TEDxManila in UP College of Law

Yesterday December 5, 2009 I was invited to TEDxManila (woot) at the UP College of Law by the awesome Mark Ruiz. Unfortunately, or should I say naturally, I wasn’t on the list despite confirming twice so I had to wait for Sir Rommel, one of the organizers, to hear my plea and let me in. Of course it helped that the Awesome Mark Ruiz was the one who invited me I got in, but since I wasn’t on the list I didn’t get a pin or nametag….which I wanted to have..fortunately for me Reese Fernandez of Rags2Riches gave me hers. THANK YOU REESE !

My seatmates Reese Fernandez of R2R, Zara Perez of Starbucks and Brian Ong my XS Batchmate and I am so lucky to be beside agents of change here in our country.

The hostess reminded me of someone …but can’t remember ..too bad I didn’t take pictures of the commercials which would have killed Jason who was in front of me hahaha.

The first talk was by Atty. Oposa who talked about LAW, not law law but LAW as in Land, Air and Water. And how we are pretty much destroying the work of nature in far less time that it took her to build it.

“We should only use the interest not the principal” – Atty Oposa.

The 2nd talk was by the ever awesome Mark Ruiz who I think never slept that much the past week O.o He talked about social entrepreneurship and how it could scale up to some thing massive. Small is truly the new big.

Find out more about Mark at ruizmark.com

Edu20.org founder Graham Glass then took the podium talking about the future of learning. One of the most interesting things he showed is gaming to learn. I have been a gamer all my life and so are my siblings and to be honest playing Red Alert allowed me to learn strategy and complex math more than school. Games like Halo thought me more high school science than my science teacher, I knew what plasma is before it was taught in school as the special 4th state of matter. I think gaming to learn would be the natural evolution of schooling. What I am worried about is the social aspect of learning, the importance of classmates often trump the importance of the subject matter. I mean who remembers the 5th day of Science Class on Grade 5 ? but do I remember the day when I became the butt of all jokes of the class.

Find out more about edu20.org at http://www.edu20.org

a special talk by Maria Tan of Eskwela followed and all I can say is that despite all the limited resources she has (in government) she rocks the country hard. Eskwela is a beacon of hope in the country where sometimes it is hard to find hope outside the boxing ring. People are changing the world and in TEDxManila everyone there was changing the world, so why be so down ? There are lots of beacons of hope when you just look.

Find out more about eskwela at : http://eskwela.wikispaces.com/

The last talk was given by Iliac Diaz of MyShelter and this talk was full of one liner quotable quotes ! I’m so glad that there is someone working on disaster mitigation rather than disaster relief effort. Our country is now experiencing climate change and adaptation not rock concerts is the answer to it.

Find out : http://www.philippineclimatechallenge.org/

After the talks we had cocktails and met the most amazing group of people like these bunch :

I do believe that TEDxManila had the highest number of change agents per square foot in the entire country and I do believe that new ideas, new projects and kickass innovation was born in this event so I look forward to more kickass stuff in the Philippines !