TED

I’m not quite out of my “wow, this is hectic!” weekend yet, but I think I’m well on my way. I’ve finished nearly all of my assignments- certainly everything that has to be done right now is done. Not that I can completely blame my professors… I mean, they didn’t force my to spend all day at the Phillips Center listening to speakers.

TEDxUF 2012 was definitely worth it though! The event was a whooping 6 hours of sitting in a dark theater staring at the stage, and long before it was over my head was aching. Not all of the speakers were my cup of tea, and my favorite speech was actually a recording of a 2009 TEDx speaker, but I’m definitely glad I stayed for the entire event.

There were 12 lecturers Saturday, and 2 video lectures. Some of the speeches were enjoyable, some started strong but lasted too long, and others just seemed to be plugging their own agendas, and not really sticking to the theme (Celebrating Curiosity) or telling an interesting story at all.

One memorable speaker was Kristen Haddeed- mostly because she was just very lively and entertaining. My favorite part of her time on stage was actually the video they played after her story.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=T6MhAwQ64c0]

Jacob Atem spoke about his journey from Sudan to the United States, and was my favorite story. It wasn’t really inspiring, but the way he spoke about it made me want to listen. It’s something I know little about, that I wouldn’t often be motivated to watch anything or read about it, and yet I found his story particularly captivating. I think the fact that he spoke about an extremely sad childhood in an everyday tone of voice made me more comfortable, so I didn’t want to distract or distance myself from the story and sorrow.

Michael Jones also had a really interesting talk, even though what he really went over was Creative Commons. He spoke about a Creative Commons education site, and it really piqued my interest. The great thing about his talk was that it created a subtle interest in me which motivated me to look into this idea and discover that Michael Jones is the founder of Open Equal Free, a site all about what he discussed, yet not thrown in your face.

You might start to notice a trend here, but Matt Hintze was up next, and that was planning well done. He took the thread of education and ran with it, discussing how education could further use technology to better teach students by catering to their learning styles! I’ve never been a fan of replacing an in-class teacher with some abstract robot-force, but by the end of Matt’s talk I was a pretty big supporter. It might have biased me a little that I’ve met with Matt before for RUB Entertainment purposes and know he’s a down-to-Earth guy who really just wants to help students and support the community.

And then the event ended with Morris Morrison, who is a professional motivational speaker. His greatest quality was that he was really up-beat, ending the event on a good note. Which is exactly how everything should end, so that’s what I’ll do here by sharing my favorite speech:

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=wpSBdA0Dc14]

Next up will be some of the projects I made this weekend!