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A homemade TED Talk

Your major project for this course (which we’ll work on in stages as class proceeds) will be to create what I’m calling a “homemade TED Talk” on the topic of virtual realities, i.e., one of the new ways of thinking, acting, feeling, etc., made possible by internet-based technologies. You will choose one specific piece of that larger puzzle to explore through various forms of research, and then create a 30-minute digital presentation through which to share your insights with a diverse audience. If you’re not familiar with TED Talks, you can check some out  here (Links to an external site.) . As you’ll see, they cover a wide range of topics — from subatomic physics, to comic books, to the future of democracy, to the meaning of life.

· What topic might you explore?

Pending my approval, you can explore the broader human significance of just about any piece of internet-based technology — any app, any gadget, or any form of social media — is fair game. You might explore, for example, Spotify or Netflix, the iPad or the selfie stick, Instagram or Pinterest, etc. The choice is yours — provided that you can develop a research question (see below) that, again, explores the broader human significance of the technology you’ve chosen.

· How will you explore your topic?

First, you’ll develop a research question. Your research question will focus on the broader human significance of your chosen technology: that is, on how it’s changing our political systems, or our understanding of the self, or the nature of our communities, or our forms of cultural expression. In other words, in a fundamental way. In other words, your goal isn’t simply to talk about how cool (or how awful) your chosen piece of tech is; rather, your goal (much like the writers of the texts we’ve read so far) is to consider how that piece of tech is deeply and profoundly changing who we are.

          Next, you’ll do some internet and library research, compiling an annotated bibliography of materials relevant to your research question.

          Then you’ll continue to pursue your research question by doing some cyber-ethnographic and auto-ethnographic research and conducting some interviews.

          Finally, you’ll write your TED Talk script, putting your own original insights into conversation with other voices you discovered through research, in the service of presenting your own BIG IDEA.

          In the weeks to come, you’ll learn more about each of these forms of research and writing, as we build step-by-step toward the creation of your digital presentation.

· What is a “digital presentation”?

Each of you will script a spoken presentation of approximately 25-30 minutes in length. (That’s between 12 and 15 double-spaced pages.) But how you deliver that speech will be up to you (with guidance from me). You might decide to create a video, a screencast, a narrated slideshow, a podcast, etc. The idea is to use the form of digital media that best suits what you have to say in a way that communicates clearly and persuasively to your audience.

· Who is your audience? 

This will vary a bit from presentation to presentation, but, in general, you want to imagine your audience to be like the audience at an actual TED Talk: a mixture of both scholarly experts and interested laypersons. For example, if Nicholas Carr, author of “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” were completing this assignment, he might imagine his audience to be made up both of the comparatively small group people who are experts in the fields of human psychology and intellectual development, as well as people from other, non-academic walks of life who happen to use Google a lot. Your audience will be different from Carr’s, insofar as you’ll be exploring a different topic, but the basic principle is the same: you’ll address an audience of scholarly experts as well as interested laypersons.