I'm going to try and deconstruct my experience with #TEDxNYED

Yesterday was the TEDxNYED conference. It was an incredible day filled with brilliant educators and equally brilliant speakers. We broadcast it live over the Internet and Livestream (our sponsor) reported to me today that we had over 20,000 views. I can barely comprehend that. Today, while I'm still fresh with memories, I want to try and reflect and deconstruct my experiences yesterday, and my experiences with TEDxNYED overall. In particular I hope to go back to my own tweets, go back some of the 2,871 tweets posted about #tedxnyed yesterday, to the Flickr stream, and to the blogosphere discussing TEDxNYED.

Some of my main goals for the reflection include:

  • pulling out things that were really meaningful from the talks
  • summarizing if and how TEDxNYED had a diversity problem (in the speaker set)
  • lessons learned from organizing TEDxNYED

All this, after a perfect whole wheat everything bagel from Bergen Bagels, the best bagles in the world.


(the cool name badges created by Stacy Mar)


(binary apples designed by Lisa Chun)


(@ginab, CEO of Ning.com)


(@jlamontagne, our emcee, and TED fellow)


(@gsiemens, of Connectivism)

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7 responses
About "how TEDxNYED had a diversity problem (in the speaker set)". First abt ur blog post: Loved your pics and your inquiry. Thanks for starting the dialogue. This is why I love social media. And thanks for creating the event that led to this moment to converse about it.

So I wasn't there at TEDxNYED but watched all but one session online. I didn't even know about the event and, ironically, I am a TED Fellow, I work in Education at CUNY, and I am a person of color and an African-American woman. I learned about TEDxNYED a day or two before when someone on Twitter expected to see me there and sent me a tweet. Clearly I missed the noticed (and not sure ppl of color were marketed to, included, targeted to share to majority abt our experiences being or not being educated and included). Given my connections to TED and TED Fellows, I was stunned that I wasn't asked to participate or to engage in the event in any way. Would have loved to contribute. Which brings me back to your bullet: "summarizing if and how TEDxNYED had a diversity problem (in the speaker set)"

Consider that the problem began long before any concerns about the speakers' selection or performance. It's like dehydration begins LONG before thirst sets in. We simply didn't include or notice the need for hydration--overlooked it.

Your post has me convinced I need to blog asap on this subject.

— Kyra D. Gaunt, Ph.D.
I could hardly sleep last night after TED and I look forward to your reflection. I want to fill you in on a project that I'm starting up with a fabulous educator at another of our indie neighbor schools. Just had a great chat with her on Thursday and our work directly speaks to much of what the group discussed yesterday. Thinking maybe we should get our attendees together this week for a chat??
— Maureen Burgess
Kyra, thanks for your quick feedback. I hope to get to my summaries at some point today. Quick note, the pics are not mine. You can see the photographer by clicking on any of the photos, but they are from @alexragone, @specialkrb and @kjarrett.

I'm sot of not surprised you didn't know about TEDxNYED, though. We're basically a group of independent school educators who decided to put on a conference, and one of us registered to have it be a TEDx. Most of us had never been to TED, and we knew only what we see in the videos. So, we set out to collect a great group of speakers to talk about new media, technology, and education. How that all connects to TED, the fellows, etc, was never a large part of our thinking. Now as I learn more about TED I see how others could have been pulled in.

I'm going to get to the issues of a diverse speaker body, but a diverse attendee set is also quite relevant. TED has taken much heat from the blogosphere (mostly fairly) about its elitist nature. It would be great to have a discussion on that, too.

I'd love to see any blog posts you might do on this, and we'll likely to a 21st Century Learning webcast on it, too.

Thank you so much for your comment, it really got my wheels spinning!

— arvind s grover
Maureen, a get together of attendees from our school would be great! I leave for NCAIS Innovate conference on Wed evening. Can we squeeze it in before that? Today or tomorrow after school?
— arvind s grover
I noticed the lack of diversity right away. I don't see it as a TED problem, per se, but as a larger issue that moments like TED just point out. There is a huge lack of diversity in Educational Leadership in general. I noticed it at Educon as well. The only true diverse population there were the wonderful students. There have to be some great voices that we are missing.
— Carey Pohanka
@arvind - thanks for getting and keeping the buzz going. You are the master connector and I look forward to your commentary on what just happened at TEDxNYED.

@kyra - thank you for your perspective on this past weekend. As with many things in life, our first try at something is just the beginning. We are grateful to comments like yours as we move forward and try ot make future versions of TEDxNYED as inclusive as possible while bringing a call to action.

— dcinc66
@Carey. I couldn't agree more. That was a huge struggle. TED and many of the TEDx events do put a lot of time an effort into creating a diverse community and that is something that we as an edtech/TEDxNYED commmunity we must address as well. Hopefully we as the larger ed tech community can begin to seriously evaluate this problem and see what we can do to balance it out.
— dcinc66
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