Clay Shirky

Clay starts of his presentation with a story about a website called Uhahidi. This website is an automated way of showing deployments such as rescue deployments and can be used to mark anything. His main topic is cognitive surplus which is the free brain time and talent that we all have to make a change in the world. Cognitive surplus is made up of the worlds free time to commit to new products and the media landscape is the second factor in cognitive surplus.He mentions that the stupidest creative act is still a creative act there for they can improve what ever they have put out to the public which is what counts. Mainly because it is better to be someone who is willing to do something the someone who does not want to do anything. He explains how both ushahidi and wall cats were created by people who were intrinsically motivated to do so therefor they are using that cognitive surplus to make a change.Relating to cognitive surplus communal value is everywhere which is a large amount of shared information that is created for only several to enjoy. Civic value on the other hand is created by a few people and is shared enjoyment and motivation to everyone. Clay explains that there is a trillion hours of cognitive surplus time available every year that will never change and may grow. When he explained what is going to determine how much of this time is used by individuals. I think he was hinting towards the fact that in this day and age there has to be some kind of extrinsic motivation for individuals to use their free time to create something that could be enjoyed by all. His presentation was very boring and not really to creative. Even though I believe his idea of cognitive surplus was very meaningful I did not really enjoy his presentation because it was very boring and vague. Also he did not have any urgency in his voice that really wants to make the audience go home and do something creative weather its communal or civic. The one thing that I will take away from this Ted Talk is that it is important to have intrinsic motivation to be creative and create something worthy of sharing with others, and it does not matter weather it is communal or civic because both are better then doing nothing. I believe that this is important to education because every student must intrinsically motivated to do well in school and may be useful if some students were to create something that could be used by all students to make school easier. Everyone should be interested in this idea because if everyone could pitch in and help use most of those available cognitive surplus hours then the possibility of what could be created in those hours every year is unimaginable.