Building on TED Talks, Part II

In my previous post, Building on TED Talks: A Course for High School Seniors, I presented tentative ideas for designing a high school course that would be based on TED Talks. Since then, I have received some feedback, talked to parents and students, skimmed a collection of books, and considered various options. Based on my research, I've decided to revise my original plan.

Course Objective
My initial course objective was too vague: "Explore new ways of thinking by studying, discussing and reflecting upon a set of powerful ideas. . . ." What "powerful ideas"? Clearly, I had to be more specific. Otherwise, how could I create a cohesive TED Talk Playlist for the course? With over 1500 TED Talks in the full catalog, it would take me hundreds of hours to preview all of them. Even though I managed to haphazardly select some excellent speakers from nearly every one of the main TED categories (business, design, entertainment, global issues, science and technology), I could see how jumping from Susan Cain to Clay Shirky to Jacqueline Novogratz might be confusing to students if I couldn't make strong connections between these extraordinary speakers.

To improve the course focus, I asked myself two obvious questions:

• Exactly what "powerful ideas" do I want to share with the group?
• What do I hope everyone will learn by the end of the year? 

After considering these questions, I began revising my earlier plan to focus on three concepts: 

1. Democracy in the Digital Age—How does the internet influence who participates (and how and why do people feel empowered to do so)?
2. Collaborative Consumption—How does the internet alter the way we acquire and dispose of our stuff? 
3. Cognitive Surplus—In what way can we harness the power of aggregated data and manpower?

In addition to exploring these ideas, I would like to help students with blogging projects tailored to their own interests and aptitudes. My goal is to help them become more skilled at working with online content so they can (in Howard Rheingold's words) "thrive online." We can use the blogs to promote discussions within our class group; we can also consider how and why we might choose to use blogs to reach a larger audience. Hopefully, the blogging projects will provide "hands-on" experiences that will help to reinforce the major course concepts (digital democracy, collaborative consumption, cognitive surplus). 

Course Content

In a future post, I will provide a complete list of TED Talks and recommended reading for the course. Currently, I'm thinking of working with the following two books:

Net Smart: How to Thrive Online by Howard Rheingold (MIT Press, 2012) 

CreateYour Own Blog: 6 Easy Projects to Start Blogging Like a Pro by Tris Hussey (Sams Publishing, 2010)

Have you used either of these texts? Were they helpful to you? I welcome suggestions for alternative texts—ideally, inexpensive and straightforward—that explain how to use free online tools to create effective multimedia content for a range of purposes.