Saturday, 17 January was definitely “a day of TED” in Melbourne [1].
Over forty of us TED geeks got together at Monash University and spent the whole day watching our favourite TED talks, talking about those talks, and also watching a live talk on rebuilding faces (through engineering assisted surgery) given by Dr. Ninian Peckitt of ComputerGen Implants Limited. The video of Dr. Peckitt’s talk will be uploaded to the web some time soon.
What I loved most about the day, though, was meeting and talking to all the people who were there (search for #tedx or #mted on Twitter and you’ll find a whole bunch of them). In between the talks we managed to swap stories on how we got hooked onto TED, we talked about what each of us is doing personally and professionally – we’re a fun bunch doing a lot of fun things, by the way – and, of course, we talked about the talks themselves. [2]
So a million thanks to the organizers who did a wonderful job planning and then running TEDx Melbourne. I’m sure this event will becomes a regular feature from now on – maybe with groups of us taking turns to organize it each time – and I’ll keep you posted on this blog every time such an event does take place.
Meanwhile, Shawn Callahan has written about this on his blog as well so make sure you check that out. Also, keep an eye out for the post-event survey that Cheng is in the process of putting together.
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[1] This despite the fact that they didn’t include one of my all-time favourite TED talks: ‘Benjamin Zander: Classical music with shining eyes’. Oh well. Next time, perhaps :)
[2] My apologies but the over-use of the word “talk” in this blog post was inevitable!