By Katherine Gibson (The Cascade) – Email
Print Edition: March 19, 2014
“We believe passionately in the power of ideas to change attitudes, lives and, ultimately, the world,” reads the TED Talk mission statement — an ideal Student Life is hoping to bring to UFV.
Eighteen-minute TED Talk events tackle everything from current business ventures to cultural issues impacting the world. Modelling a similar speaking series, fittingly named UFV Talks, Student Life programmer Martin Kelly hopes to engage students and give them a forum to express their ideas.
“Ideas are like planting seeds or dropping a petal into a pond — they’ll expand from here,” Kelly says. “There isn’t a shortage of good ideas out there — so why not share them?”
So far there has only been one student speaker, with a relatively small turn out of approximately 10 students. Kelly says this has more to do with the program’s infancy, explaining that with anything it takes time to get students involved and aware.
“This is the trial run … it’s a building thing like everything else,” he says. “Hopefully this will evolve into something much grander but it has to start somewhere.”
TED Talks specifically looks to address issues that will open a broad discourse, a fact Kelly strongly believes should be emulated by students wishing to speak at these events.
“Do you have something [to say] that will make a light bulb go off over students heads and get them talking? … I don’t want it to be about a particular issue,” Kelly says. “So not about starving kids in Africa or the conflict in Ukraine or anything like that — no axe to grind.
“The idea is to present any kind of view on any thought that you have,” he says, “that will make the people who come to watch do a double-take.”
Kelly notes that while other events on campus geared at opening up similar types of discussion are valuable, their formality may be intimidating to students — something he hopes UFV Talks will address.
“Stéphane Dion came. We have Daniela Elza, the writer in residence, bringing in people — fantastic stuff — but those [events] are more formal; it’s a different structure,” Kelly says. “With [UFV Talks] you’ll never have a friendlier or [more] sympathetic audience. It’s very gentle — it’s not subject to academic rigor.”
In time, Kelly hopes UFV Talks will gain enough traction to potentially become a “TEDx” event, or a mini version of the TED Talks themselves, a potential Martin believes UFV students should be striving toward.
“I think there should be more of this kind of stuff at universities,” he says. “If you’re going to create a vibrant campus community … we need to have some intellectual pursuits for students to engage in.”
“If you sit here in U-House and listen to the conversations … students love talking about stuff that means a lot to them,” Kelly concludes. “So the dream would be to make it … a destination — a reason for students not to go home after school, but to stay.”
