“Dare to Dream” was the theme of Hong Kong’s first TED conference, held yesterday at HKTALHKSS (Hong Kong Teachers’ Association Lee Heng Kwei Secondary School) in Wan Tau Tong, near Tai Po.
Li Po Chun UWC had a special role to play in this great event. As shown in the photo to the right, LPCUWC was one of the key ‘supporting organisations’ as we provided a large team of student volunteers to help with important tasks such as crowd management and time keeping, we sent a delegation of about 30 students as participants, and perhaps most spectacularly of all, one of our students was a keynote speaker - more about that a little later!
I have been a fan of TEDTalks (www.ted.com) for many years, even to the point of subscribing to their lectures via iTunes. They represent a remarkable set of concise insights into cutting edge thinking and research by world leaders in their respective fields. I find the lectures not only to be fascinating in their own right, but often extraordinarily useful in my teaching of Theory of Knowledge (ToK).
As background, TED is a non-profit organisation that encourages the dissemination of ‘ideas worth spreading’. It began as a four day annual conference in California 25 years ago to which speakers were invited to speak for 18 minutes each. Although the conferences themselves are very expensive (about US$6000 I understand), the lectures are videoed and made available for free. In addition to the annual conference in California, there are now annual conferences in Oxford (UK) and an increasingly vast range of TEDx conferences, the latter being independently organised events around the world that give opportunities for local people to share a TED-like experience. Yesterday’s TEDx youth conference in Hong Kong was one of about 60 held on the same day around the world (http://blog.ted.com/2010/11/19/tedxyouthday-is-on/).
The theme of the Hong Kong TED conference was “Dare to Dream”, and both the range and the quality of the speakers were fabulous. It included a world famous ukulele player, an award winning photographer, a young entrepreneur who makes handbags out of disused Hong Kong taxi seat upholstery, the founder of a biotechnology company that uses glowing fish to test toxin levels in water, an investment banker who has competed in ten 250 kilometre runs through deserts and jungles and across mountains, a famous Canto-pop singer, a twelve year old champion tennis player, a film maker, a comedian, a poor immigrant from Guizhou who has become a millionaire by adopting the philosophy of being a ball, a rap dancing group, the Laughter Yoga HK Team, a fashion designer, a musician who became a world famous philosopher of science, and the founder of a technique that uses laughter to promote self-esteem - among many others. It was an extremely challenging and stimulating day in which the time passed very quickly in spite of the wickedly uncomfortable wooden seats.
For those of us from LPCUWC, the highlight of the day was undoubtedly the talk presented by own student, Amelia Fischer-Linnett. Originally from Seattle in the US, Amelia has been one of the students in the College’s Traffick Link group that has been working to support victims of human trafficking for sex slavery in Cambodia. Amelia had travelled with fellow students to an AFESIP centre in Cambodia, and like her fellow students, had been profoundly affected by the experience. Amelia gave a very clear, well informed, well presented and personally passionate insight into the issue of human trafficking, an issue that is unfortunately rarely thought about and not well known in Hong Kong.
The underlying theme of all the presentations at TEDx Hong Kong yesterday was the importance of following your passions - daring to dream of new possibilities and having the courage to overcome the obstacles that might prevent their achievement.
This theme of daring to dream was also the implied keynote message of another event that I was privileged to attend this week. On Friday evening, the Hong Kong United World Colleges Graduates Organisation (UWCGO) held its annual dinner at the Chinese Chamber of Commerce Members’ Club in Connaught Road, Central. The UWCGO is a great supporter of scholarships for Hong Kong students to attend overseas UWCs, and it supports LPCUWC specifically in many ways also, such as supplying volunteer helpers for our annual Challenge Day, hosting overseas students in local homes to give an authentic home experience of living in Hong Kong, supplying laptop computers for students from poor backgrounds, and funding student’s initiatives in the College.
This year, the UWCGO has agreed to support two groups of our students as they “dare to dream”. One group is the Initiative for Peace (IFP), a group that is planning their next conference to develop skills in conflict resolution by bringing together young people from both sides of the conflict in Mindanao (Philippines) on the LPCUWC campus in late May 2011.
The second group is the Sino-Japan Youth Conference (SJYC) organising team that is planning their third conference at LPCUWC in August 2011. The SJYC has now established an important role in east Asia in bringing together young people from China and Japan to discuss their different educational experiences and their varying interpretations of history and current events.
The College is very grateful to the UWCGO for its continuing generous support to the College, and especially for its encouragement and support of our student initiatives. As a small gesture of appreciation to the UWCGO, some of our students were delighted to travel to Central to provide the entertainment for the evening, notably a performance by our Latin American dancers that drew rapturous applause from the alumni present.
“Dare to Dream” - a great theme to focus and reflect upon at the end of this week.