2008 Woodie Awards
Group brings TEDtalks to PSUC
Megan Munroe
Issue date: 4/20/07 Section: News
Originally published: 4/19/07 at 4:20 PM EST
Last update: 4/19/07 at 4:19 PM EST
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They'll also find out what Eve Ensler, author of "The Vagina Monologues", has to say.
Students and community members will even hear from Paul Hewson, more commonly known as Bono of the Irish rock band U2.
A small group of faculty and students are behind all of this, but they're not fronting the tens of thousands of dollars necessary to literally bring these famous artists and intellectuals to campus. Instead, the ideas and messages of these and other speakers will be presented virtually, through short films known as TEDtalks.
"TED" stands for technology, entertainment and design, and these "talks" are held in Monterey, Calif., every year, where they are filmed and later made available to the public.
Beginning in the fall, two PSUC students, senior Robert Abel and junior Maike Behling, along with Foreign Languages and Literature professor Jurgen Kleist and Anthropology Department Chair James Armstrong aim to bring these talks to PSUC and the surrounding community through a lecture and discussion series entitled "Plattsburgh State University Presents TEDtalks: Ideas Worth Spreading".
"(The TEDtalks) call together all kinds of experts from each field and invite these people to give talks on any subject," Abel said.
Those invited often speak on subjects they are working on before they are published in a book, journal, or a documentary, he said. This way, the speaker receives feedback from experts in the field and has time to revise his or her project.
One example he named was Al Gore, who gave a speech about the global-climate crisis several months before his film on the subject, "An Inconvenient Truth", was released.
Abel said the idea of bringing the TEDtalks to PSUC students was presented to him by Kleist last semester, who suggested the group show the talks that can be viewed free of charge on the Web site www.ted.com/tedtalks and are also available for download.
"We'll show one every other Wednesday and have a discussion about it afterwards, so it'll be as if the person is there talking about it," Abel said. "We're showing them to stimulate discussion on campus. It's not just random issues - it's all things that are really important."
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