College hosts insightful series

Technology, entertainment and design: These three core concepts form the basis of TED talks, an international movement started in 1984 meant to “spread ideas worth sharing.”

Northwest Montana got a taste of the TED talks last week as Flathead Valley Community College hosted a Best of TED Festival seeking to explore those three areas of human thought.

Hundreds of curious people turned out at the college for three nights of local innovators, scientists, artists and architects sharing insights and interesting ways to look at life.

Ashley Wold, a dancer and founder of Feat X Feet, a youth tap dance ensemble in Whitefish, said subjectivity can change how you see things.

“You and another person can watch the same exact performance and have a totally different perspective,” she said. “That’s what’s so beautiful about it.”

Wold, along with two Flathead High School teachers — author and English teacher ‘Asta Bowen and artist and art teacher Susan Guthrie — made up the panel of experts on the festival’s entertainment night.

Each of the three nights invited experts as a panel to introduce a pre-recorded TED talk and then lead a discussion. The technology night included an educator as well as a professor of biology at FVCC. The design night was hosted by a design architect and the building director for the city of Kalispell.

Jill Seigmund, head of the festival’s steering committee, was inspired by a TED event she attended in Bozeman. But she knew the costs of those events would be prohibitive for many in the area.

“It costs a great deal of money to attend the TED international events, and a lot for the TEDx events as well,” she said. “I wanted to give young people a chance to attend and that is where Flathead High School came into it.”

The Best of TED festival was put on by FVCC and Flathead High School’s International Baccalaureate program. Dispersed throughout the crowd were some of these bright high schoolers to help stir conversation.

One of these students, Sam McCadden, had a question for his table engaging in a spirited discussion about the nature of statistics and art.

“Is bringing emotion into statistics a fair thing to do?” he asked. “Or does that change the conversation?”

Questions like those were the reason TED started as a four-day event in California nearly 30 years ago. Now an international phenomenon, talks are held in far-flung locations such as Oxford University; Brussels, Belgium; and Monterey, Calif. TEDx events are ones produced locally, such as the one Seigmund attended in Bozeman.

Because of the interest shown in that town, she is working to get a TEDx event in Whitefish.

“Defining the last, best place” is the theme of the event to be held from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Jan. 16 in the Central School Auditorium in Whitefish.

“We are actually only selling 100 tickets to the event,” Seigmund said. “But we will screen it live and have recordings of it after for free.”

Most TED events are recorded and posted to www.TED.com for the world to view free of charge, but for many people, attending the events in person is half the fun. It’s like a play or some sort of performance by an intellectual, scholar, comedian, artist, entrepreneur or any of hundreds of other professions that have interesting ideas.

John Balsam, the new FVCC Small Business Development Center director, loved the idea of presenting new technologies and ways of thinking about the world.

“I’m exceptionally passionate about technology,” he said. For years Balsam was a consultant that helped small tech companies get funding. “I am a stats guy, but you can make stats say anything you want. What I picked up from tonight’s event is not to get stuck in one way of thinking. Expanding horizons is always going to result in a better way of doing things.”

For information on TEDx Whitefish, go online to www.TEDxWhitefish.com. Tickets go on sale Dec. 2.

Reporter Ryan Murray may be reached at 758-4436 or by email at rmurray@dailyinterlake.com.