Clay Shirky- TED Talk #4

What are your take-aways from this video?
What are the speaker's effective speaking techniques?
What is his/her presentation style?
What matters from this video?How does it connect to you personally? To education? To the world?


During Clay Shirky's TED Talk, he shared with the audience his views on motivation and creativity. He believed that through internal motivation, society would be able to make both communal and civic creations, which would overall benefit the 21st century. But ultimately, sharing and collaborating internationally, he said, would promote our society to accomplish tasks that are beyond mediocre, but rather exceeding the limits. Through a study of an Islam Pre-School, it was proven that punishment actually discourages the ability to follow the rules because it is not fueled by internal motivation. He believed that by corresponding with others and sharing new ideas, our society could advance with a cognitive surplus.
Throughout Shirky's TED Talk, he used many examples and visuals that helped the audience better understand his ideas. Through his visuals, such as the "wall cats" and the images from "Ushahidi," Shirky was able to support his ideas and promote cognitive thinking. Also, Shirky began his speech by telling a story of how Ushahidi began. According to A Whole New Mind, this strategy provides the audience with the ability to better retain and understand the information that Shirky shared during the talk.
I believe Shirky's personal style was slightly bland and lacked much enthusiasm. Rather than a few hand gestures, Shirky never showed much emotion or passion for the topic he was talking about. The way he conducted and shared his ideas was hard to understand. I feel that he lacked a main topic and jumped around to numerous topics without a definite purpose. The different topics didn't relate and he lacked comprehensible segways that would aid the audience. Overall, I don't believe his presentation style was effective. It didn't inspire me to change the world with cognitive thinking as he was supposedly sharing with the audience. Instead, it accomplished to make me slightly confused about the purpose of his TED Talk.
Shirky's video promotes the ability to communicate and collaborate with others efficiency in order to create a more productive society. He also wished to share that internal motivation and the ability to enjoy a certain activity would aid the world by influencing individuals to stay on task and be productive. Personally, this will create a drive within myself to search for the internal motivation that both Shirky and Daniel Pink promote. I also believe that Shirky's ideas will aid our future and the way students are taught. Instead of being assigned a specific topic, students may be allowed to explore new ideas and study things that they are interested in through internal motivation.