After a successful inaugural TED event in Katoomba in 2023, Hazelbrook residents Niall and Wei Clerkin are bringing TEDx back to the Blue Mountains.
In 2024 TEDx is moving to the Blue Mountains Theatre in Springwood on Friday, September 6.
TEDxKatoomba produced many wonderful talks which remain available on the TEDx YouTube channel. The event earned a net promotor score of 88 in a blind survey organised by TED HQ, on a scale where anything north of 70 is considered excellent.
A number of the talks were highly acclaimed by TED and some lauded internationally.
Lauded for his talk, Blue Mountains Grammar School principal Steven Coote has since been invited to discuss his ideas at the highest levels in the Department of Education. Nepean cardiologist Faraz Pathan spoke about a health break in the workplace and his talk has now received more than 1.3 million views. Sydney based neuropathologist Dr Michael Buckland, who spoke of the brain damage caused by contact sports (CTE), has been invited to feature in sport documentaries in Europe. Many more of the talks have been watched thousands of times and shared all around the globe.
With the Blue Mountains Theatre as the venue TEDxSpringwood will give speakers the opportunity to deliver their talk in a wonderful auditorium, with a huge stage and screen producing what is likely to be a very polished TED talk, worthy of the global catalogue it will join.
This year the team is curating talks on the theme of "community". Talks and ideas will all be connected to this theme in some way; that's down to the successful speakers.
Applications are now opening for potential speakers and instructions are available at www.tedxspringwood.com. Applications remain open until May 10.
In 2023 TEDx received more than 100 applications.
TEDx Youth Day
This year the event is being expanded to include a TEDx Youth Day to be held on Wednesday, September 4.
Ten high schools from Lithgow to Penrith will be selected to have a Year 9 or 10 student deliver a TED talk of their creation to an audience of their peers, families, and teachers. To deliver this event TEDx Curator Niall Clerkin will be delivering in-school workshops to groups of students who will develop potential TEDx talks, competing to be the student representative from that school appearing at the TEDx Youth event.
Just like those of the sibling event, the finished talks will be professionally filmed and edited and will also join the catalogue of TED talks available to the world. This is an opportunity for schools to augment public speaking programs, but also an opportunity for some very special students to lay down a marker for what's to come.
The school program involves multiple workshops on both delivery and content for public speaking which will be delivered over late term 2 and early term 3.
Interested Schools may enquire via tedxbluemountains@gmail.com.
