Thanks to Michael Sauers‘ suggestion in his comment on my post about the documentary Good Copy Bad Copy, we have done a brown bag lunch and video screening the past two weeks at my library. Both times we have had a nice mix of attendees from the library, academic technology, and the writing center.

Last week we watched Good Copy Bad Copy, and this week we watched a few videos from the TED conferences. Namely:

• Hans Rosling reveals new insights on poverty: gGeat use of statistical visualization and a wonderful surprise finish. More about his software, Gapminder; give it a spin at Google, Gapminder World (in beta, natch).
• Blaise Aguera y Arcas demos Photosynth: The talk that first got me hooked on TED when Iris Jastram blogged it. Astounding demo of image browse software, followed by even more astounding demo of Photosynth, which maps photos onto a virtual 3-D space.
• Ken Robinson says schools kill creativity: Is the point of educating people to create college professors? Can’t we do better in helping people unlock their creativity (or at least not crushing it out of them)?
• Anand Agarawala demos his BumpTop desktop: A shorter, fun one. What if the icons on your desktop had heft? And you could throw them around?

I’m sure if I had more time, I could put together an entirely different, but equally compelling hour of TED talks. They are great to watch, not just for the content, but also for seeing some interesting presentation techniques and styles.

I’m not sure what we’ll screen next week; maybe something a little lighter, more fun (though I thought the documentary and these talks were loads of fun, too). Thanks for the idea, Michael!