Anti-TED

Cathy goes off on TED talks today, calling them shallow, one-directional, and slick.

I was thinking about TED the other day, while I was watching Jared Weinstein give a great lecture at the Arizona Winter School.  At AWS, they felt like people were leaning too much on prepped slides, and the rule is now that you have to handwrite your slides in real time, using an opaque projector to show the slides on the big screen.

Would TED talks be better if the speakers were restricted to visuals they could write or draw by hand in 18 minutes?

Split-screen blackboard

From Andrew Gelman, an interesting pedagogical suggestion:

The split screen. One of the instructors was using the board in a clean and organized way, and this got me thinking of a new idea (not really new, but new to me) of using the blackboard as a split screen. Divide the board in half with a vertical line. 2 sticks of chalk: the instructor works on the left side of the board, the student on the right. On the top of each half of the split screen is a problem to work out. The two problems are similar but not identical. The instructor works out the solution on the left side while the student uses this as a template to solve the problem on the right.

Has anyone tried anything like this?  It sounds rather elegant to me.