse of free knowledge from the world’s most inspired thinkers, and do it in 18 minutes or less.
The TED Executive
Professor Sugata Mitra
Mitra is Professor of Educational Technology at the School of Education, Communication and Language Sciences at Newcastle University, England. He is a leading advocate of Minimally invasive education. Mitra is credited with numerous inventions in the areas of cognitive science and education technology, and was the 2013 winner of the $1 million TED Prize (TED invests $1 million every year in individuals who have powerful ideas, a program designed to accelerate progress towards some of the world’s most pressing problems).
TED has evolved to include local events all over the globe. These local events are called TEDx, and at last count, there were some 3600 events happening per year. According to Anderson, TEDx was an idea they floated with little expectation for widespread success. “TEDx was an experiment that has blown us away. It started because so many people came to us and said: Please do a conference in my town in India! In my town in Brazil! There was no way we could produce that many conferences on our own, but we knew amazing ideas were out there that needed to be captured and shared.
We decided to give our model away for free, and let passionate volunteers replicate the TED experience worldwide, all in service to our non-profit mission of Ideas Worth Sharing. Honestly, we thought there’d be a handful of TEDx events a year – but there are now roughly ten held every day in the world, from prisons to the Sydney Opera House. There are more than 80 thousand TEDx talks on YouTube. TEDx has been instrumental in fulfilling our mission and in unearthing new ideas. Some of the most-watched talks on TED.com came from TEDx events.”
Little TED
Rob Ivy lives in Nashville. He is the chief financial officer of Lee Company, a mechanical contracting, facilities and home services company with over 900 employees serving government, institutional, commercial, healthcare and industrial organizations as well as residential customers throughout middle Tennessee, southern Kentucky, and northern Alabama. Ivy is a board member and speaker coach for TEDx Nashville, a successful TEDx organization. Ivy and others refer to the home organization as Big TED, and the TEDx organizations as Little TED. Ivy is a big believer in the value of TED, and talks passionately about the platform. “I believe that part of the appeal of TED Talks is the “purity” of the platform. No politics, religion, or advertising. No fees or honorariums. Just original ideas presented by passionate advocates. I think of it as “open source knowledge.” Viewers appreciate that TED Talks are a safe space, where the only agenda is enhancing society through imparting knowledge, sharing ideas, and sparking creativity.
Another reason for the success of TED Talks is their brevity. Complex concepts in bite size portions. After all, how many two-hour seminars would draw 1,000,000 views online? Making complex concepts accessible to a broad audience in 18 minutes or less isn’t easy, but thousands of TED and TEDx speakers do it every year – providing a vast library of content that can be had for only a few minutes’ investment. The educators and innovators we’ve worked with at TEDx Nashville are drawn to the TED platform in part because it offers them the opportunity to take their life’s work beyond academia to a much broader audience.”
TEDx Nashville continues to break ground, offering talks from experts like Dr. Turner Nashe, technology expert and prison education reformer, whose company GTL is a leader in prison technology. Nashe and GTL are using technology in innovative ways to educate inmates, reducing recidivism and saving taxpayers millions. Nashe is a big fan of the TEDx experience, saying “My TEDx Talk sparked a lot of conversations. TED is not just an event or an online platform, it is a way to get innovative ideas into the public consciousness. It’s a place that lends credence to new ideas, a launching pad for public good.”
TED And The Education Expert
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