What is TEDxYUE, and why?

Inspired by the idea of TED, a team of students from 29 universities and colleges in Guangdong Province, China joined together. Their purpose is to hold a TEDx event which can attract more audience telling them that there is something called TED.

Their event is called TEDxYUE. YUE is the abbreviated name of Guangdong Province, and Oliver Ding, the co-founder of TEDtoChina, advanced this name of TEDxYUE, saying that YUE also means “Youth, University, Eagerness”.

Although TED received world-wide popularity, but its fame in the campus in China is not at parity with other more distinguished acronyms from western countries, like NBA, LV, or OMLG.

So the first target of the TEDxYUE event is to promote TED in the campus by holding a TEDx event, hopefully this could help more students, although still hesitate in embracing TED due to the language barrier (still remember Jay Walker’s TED Talk on the English Tsunami in China?), be informed that there is something good on the internet besides Renren.com and Youku.com (the Chinese version of facebook and youtube).

Another target of TEDxYUE can be reflected by its stated mission: “Better Education, Equal Opportunities”.

It requires no explanation that there is a gap among universities. The resources of the first-rank, top universities eclipse other universities. This gap in educational resources will create ever-wider gap of opportunity, and self-respect between college students from the top universities and those from the non-first-rank universities.

In reality, there is no solution for this: since the educational recourses is limited, the government of course want to invest them into the best colleges, allowing them to compete in the international level with the prestigious names around the world.

However, the information age, as the ‘Next Society’, can offer a solution, and TED is essentially the educational brand which is part of the answer.

The wish of TEDxYUE team is through sharing, watching, and discussing TED talks with students from different universities can join together to form a tribe of curiosity, of eagerness for knowledge, of the passion to change the world through ideas and actions, to form an invisible college without the border of knowledge segmentation and so-called discipline, to self-develop a new kind of education based on learning the wisdom from the TED talkers, a TEDUCATION.

That is why we have TEDxYUE.

TEDxYUE: how?
TEDxYUE will be held in 5th, September, 2010. What distinguished TEDxYUE is that there is no invited speakers for TEDxYUE.

What we plan to do is a TED-replay at the same day in 29 universities and colleges. Just students join together, watch, and discuss. The idea is to create an influence by having all these universities and colleges joining together, and to bring a sense of belonging to a community, or a tribe.

Each individual organized team at the campus is responsible for carrying out the promotion and execution of the TED-replay. All the resources were provided by an online platform.

The idea of TEDxYUE won the “3rd Google Gong1Chuang1 Innovation Competition for Social Good”, and became one of the 30 team out of the 18200 applications from 1060 universities and colleges in China. Google CSR will be the sponsor of the TEDxYUE event.

In the future, we are planning to develop on-line learning community based on TED material. The idea itself was first exhibited in Wiser Summer 2010 at Peking University and won the “the best social value award”, as well as identified as "Happy China" Social Welfare Project by Nanfang Weekly.

The first step is to cooperate with Social Learn Lab (http://sociallearnlab.org/), an online education community for educators in China, to advance a weekly on-line watching and discussing TED activity. Also, we have a digest in Chinese of 100 most popular TED talk for newcomers to know what is available out there in the TED treasure (http://blog.sina.com.cn/tedxyue).

We truly appreciate if you have ideas or suggestions for TEDxYUE, please email: yukai@tedtxyue.com.

The list of universities and colleges involved in TEDxYUE:
1. Guangdong Vocational College of Mechanical and Electrical Technology
2. Shaoguan University
3. Guangdong University Of Finance
4. Guangdong Polytechnic Normal University
5. Wuyi University
6. Jiaying University
7. Guangdong University of Foreign Studies
8. Jinan University
9. South China Normal University
10. Guangdong University of Business Studies
11. Guangdong University of Technology
12. Dongguan University of Technology
13. Foshan University
14. South China University of Technology
15. South China Agricultural University
16. Guangdong Medical College
17. Guangzhou University
18. Guangdong University Of Petrochemical Technology
19. Dongguan Polytechnic College
20. Nanhai Campus, South China Normal University
21. Guangzhou Auto College Campus, South China University of Technology
22. Huizhou University
23. Guangdong Industry Technical College
24. Zhongkai University of Agriculture and Engineering
25. Nanfang College of Sun Yet-sen University　
26. Guangdong Pharmaceutical University
27. Beijing Normal University, Zhuhai Campus
28. Sun Yat-Sen University
29. Guangzhou Sport University

Guangzhou
China

Andrew Yu

founder of 1kg.org

Dandan Wang

A famous English language trainer

David Huang

Harvard Business School student & P&G CMK manager

Menghen Yang

A disabled student who fought his way into university

Yufei Guo

A philosophical student from SYSU

Zhixiong Lin

A Research & Professor of Social Science from Jiaying College

Bi Zhao

The leader of an award winning team VIVA from Guangdong Industrial University

Yuke Li

Designer of "Green Pass", an award winning sustainable industrial design

Jinhui Zhu

Founder of a local documetary studio deveoted to record and describe story of Canton

Qinlin Hu

An artist using cartoon to record the local culture of Guangdong

Zhimin Huang

Psychologist