TEDx speakers encourage idea sharing
Attendees at TEDxUSU were told to aspire to create greater things Wednesday afternoon during talks based on the TED tagline, “Things worth sharing.”
Speaker Taylor Halverson, a junior in communication studies, said the opportunity to talk about her experience with creating a better website to engage students at USU in front of a crowd of students, professors and leaders was a dream. Halverson was the only student out of the eight presenters.
“This is like my dream right here, to just be given a mic and allow people to let me talk, so it’s incredible,” Halverson said before the event.
Slam poet Buddy Wakefield began the conference by standing on the red rug characteristic of many TEDx talks before the crowd in the Chase Fine Arts Center choir room.
“If I really was created in God’s image, then when God was a boy, he wanted to be a man,” Wakefield said as an introduction.
Wakefield proceeded to teach the crowd in his style of jumping from subject to subject about Vipassana meditation, which emphasizes concentrating on breathing and eliminating other stresses and non-necessities of life. Wakefield explained to the audience how Vipassana helps one to understand things as they really are.
“The idea is that today I am representing air,” Wakefield said. “That’s a pretty good idea, guys.”
Another presenter was Karl White, a psychology professor who spoke about the advances made by the National Center for Hearing Assessment and Management, of which he is the founding director, to help with early intervention programs for children with hearing loss. Because of the center’s work, 95 percent of babies are screened for hearing loss within hours of birth.
White said the prospect of giving a TEDx talk, which will be uploaded to YouTube and available for anyone to watch in the next week or two, is intimidating.
Halverson said giving a TEDx talk was more than an opportunity to advance herself.
“I’m less excited about what it means for me as that I get to share this message,” Halverson said.
Halverson and other students conducted research with the Business Innovation Factory last year as part of a class at USU. This research was used to create a website based around students and their interests with the help of James Morales, vice president of student services.
Halverson said the website works much in the way ads on Amazon.com do. Information about classes and other activities will be displayed on a sidebar based on the viewer’s interests to better engage them in their university education. Halverson said the beta version of this website will launch this spring.
In addition to sharing the story of the website’s creation, Halverson spoke of her journey to becoming who she is today in an environment where she was given the opportunity to explore and create. Educators and students should work together to foster a learning environment where the opportunity exists to create changes in society on a university campus, Halverson said to the audience.
Jim Butcher, a USU alumnus and a Rhodes scholar at Oxford University who worked with the Clinton administration in the 1990s to create the U.S. National Energy Plan, talked about a problem solving method called scenario planning.
Butcher said putting together the work of 20 years into an 18 minute talk was no easy task.
“We were joking last night that, you know,” Butcher said. “Normally we’re used to at least having an hour of talking.”
Scott Bates, associate vice president for research, said each talk, according to TEDx rules, can be no more than 18 minutes long. Bates was in charge of putting together the event.
Bates said the office of Research and Graduate Studies plans to host another TEDx event next year. TEDx licenses are free and available to anyone pending approval, according to the TEDx website.
According to Bates, there are two things other than the name itself that make a TEDx talk a TEDx talk. One is the format, which includes time constraints and being recorded for YouTube. The other is expressing a core idea about what one thinks rather than what one does.
“For us it was, ‘Hey, we have ideas worth spreading, and let’s do it,'” Bates said.
– la.stewart@aggiemail.usu.edu