Ted Talk #4 - Clay Shirky

What are your take-aways from this video?
I learned the difference between civic and communal value and which one our future can build a better structure upon. I learn that civic value, such as Ushahidi (and open source project to provide source crisis information):

and it is created by the participants to help the whole society/world. Where as communal value is created by the participats for the participants, such as wall cats (pictures of cats with funny captions):

It is hard to envision a future on communal value. However Clay Shirky  said that if we take communal value and use massive group projects with it side by side, we can created civic value and build a sturdy base for our future. Also, I learned an effective way to show graphs in pieces, to make the audience focus on one part of the graph. Clay showed pieces of the graph as he talked about them, and if I use graphs in my Ted Talk, I think it would be a great tactic.

What are the speakers effective speaking techniques?

Clay's speaking techniques were fairly simple. He spoke straightforward about his ideas in an orderly fashion. He didn't emphacize any words, or use any jokes.

What is his/her presentation style?
Clay Shirky's presentation style didn't have any humor or emotionally engaging stories, but he did use real data and tests to explain his point. His presentation included a powerpoint and lots of hand gestures. His powerpoint had some pictures and data on it. I especially like the way that he used his graph on his powerpoint. He only showed the parts of the graph that he was talking about, and then continually added parts of it as he spoke about them. I think that this is really productive in getting the audience to focus on one part of the graph at a time, and gradually adding information in as necessary. It also kept you guessing about how the results continued.

What matters from this video? How does this connect to you personally? To education? To the world?
From this video, people should know that group projects combined with light-hearted communal value can produce a civic value that we can build a possible future on. Personally, the video made me aware of these open source projects in effect that can help during crisis anywhere. As far as education, this video also mentioned that once gates are broken (through the daycare study) they are not rebuilt and people can step forward without stepping back. Around the world, civic value such as Hashidi, are helping massive amounts of people as they are created by masssive amounts of people.
-Mikaela M.