TEDxColumbus is tackling STEAM this year. For its 6th annual event on Nov. 7 at the Capitol Theatre, speakers and performers will be invited to tease out the spokes of STEAM: education, energy, food, emotion and as fuel for creativity and innovation.
College of Arts and Sciences featured speaker/performers:
Brad Bushman, professor, communication, psychology
Exploring the STEAM of Anger
It is well know that aggression often starts when self-control stops. So what decreases self control that causes aggression to have a clear pathway, ending in consequential life-changing behaviors? Professor Bushman has made this question his life’s work, researching the causes of aggression and violent behavior for over 30 years. He’ll reveal the two major factors that decrease self-control and the present a case that self-control can be treated like a muscle and with exercise, can actually be strengthened.
Cindy Foley, alumna, art education
Changing the Chant
When Cindy Foley discusses creativity in schools, she doesn’t want to hear “don’t kill the arts.” She instead wants to hear “don’t kill the ideas.” Provoking change in arts education may be her job, but it’s also her passion. Cindy will share the need for a better articulated goal for educators and how a new model is possible where ideas are king and curiosity reigns.
Jim Fowler, assistant professor, mathematics
Humanity of Calculus
Jim may have some broad reaching research interests in the topology of high-dimensional manifolds and geometric group theory. But his educational mission is as “big.” He has lead the creation of an online calculus course that has had over 180,000 enrollments (that’s one-hundred-eighty-thousand). His goal: to get more people to do more math for math’s sake. And to prove it, through his work with the STEAM factory, where he is outreach director, he brings mathematics to farmer’s markets.
Nick George, lecturer, art
Latent Layers of Time and Space
Nick is a visual artist whose practice centers on photography, often as both medium and subject. His father taught him to be a scavenger and he’s explored a provocative, unique way to marry his inherited passion with his learned art. The result causes us to want to hear more story, ask more questions and embrace mystery.
Ken Rinaldo, professor, art
Trans-Species Symbiogenisis
According to Ken Rinaldo, the junctures where machine, animal, plant, bacteria and humans meet are where our future exists. Three decades of creating robotic art has taught him that living systems provide the ultimate models of what technology can become. Communication is at heart of his work with a desire to break down and reveal behavior, processes and patterns inherent in natural and semi-living species. His work exposes the underlying beauty inherent in the intercommunication of all species (organic and machinic) at all scales. As anaerobic bacteria have receded to our stomachs, symbiotically intertwined with our survival, so we are receding to a comfortable embryonic sac enveloped in technology as a new species. Neither human nor machine is ascendant; we are becoming symbiont. He joins the TEDxColumbus stage to discuss and show a number of robotic artworks in the process of revealing this complex yet provocative philosophy.
Tickets are now on sale! Visit the CAPA box office, call (614) 469-0939 or visit Ticketmaster.
For more information about the talks and the event, visit the TEDxColumbus website.
