TED Presentations

It's over. The multi-month first-quarter-closing grand collaboration of all wishing to collaborate has skidded, ground, screeched, and glided to a resounding, sometimes painful, halt.

It was a decent ride, sometimes exciting, other times frustrating, but mostly, for me at least, dull and not engaging. A computer with people I get to see once, for planning and not working, doesn't suffice to entice me into actively and passionately participating in a project so simultaneously distant and almost completely unrelated to areas anything I've ever studied in school gives me background in. A one slide show stand.

Not that parts weren't fun or rewarding. Getting to work with peers both older and younger offered unique challenges, and, more importantly, an opportunity to meet some cool people, as well as understand how the dynamic of my Academy classes and classmates might change over the years. I also really enjoy public speaking. Public speaking under a pressure, a result of some time allocation issues that left me with roughly 70-90 seconds to cover three minutes of material gave me a challenge almost equivalent to the situations I deal with in my debating life, and a chance to meet that challenge at a pace the average person can understand. It was fun.

The system is far from perfect, and a running in-depth study of the issues the presenters cover with members exclusively in our class, or with continued organized collaboration with other classes could still be rewarding, but I feel that as long as the TED projects are oriented towards an end goal of the TED presentations, we won't get the full value of learning about these incredible people and the issues they discuss, or working with our gifted acadamates.