By Adrianna Avila, Managing Editor
Instructor searching for speakers for lecture event
To inspire innovation and the sharing of ideas, TEDxABQ, an offshoot of the well-known Tedtalks, is in search of speakers for this year’s event and the deadline is closing in, Bill Meador, part-time U.S. History instructor, said.
The three-question application for the Sept. 7 event, found at tedxabq.com, is due by April 30 so that speaker training can begin in May, he said.
Meador has been involved with TEDx for three years and this year he is trying expand information resources for the community, he said.
“The title of our organization is TEDxABQ but we’re trying to reach out into other parts of New Mexico and are really looking for speakers and people to attend from all over the state,” Meador said.
TEDxABQ ’12 had speakers from Santa Fe and Las Cruces, but the push this year is to spread the word and get people involved statewide, he said.
Along with planning for this year’s TED event, the TEDxABQ group will be involved with UNM’s New Mexico Shared Knowledge Conference at the Student Union Building April 16-18, he said.
“We tried to find people with a UNM connection because the folks at the Shared Knowledge Conference approached us about speaking at this event and again it’s not going to be strictly a TEDxABQ event,” he said.
The mini TEDxABQ presentation will be about an hour and 15 minutes for the lunch and lecture, he said.
“It’s going to give them the flavor of it because they’re only going to get three or four speakers plus a couple of videos instead of just one person, one boring person, talking way too long,” he said.
Don McIver, Learning Center supervisor, said he will be one of the speakers for the NMSKC.
McIver was one of the speakers at TEDxABQ ’12 and he might give the same lecture, “Objects In The Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear.”
His TEDxABQ talk covered the transition he and his wife went through from driving cars to riding bicycles, he said.
“My wife and I, in 2010, had given up our cars and were basically walking or biking or busing and how the transition from being someone who used cars to someone who didn’t use cars was not as difficult as we originally thought. Even in the city that is not necessarily known as being bike friendly,” he said.
The second lecture McIver planned is about how the learning process extends farther from the classroom, he said.
“I’m a writer, so I’m actually using one of the things I have written about: being a standardized patient, which is something that a medical school went to talk about like how we’re students all the time, essentially. We never really leave that world of where we’re not cultivating and where we’re not inquisitive and where we’re not asking questions and where we’re not learning,” McIver said.
Many people define life-long learning as continually taking classes to continue learning but that is not always the case, he said.
“Learning doesn’t happen in the class, learning is kind of a mind-set. Being in the world that you’re constantly trying to learn more about yourself, paying attention, seeing the world around you. It’s amazing the way we live in a lot of ways,” he said.
Meador will present a two-hour session on April 17 about teaching with TEDtalks, he said.
“Other than that thinking about who else shares more knowledge than some of these TEDTalks because some of them have been viewed millions of times and I think a lot of people have gotten a lot out of these TEDTalks,” Meador said.
For more information on TEDxABQ, contact Bill Meador at bill@tedxabq. com or 450-4744. For more information on NMSKC, visit UNM’s graduate resource center’s website or call 277-1407 and email unmgrc@unm.edu.
