("Eggers")
Dave Eggers describes the difference one idea can make with the impact of his free writing tutor business set up in the Bay area of San Francisco through his TED Talk performed in February 2008. Dave figured out that the nearby schools were being underfunded in the English department, so he began to set up a writing workshop next to the offices reserved for his McSweeney’s magazine writing and book editing business. His community of writers were able to successfully help each individual student with at least an hour of one-on-one coaching. Dave describes the success as, “And we found ourselves full every day with kids. If you're on Valencia Street within those few blocks at around 2:00, 2:30, you will get run over, often, by the kids and their big backpacks, or whatever, actually running to this space” (“Eggers”). In my life, I have been able to get help from a similar service. This place was the writing lab that takes place in the study center of my school. At least one English teacher is able to provided one-on-one help to students every single hour of the school day. My own writing has been able to improve by going to these sessions by learning skills like removing extraneous details, checking for word confusion, and staying relevant to the main idea. By visit the Writing Lab before turning in an essay has drastically improved the scores that I had been able to receive. Although Dave Eggers’ idea isn’t completely ground-breaking, he has fostered an idea that could alter the ways of education. That may not make sense to readers because being able to alter the future usually requires a ground-breaking new idea. However, tutoring students outside of school is not a new idea, nor is it creative. If you are struggling in school, it makes sense to go get extra help. But it is because Dave Eggers is making this service free to all people and organizing it in a way that is fun for the learner and the teacher. All of this ideas described in every speaker’s TED Talk connect back to Dan Pink’s TED Talk about motivation. Dave Eggers is helping the community because he wants to and feels the duty to make the world a better place. In the future, I think that people like Dave will advance the world in a direction that is productive and faster compared to anything that has happened during the information age.
Dave Eggers presentation style is something similar to the “pecha kucha” or “ignite” format. Eggers’ presentation, although much longer, had many slides with prerecorded timings. Each slide ran for about the same amount of time as the other slides, mirroring the 15 seconds per slide in the ignite format of presentation. Dave Egger’s topics also flowed from one to the next, with the aid of the PowerPoint slides. He speaking technique was also very effective because his points were clean and easy to understand. His also was able to perform the entire presentation without muttering or showing signs of nervousness. Overcoming nervousness is one thing that I am going to practice so that my own presentations are as good as they can be. Dave Eggers’s sense of community will one day lead the world in a positive direction than the violent condition that it is in today.
Works Cited
Eggers, Dave. "Dave Eggers' Wish: Once Upon a School | Video on TED.com." TED: Ideas worth Spreading. Mar. 2008. Web. 01 May 2011. <http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/dave_eggers_makes_his_ted_prize_wish_once_upon_a_school.html>.
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