TEDxIB@YorkSchool 2012 – "Taking on the World"

TEDxIB@YorkSchool 2012 theme: Taking on the World

This year’s TEDxIB@YorkSchool is all about facing challenges, taking risks, overcoming obstacles and standing for what you believe in. Looking for a mountain to climb? Consider attending on November 14th and perhaps even giving your own TEDTalk. You will hear over 20 fascinating speakers – accomplished adults and articulate IB Diploma students – share how they have taken on their own part of the world. Combine this with amazing art and musical performances and you have the makings of an unforgettable day.

And after you have taken on a world of ideas, we invite you to join other IB Diploma students from around the world on the following day, November 15th, as we take on Toronto. In a unique race around the city, groups of students will challenge one another to discover and capture unique perspectives of this exciting city to share with the world.

What is TEDx?

In the spirit of ideas worth spreading, TED has created a program called TEDx. TEDx is a program of local, self-organized events that bring people together to share a TED-like experience. Our event is called TEDxIB@YorkSchool, where x = independently organized TED event. At our TEDxIB@YorkSchool event, TEDTalks video and live speakers will combine to spark deep discussion and connection in a small group. The TED Conference provides general guidance for the TEDx program, but individual TEDx events, including ours, are self-organized. In past years, we have heard from explorers, inventors, political activists, movie makers, artists, scientists, and, yes, IB Diploma students. Take a look at our website: www.TEDxIB@YorkSchool.com.

The most distinct part of this event is that we have invited IB Diploma students from all over the world to come take part. In past years, students have attended TEDxIB@YorkSchool from as far away as Shanghai, Slovakia, and all over the U.S. Come embrace the ‘international’ in the International Baccalaureate, as students share ideas and experiences from diverse areas of the globe.

The TEDxIB@York conference this year included a digital display of art works created by international students.  The event itself, which is modeled after the world-renowned TED conference, was founded two years ago by The York School.  The Visual Arts component highlighted the works of IB Diploma students, who were invited from around the world, to contribute digital reproduction of their art works. Students selected their strongest works, which ultimately conveyed the importance and power of visual images to symbolize universal concepts and ideas.   The art works, which were looped and projected continually during the entire duration of the TEDx@IBYork event, offer a vision of how important messages, inspired by young imaginations, can be shared through the creativity of visual design.

Thank you to all of you who came out to TEDxIB@York and made it another fantastic day of ideas worth sharing. By all accounts it was another successful TEDx. We hope you enjoyed it as much as we did putting it on.

Great news! DJ Mattice will be spinning the tracks at our TEDxIBYork after party!

Check out his myspace page!

Check out today’s article in the Toronto Star about the new ban on the sale and consumption of shark fin. This is big news for Rob Stewart, one of our TEDxIBYork speakers this year! Photo take from Colin McConnell/TORONTO STAR

When I first heard about Ms.Moraes’ lifework I was immediately curious about how she combined music and engineering to help children who have severe disabilities. Stephanie Moraes has played the piano from the age of six, and has pursued her passion of music throughout her life. During college she went for engineering but she still kept her passion for music.

While Stephanie was doing her PhD, she volunteered at the same hospital where she met the disabled children whose somatic nervous system didn’t work. As she volunteered a few hours every week, she wondered if there was a way that she could know the children individually. As the children couldn’t move or show any expression, she couldn’t find any way of telling what the children’s’ likes or dislikes were. She used four different parameters as a way of testing the children’s autonomic nervous system. After she first tested them she was ecstatic to find out that there were small changes in their autonomic nervous system when she did different things. As she showed different people the graphs, she soon realized that they couldn’t tell the difference. As Stephanie tried to think of different ways to show the change in the children’s autonomic nervous system, she soon realized that she could use her lifelong passion in music to represent the change in the nervous system. She converted the change in the nervous system into music, and used this as a method to interpret the children’s change in emotion. Stephanie had pulled together her deep-rooted passion for music and science, to change the world for the children’s’ care givers, as they now had means to hear changes in their child’s emotions.

When asked if what she would like to tell the students attending TEDxIB@York she said that “it’s important to have a diversity of interests”. Stephanie has inspired me in pursuing my passion in science and the arts, and I hope to someday use it to change lives.

Julie Hartley is an artist who “runs on inspiration”. She writes short stories, plays, and poetry, she has taught drama, and, in addition to all that, she runs Centauri Summer Arts Camp, a camp in the Niagara Region of Ontario that offers training in many different arts disciplines (including film, acting, music, stage combat, photography, visual arts, and many others), while maintaining a summer camp environment.

Julie has been published in literary magazines in both England and Canada. The first time she was published in a literary magazine was a “huge shock” to her. After leaving university, she spent a year working on a novel in an isolated cottage, and finished the year with nothing published, and accepted a full-time job at a drama department. Very shortly after this, she was announced as the runner-up for an award that involved being published in a magazine with over one million subscribers. Since then, she has also won the Peace Poetry Prize in the UK in 2010, and has had her work published on many other occasions. She recently finished a full-length poetry collection that will be sent to publishers soon, and is also in the midst of working on a drama textbook for teachers.

While she loves her writing and her teaching, Julie’s proudest achievement will always be the creation of Centauri. For her, Centauri is “the one thing that, when [she] looks back later in life, [she] will always think that [her] life was worthwhile”. The idea for Centauri began when Julie and Craig (her husband) were 23, just out of university, and trying to find a way to make their lives “neat”. After working at an arts camp in England, they realized the enormous potential for the arts and summer camp to meld. Their thought was that, because in every community, artistic people are the minority, putting them all together in one space could be a great opportunity for the kids. Since there was essentially no camp environment in England, Julie and Craig immigrated to Canada, and Centauri began. As the camp began, they realized that, to keep both their campers and their staff interested, they would need to have a wide range of programs. While this would keep the campers doing things that they have never done before, it would also let the program directors be creative and inspired on their own. For example, you could have a program director who has never taught Japanese film, but would come into it with great enthusiasm so they would want to learn as well as teach.

In short, Julie Hartley is a woman who hopes to inspire others, and hopes to be seen first and foremost as an artist. She has lived one of her main passions of giving people the opportunity to be whatever they want to be, through both Centauri and her teaching in the arts. And, coming out of her experiences, she knows that, while ideas like creating a summer camp solely for the arts may seem crazy, “crazy ideas can sustain people”.