It's Friday so I try to stay away from Autodesk Labs specific topics. With this in mind, I thought I would highlight two TED talks that I watched this week. One is Deb Roy: The birth of a word. Deb Roy studies how children learn language. Using his son as a subject, he collected data on his son's development as related to his son's interactions with his father (Deb), his mother, and his nanny. Here are 19 minutes and 52 seconds you won't regret.

Deb concludes with "...As our world becomes increasingly instrumented, and we have the capabilities to collect and connect the dots between what people are saying and the context in which they are saying it, what's emerging is an ability to see new social structures and dynamics that have previously not been seen." Who new that there was a relationship between how a child learns to say "water," and the volume of Twitter posts after a Presidential State of the Union Address?

The other is Salman Khan: Let's use video to reinvent the classroom. This talk was blogged about by my Autodesk Labs colleague, Shaan Hurley. It was also recommended by Autodesk Platform Solutions and Emerging Business Senior VP, Amar Hanspal.

Imagine if I was going to teach you something, but told you that you could not take notes.You would ask "Why not? I have a pen and paper right here." Now imagine if I had the opportunity to provide my instruction via video but did not. You would ask "Why not? Video lets me watch when I want to watch, not when you want to talk. Video lets me pause. Video lets me rewind." The future of education lies in self-paced video instruction coupled with in-classroom collaboration. Fascinating.

Asking if www means the worthwhile web is alive in the lab.