How Fine-Grained Will New Credentialism Get: Credit For Watching a TED Talk?

jyosim writes: In a sign of how willing some companies are to consider alternatives to higher education, services are popping up that allow employees to track their informal-learning activities so they can be added to their credentials. These activities can include such things as watching a TED talk, a Khan Academy video, or reading a newspaper article. "It’s easy to poke fun at a single TED talk or a single article and say, What is the merit of this and what’s the efficacy of a single article?" says David Blake, chief executive and a founder of Degreed, a service that logs what employees are learning online. "But when you zoom out and look at a year’s worth of learning," it adds up, he argues. "The average professional’s time on videos, books, and articles will substantially outweigh their time inside a classroom. In aggregate, it is the story of our lifelong learning."

Comments

TED? Subtract credits!

[PvtVoid]

I'm becoming convinced TED talks actually make people stupider. Here's a TED talk about it.

Re:TED? Subtract credits!

[alvinrod]

All TED talks are not created equally, and there's a stark difference between a TED talk and a TEDx talk. The latter are pretty much open to anyone and aren't well screened either for quality of information or quality of presentation.

The talk you've linked to is one of those TEDx talks and it's given by a professor of visual arts. He's simply just passing off his opinion and little more than that. The speaker describes his work as dealing with "deep techno-cultural shifts, from the post-humanism to the post-anthropocene." I still can't get the Bullshit klaxon to turn off after hearing that part. Some of those words have individual meaning to me, but I don't even think the speaker could given me a concise definition of what that phrase actually means. Post-anthropocene is especially egregious. We get other meaningless jargon phrases like "placebo techno-radicalism" which is defined as "toying with risk, so as to reaffirm the comfortable." After that point I quit, as it was probably just another ~6 minutes of pseudo-intellectual peroration where we get to hear a lot of words that don't actually mean anything, and are only there to make the speaker sound intelligent so you might agree with whatever point they were trying to make if that was even clear.

Funnier yet, the example he gives of a terrible talk that accomplished nothing is another TEDx talk. Stay as far away from those as you possibly can. Even though there are a few bad TED talks, at least they're curated enough to keep the worst of the worst out.