It's really like short seminars. They're often structured with some kind of easy takeaway that people can apply quickly. I'd actually like to know more about how it became such a "thing" myself. As for why this instead of an article, well, I think people get turned off by long text on the internet. Plus, during the talks, there is often a visual or other component that the speaker explains or uses to interact with the audience. I don't think that this will help you get an idea of what the typical one is like, but Reggie Watts did a TED talk that was pretty cool.
So the easy criticism to level, which I will go ahead and air so someone can refute it, is that gearing info toward someone who can't handle long amounts of text or needs a snappy visual and an "easy takeaway" automatically makes the content less focused and knowledge-heavy than a different approach. As in, we let kids learn on iPads now because they can't learn any other way = TED talks. Am I way off base? Still never seen one so I'm still just asking. I'll watch one sometime this week and check my hypothesis.
Check out this one if you do watch as it's one of the most watched. Sir Ken is incredibly entertaining but I'd be interested to know your thoughts of the talk.
Will do. Wikipedia says he's an "educationalist" which is like an extraordinarily bad sign, but I've got to start somewhere. Also obviously schools kill creativity that's not what they're for. But I promise to watch it now instead of continuing to talk.
Without being a regular consumer of TED talks, I would say that is close to my experience thus far. For some of the topics, video makes a lot of sense. For example, talks that deal with physical things like body posture and the non-theoretical aspects of music.