TED Presentations

Watching the presentations was very educational... I learned a lot, El Sistema and Innovative Ideas for a Sustainable future were my favorite presentation groups. I think that we learned a lot, but we only saw a third of the presentations... which is good and bad at the same time. It was nice having a smaller audience because it was less stressful and you could connect with the audience a lot easier; but, it felt anticlimactic, because most people put a lot of work into the project and then only a third of the target audience heard it (or had the opportunity to hear it).
The project still needs to be refined and fixed a lot, although the format was better than last year (so at least we're improving). I think the best thing to do would probably be to keep it in the seperate classrooms until all the wrinkles are ironed out (which will probably take a couple more years). I know that the whole point of the project is to get the academy classes together, but it usually just creates a whole lot of anger between the classes (the freshman aren't doing any work, the seniors are slacking, ect.). I don't think that people didn't know how to collaborate, it was that a few chose not to, or were unable to for many different reasons. I think a lot of the project was blown out of proportion, and then other parts weren't focused on enough. Also, many people only learned about there tasks and never bothered to read anyone else's work (so how can they learn anything from the rest of the presentation).
I like to think that all of these ideas to save the world are there because we need to use all of them to get anywhere... make some kind of master plan to save the world accounting for all these innovative ideas. Saying that, we learned about these ideas, and we really haven't done anything about them. We are more aware, but nothing has changed.