on TED and other apps

I’ve been looking for good apps on the iPhone.  I guess I’m obsessed with education, so that’s what I seem to be looking at recently.  The most recent ones I’ve added are TED and iTunesU.  I haven’t spent much time on iTunesU yet, so I’ll talk about TED. 

I’ve heard there’s a lot of brilliant things said at the TED talks.  It’s very possible my choices on what to listen to from the TED talks are wrong.  But so far, I’m not very impressed.  I find it nice to be able to listen and identify things I want to hear.  But some of the talks aren’t very impressive.  I listened to one about teaching statistics before calculus.  It lasted three minutes or so, and wasn’t the most persuasive thing I’ve heard.  I think there might be some basis for the idea, but three minutes isn’t enough to convince me.  My own experience tells me the guy is right, but if you want a fundamental change in math teaching, you’re going to have to spend more than three minutes.

I listened to one about a guy who built a windmill generator in Africa at 14.  Pretty neat.  But mostly done through interpretation.  And there was another one from Tim Berners-Lee about the wonders of open databases.  Though it really wasn’t about open databases, it was a status report a year later after encouraging people to create open databases.  Which I think might be useful information, and got me to thinking about databases in general, but that’s neither here nor there.

So far, my selection of material is pretty sucky.  But I’ve got 16 more that just might find me something interesting.  I’m looking forward to hearing from Bill Gates, T. Boone Pickens, and Elon Musk.  Those seem more interesting and are likely to inspire or educate me more.  Maybe it’s that I have a different goal in what I’m trying to get out of the TED app.  But everyone says the TED talks are some brilliant stuff. 

Guess I just haven’t found it yet.