TEDxCardiff 2011 and NxtGenUG

Posted by on April 15, 2011 in geeky stuff | 0 comments

TEDxCardiff 2011 and NxtGenUG

Last weekend, I went on a bit of a road trip to feed my brain.

Regular readers will know that I favour the smaller, invited-to-talk or un-conference format events (ie: Bar Camp Bournemouth) over big sales-y or pay-to-talk ones.

On the Friday NxtGenUG was a trip down memory lane, seeing old friend Jon Skeet presenting “C# goes evil with sock puppets”. I understood more than I expected (my coding is quite limited these days) but I was slightly dis-appointed with the minimal use of puppets Jon! More puppets!

Saturday was TEDxCardiff, a couple of us from Bournemouth went last year and there was a larger group in 2011.

The speakers were good, with a wide range of topics (from printing human organs, friendship, Everest climbing and more).

Highlights for me were:

Dr Kelly Page‘s talk on the effect of social networking on the value and meaning of friendship.

Kevin Chester’s talk on creativity and “Eno And”

The award for most thought provoking has to go to Mark Chataway for his talk on attitudes to vaccination. Getting the audience to act as a jury in given circumstances really stopped and made a lot of us think hard.

While you (and I) wait for the real TEDxCDF videos to be released here’s a handy set of audience shot videos of the talks by Rai M Azlan’s blog post on TEDxCardiff.

Also interesting was the invitation to all to join the organisers and speakers for some food n drinks afterwards, we did and it was really good to meet Ben Hyde who’d excellent Ignite talk I suggest you all watch:

 

Ben Hyde – Playfulness and the Art of Getting Stuff Wrong from Ignite Cardiff on Vimeo.

 

By no means a big deal but personally I wasn’t a big fan of people just reading from ipads… tech should make talks better… not just be a replacement for cue cards!

Well done to Neil and Clare for an excellent event (again).

Leave a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *