Students lined the walls of the Hutton Honors College Great Room for the first TEDxIndianaUniversity callout meeting Monday night.
Tickets to TEDxIndianaUniversity, scheduled to take place Friday, Nov. 13 in the IU Auditorium, will go on sale at 10 a.m. Sept. 4, though the theme and lineup of the event will be announced Monday, Aug. 31 through Friday, Sept. 4.
“We’re hoping to fill up IU Auditorium,” Ben Brattain, president of TEDxIndianaUniversity, said.
TED is a nonprofit dedicated to spreading powerful ideas through short talks, according to the TED website. A TEDx event either shows TED Talk videos or shows both TED Talk videos and live speakers from the community. The IU event will show both TED Talk videos and live speakers.
“They have these giant TED conferences every year where there are a bunch of TED talks, but they tend to get bigger people, like Edward Snowden, Bill Gates, et cetera, et cetera,” Brattain said.
Brattain said that, in addition to putting on TED events, TED also licenses out TEDx licenses to individuals, organizations and communities, allowing them to put on their own TEDx event. He added that TEDxIndianaUniversity has a university license for a TEDx event.
“Basically, a TEDx event, which is different than a TED event, gives us the right to hold our own TED-style event, under certain TED-style rules,” he said.
Brattain said he and Ari Stoner, vice president and executive producer of TEDxIndianaUniversity, started talking about bringing a TEDx event to IU approximately two years ago.
He said he applied for a TEDx license, receiving it after about six months of wading through TED and IU bureaucracy. The team then focused on fundraising, branding and planning. After focusing on building the lineup this summer, the team will focus on building their team this fall.
Interested students can apply for an internship-style program by Friday, Sept. 4. These students will meet once a week, learning how to put on a TEDx event, in hopes of preparing them to put on their own TEDx event next year.
“We want to be having a lot of interactive activities on campus,” Stoner said. “It’s not just about getting students to help organize the event. It’s about starting a creative discussion, a forum, where we can think about important issues and really drive it home on campus and give students a platform and think about how they can change the world.”
Stoner said that though he thinks IU does a good job preparing students for specific job roles, he doesn’t think IU does as good enough of a job encouraging students to think about critical issues.
“So what we’re trying to do is we’re trying to give an innovative learning experience where students can interact with professionals from the field who’ve really interacted with these crises and issues that we’re facing right now as we come and enter the work force,” he said. “And so by sparking this discussion, we’re trying to get students more interested in the ways that they can get involved in dealing with these crises and issues that we’re dealing with as a generation.”
Rather than just saying, ‘I can become an accountant’ or ‘I can become a doctor,’ Stoner said he wants students to be able to say, ‘I can work on limiting social inequality’ or ‘I can work in trying to make healthcare more accessible for at risk youth.’
