A couple of months ago I was introduced to a website for TED talks, which are videos taken of different conventions held to spread ideas. Some of these videos can at times be very dry, and hard to watch, while others really know how to hold the audiences attention. After watching a couple different videos on here, there was one video in particular that really stood out, and held my attention the entire time. The title of this video is, "Luis von Ahn: Massive-scale online collaboration".
Luis von Ahn as you may have guessed, is the speaker in this particular video, and right away he sets a clear path for his presentation, and has a way of connecting all of the topics that he brings up. He starts his presentation talking about a program that he developed, called "Captcha", and then created a new version of this program called "Re-Captcha" which we all know as the annoying words that pop up on websites that you have to read and then type in to the computer to prove you are human, and to avoid scammers. Luis talks about how he created the updated version (Re-Captcha), because people had spent so much of their own time typing these annoying words in to the computer with the original program that he wanted to create, the other program so that while the people where wasting their time on these words, they were also doing something useful, by identifying words the computer had not recognized to put into an electronic book.
As amazing as the "Re-Captcha" program alone was, Luis then connects that to his next point of topic which was how he, and some colleagues, came up with an idea from the previous idea of people translating words for an electronic book. From that idea, they had come up with a new website that they created for people around the world who wanted to learn a new language, to do so free, by translating sentences, and all the while, these same people that are translating sentences, are also helping to translate the web itself. By doing this, Luis and the team that worked on this project eliminated the expensive need to hire translators to do the same job instead.
Throughout his presentation, Luis used different slides to also help draw the audience's attention, and to re-emphasize his points, which he did very effectively. He was able to keep the audience involved by also asking them questions, and combining the questions with humor as well. Luis even used a couple slides for humor to show some bizarre words that would be placed together. This presentation was very inspiring to me because, one of my favorite things to do is to read books. I have my own Nook Tablet, so I was really able to connect with the topics in this presentation right away, knowing that I could have played a part in creating the some of the electronic books that I was reading. For me, this was one of the best presentations I have seen.
References:
"Luis von Ahn: Massive-scale Online Collaboration", Luis von Ahn. TED Talks. Flimed April 2011. Web. Accessed 19 November, 2012. http://www.ted.com/talks/luis_von_ahn_massive_scale_online_collaboration.html
