I came across a few interesting videos this week, ranging in topics. Here they are:

Outside In

5.6k Saturn Cassini Photographic Animation from stephen v2 on Vimeo.

More at GeekDad

Salman Khan

More at TED

The History of Twitter

Funny or Die’s take on the origins of Twitter (NSFW, thanks to Soulja Boy):

More at WebProNews

Sheehey’s Dunk

Greg Pattillo

More at PROJECT Trio

PostRank, a Canadian social engagement aggregator service (formerly AideRSS), has turned their attentions to TED, too. They released a special view of social media activity that shows which TED talks are most discussed.

Search TED talks by social media endorsement

The site lists the top five in each category (Technology, Entertainment, Business, Design, Science, Global), as well as the top videos shared on each of the different social networks. According to PostRank, the top design and technology talk is Pranav Mistry’s SixthSense device. For global issues, it is Julian Assage’s interview about Wikileaks.

PostRank tracks in real-time where and how users engage online, and what they pay attention to. Their social engagement data measures actual user activity, which they claim is the most accurate indicator of the relevance and influence of a social object or individual.

The Morgan Spurlock and Salman Khan videos-to-be are the don’t-miss talks I saw on the auditorium screen. Spurlock, the human guinea pig best known for a month of eating McDonald’s food, has a new project about product placement. Khan is a former hedge fund analyst who turned a few video tutorials for his math-challenged cousin into an open academy for self-guided learning. While Spurlock’s talk was highly entertaining, Khan moved me to the edge of my seat in providing inspiration.

Sal Khan explains the concept driving Khan Academy

Education reform is a major focus. Soon, TED will be launching a new forum—TED-ED Brain Trust—that will curate a community of visionary educators, students, organizations, filmmakers and other creative professionals to find ways to enrich education for the next wave of learners. On Day Two of TED—the same day Apple released another potential classroom game-changer—guest curator Bill Gates emphasized education as a theme for his session, including Khan and David Christian’s Big History project.

David Christian explains Big History

Khan didn’t just explain his website or his own origin story. He argued for a different way to support learning. There were two key insights I mined from Khan’s talk.

First, successful students learn at varied paces. Khan showed a chart of student achievement in the class, highlighting two common paths to success: the traditional fast-starters who get the material easily and move quickly to establish themselves as experts; and, the slow-starters who struggle to understand a few key concepts before taking off. The latter group wouldn’t be identified as “gifted” in most programs, many of which penalize early failures. In Khan’s self-guided program, failure is part of the process of mastery.

Second, there is value to flipping the role of the classroom to be about the homework and not the lecture. The video instruction of Khan Academy allows students to work through the material at their own pace and in protected and comfortable environments. The application of that knowledge can be shifted from home to class, creating more peer and small-group interaction with the instructor and moving away from a one-size-fits-all delivery of new content.

At the end of last semester, I iterated on my experience teaching Processing to undergrads. I was delighted to hear that Khan Academy is incorporating some game dynamics (energy points, badges) into their self-guided learning programs and classroom tools. If given another chance to teach programming, I may rely on video instruction and in-class coding assignments to better support the individual pace of learning.

I hope Khan’s talk is released quickly. For the moment, you can scratch your own TED itches by watching the Day One talk by Wadah Khanfar of Al Jazeera, on the optimism arising from events in Egypt, Tunisia, and Libya:

I wonder where this kid is going to be in 20 years and what impact the Wii will have on his development. Archie, at 4, mostly watches everyone else play Wii games. He liked boxing, but only for about 20 seconds. Carter is a pro bowler, according to Wii, and is also getting in regular reps in Smooth Moves. Does that mean Archie’s tendons will be less damaged but his reflexes slower? Will the next core interaction paradigm in the future workplace require mastery of The Waiter?

More importantly, how much can I enjoy my Wii victories knowing there is a two-year-old somewhere who can kick my butt.

In honor of the Bioneers conference—which is being broadcast as a satellite conference in Bloomington this weekend—here’s a very interesting use of the aeroelastic flutter effect. The Windbelt generator was inspired by the infamous collapse of the 1940 Tacoma Narrows Bridge, a standard cautionary tale for physicists and structural engineers.

The Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapses in 1940