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I’m piloting a new event on April 14th at my apartment I’m calling an inspirathon video night. The idea is simple: get together to watch a number of great modern speakers on a big screen talk about a variety of intellectually stimulating topics. But now I’m going to embellish the idea with a slight rant and background story.

My philosophy of education is summed up in the William Yeats quote, “Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.” The act of teaching needs to be de-emphasized and the encouragement of learning needs to be re-emphasized. You can’t make somebody learn something just by teaching it, but you can make them learn on their own more than you could ever teach them if you inspire them.

Inspiration has always played an important role in my life. Every ambition I’ve ever had has been sparked and fed by the inspiration created by somebody else’s work. Something will strike me as exceptional and I use it as a reference point for my own work. I learn from the creator and follow similar paths, not just to reach a similar destination, but to find other destinations along the way. It’s like an Amazon recommendation system, only instead of being based on the peer consumers of a work, it’s based on the producer and their path of inspiration, be it other works, books, topics, philosophies, values, people, etc.

I think it’s through this that I’ve come to really appreciate people as landmarks in study. A person is a nice tangible manifestation of a mixed set of disciplines, mental models, contributions, interests, etc. Each of these things can directly or indirectly link them to another person, a new landmark.

When I study something, I usually use a set of particular people as an anchor or foundation. First I’ll study them and their work, and then spread out based on references they’ve made or that I’ve found on the way. Similarly, if I stumble upon say a book I really like, I’ll usually check the other books by that author first.

This approach is much more people-oriented than subject-oriented, which I appreciate as a generalist because it exposes you to new subjects that are always in some way complementary. But I’m starting to realize that most exceptional people are most inspired by people and works in completely different subject areas than their own. All the more reason to support a generalist approach to learning.

Now as much as I love to read books, I have trouble getting through them because too often I can get a thought about something and either stop reading for a while, or worse, keep reading while thinking. For me, reading can be slightly too interactive for learning something new.

On the other hand, I can get entranced with spoken word, and when complemented with good visuals even more so. Plus, if they’re good at speaking you get the added element of entertainment. The visuals, when present and done well, can complement spoken word by making concepts and examples visual, as well as being another expressive outlet for entertainment through humor or just personal style.

Another great aspect of talks and speeches are that they’re easy to have as a shared experience. Unlike a book where you can’t really read with another person at the same time, you can have hundreds of people watching the same thing in the same place, which is great for reflection because of the possible discussion afterwards with even a few of those other people.

Maybe the most important aspect of talks is that great speakers are inspiring. The most inspiring people I know are also great speakers. There’s something magical in the energy and enthusiasm possible in speech that you just don’t get in books.

So I really like talks, keynotes, speeches, etc. This leads to conferences, which I love, but conferences not only require more effort than say a book, but also more time and money. And they happen on a pretty limited basis. Luckily, more and more of the talks at conferences are being recorded and made available online, which solves some of those problems, but it seems like they’re not taken advantage of enough.

Conferences also have a problem with being specialized. Since most conferences are big productions made for a large audience, it would be hard to generalize and satisfy everybody enough that they’d say it was worth it. However, if you do smaller, cheaper conferences it’s easier to generalize. That’s why I like BarCamps and unconferences because they support generalism better. The problem with unconferences is that while the quantity and breadth of information is great, the really spectacular talks are pretty rare.

My solution comes in the form of a movie night, where instead of movies, you watch archived talks. The talks presented are dictated by what’s been archived and what people want to see. As a result, the talks you experience will generally be by great speakers and relevant to the group’s general interests.

We can take it a step further. Since I really like talks, I usually reference things said in them the same way one might reference a passage in a book. But it’s a lot harder to search audio and video. On a number of occasions I’ve considered just transcribing some of my favorite talks because I’d spend too much time trying to find the part where they said something I was looking for.

These events can encourage transcription. So besides a list of talks viewed with possibly a link to download them, transcripts could be another output of these video nights. Not only as a searchable reference for those that attended, but for anybody in the world.

The great thing about these kinds of events is that they’re cheaper and easier to put on than a BarCamp-style unconference or a DevHouse-style hackathon/party, but could easily result in equal or greater intellectual stimulation and knowledge sharing. Collective intelligence for the win!

This entry was posted on Monday, March 19th, 2007 at 3:23 am and is filed under Events, Ideas, Education. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.