Adonis Diaries

Technology, Education, & Development (TED) corporation: Who is Chris Anderson?

The weekly British The Observer published a long portrait of Chris Anderson, and described him as global “master of ideas”. Chris is a man of media who is doing his best to becoming a source of real information acceding to the real world”.

Chris has been organizing “TED Talks” since 2001, and disseminated all kinds of topics. The talks are accessible on Internet, and TED is celebrating the visit of 500 million users to its varied talks.

Every year, TEDGlobal invites specialists in many domain of knowledge, with objective of extending “an idea worth disseminating” in less than 18 minutes.

The latest event was held in Edinburgh between 11 to 15 of July. Over 70 speakers took turn on the podium. Chris declared: “I am persuaded that these conferences could have impacts on every one of us, aid us reach a higher level of mental development“.

Chris was born in Pakistan in 1957 and studied in India. His parents were missionaries.

He earned a diploma in philosophy from Oxford and worked for the written press and radio.  Later, Chris created two media groups: Future Publishing and Imagine Media (focusing on mass public electronic advances).

As the enterprises of Chris developed and flourished, he instituted a non-lucrative private foundation “The Sapling Foundation” with goal of discovering “New ways of resolving global problems, taking advantage of media, technology, entrepreneurship, and ideas”.

In 2001,  The Sapling Foundation acquires TED, and Chris quit the world of business to concentrate his energy to TED corporation. The yearly conferences are reserved for the elite classes who can afford high fees, but all the talks are then licensed (for free?) to local entrepreneurs wishing to disseminate the talks in their communities and States.

Chris boast that “Only in TED can we ask critical questions and reply with a variety of approaches and alternatives”.

Many obscure professors and authors managed to get world recognition simply by being selected and chaperoned to speak on TED conferences.  The speakers are trained to give the image of rock stars as they take the podium.

Chris has offered a free video support on Internet and enlarged access to ideas. The next objective is “to constitute a knowledge-base of pedagogic resources that all classrooms in the world may access and use…”

Note 1: I have published many articles on TED speakers. Currently, I was focusing on the speakers in TEDxRamallah and TEDxBeirut. For example, https://adonis49.wordpress.com/2011/09/29/mostly-a-hoax-from-limitation-to-inspiration-slogan-of-tedxbeirut/

Note 2: This article extracted a few information from a piece published in the French weekly Courrier International # 1082