Luke Swanek at TEDxSummit
uh okay so I'd like to touch on two topics essentially with my talk here uh the first being okay apologies the first being how do you disseminate ideas more thoroughly and the second uh which is kind of uh what the talk is really focusing on is how do you work with high school age youth um so as noted my name is Luke swanik I was the organizer for tedex nipping U it was a university event that happened around a month and a half ago uh in Northern Ontario Canada and what was uniquely beautiful about our event is we were fortunate enough to work with 14 high schools throughout the province of Ontario uh so the high schools were involved with you know kind of different capacities some had the entire student population present some had two to three classes maybe the Student Union but they were all there viewing the live webcast uh but we didn't just want them viewing the webcast you know we really wanted them involved we really really wanted to integrate them find out what they're curious about why why they were interested in viewing the webcast in the first place so we in the concept of the idea wall um I shouldn't say well yes okay so we did introduce it but I I Was Made familiar with the con concept sorry uh from a tedx event that I was involved with the year before and the ideal wall is essentially exactly what you think it is it's a wall uh that's filled with ideas the example seen here I used technology uh but the average idea wall is about 6 foot by 8 foot and it was just a big piece of white paper and so the way you used it was we would tell students at all of these high schools during every break go up to the idea wall and write down what you're passionate about what you want to learn more about what tedx nipping you or Ted Talk really spoke to you you know what do you what do you want to discover explore create and then and this was kind of the important part put your full name and your email address right beside that idea and then and this is the extra important part look at the ideal wall for other ideas that really speak to you you know and then go up to those ideas and put your information beside it as well uh so I'll use this example here from what's probably the the coolest High School I could ever imagine and you got Harry Luke Skywalker and Dorothy here and so of course Harry would go up to the ideal wall and says he wants to use his powers to bring down the forces of evil and Luke Skywalker sees that all over it um you know good good luck Voldemort if you will Dorothy goes up to that doesn't quite have the powers thing going on but she has this passion for photography that no one really knows about but I did uh so she put that down there and then later on in the day of course Luke Skywalker and Harry Potter both kind of say the same thing so you have these big beautiful bold robust idea walls from students from all across the province of Ontario at the end of the day and you know the the real question was how do you turn this into action how do you use these idea walls and and really do something with them uh we didn't just want to throw out the paper of course and what we did was we made recommendations on two levels the first level was based upon the natural clustering that kind of happened with the idea walls so we would go to the principal of this super cool high school here and say Hey you have three students that are really interested in photography nurture that you know help it grow teach them give them something so that they can really explore what they're passionate about and then the second level of recommendations that we made was uh within the school board so I'll use this example here so you have 10 students from the School of Technology that are really interested in using Excel and learning how to really build these beautiful graphs and then you have 10 students from the school of entertainment that are really interested in you know plotting down and and looking at data and analyzing how the entertainment industry is growing and 10 students from the school of design and they're really interested in making the most beautiful grass you've ever seen so we would go to the three principles from these three high schools and bring these 30 like-minded students together and we would say hey principles these students need to hear a talk from Hans rosling so so we were very fortunate in the fact and and of course you know it goes without saying that this was obviously the most common example uh but other examples did exist you know there were students that were really interested in in learning more about ecosystem biology and underwater exploration and these kind of things and were able to tell these principles that these students exist within the school board and we're introducing like-minded students to like-minded students you know it's it's I I'll kind of end on this because I'm seeing red here uh but we only had about a 50% buying from the high schools involved the 50% of the high schools that did buy into the ideal wall concept have really really been able to thrive from it so there is something I there I truly believe it's an idea worth spreading um it it's it's bold it's powerful it's to the root and to answer the question that I poed at the start of the talk how do you involve and engage High School youth I think the answer is quite simple you ask them what they want to learn about about thank you