this portion of moby.com, ‘film music’, is for independent and non-profit filmmakers, film students, and anyone in need of free music for their independent, non-profit film, video, or short.
You enter some login information and then receive access to thirty-or-so tracks, most of them unreleased. It’s a lot of really decent ambient stuff, ideal tracks to run underneath your podcast or vodcast. Tell your friends.
We don’t usually cover local races here at dy/dan but Christopher Knight is looking like a contender.
From my experience, educators just aren’t a funny group. Those who aren’t self-serious exert too much effort, firing off puns, confusing goofiness for wit. It isn’t a bad niche they carve out for themselves and, let’s be honest, on the list of Essential Teaching Virtues, “funny” ranks pretty far down the list.
I only became objectively funny my senior year of high school. I spent every year before that one watching, testing, and failing, my m.o. for every skill I’ve developed since birth. Here, in what’s gotta be one of the most gratuitous / self-congratulatory teaching seminars ever to hit the ‘Tubes, I offer three notes:
By my senior year I had at long last topped out at 6’7”. (2m for anyone outside the US, Liberia, or Burma.) Consequently, I stopped tripping over desks, tripping over my feet, tripping over invisible stuff. I experienced a surge of self-confidence which made me care a little less how my classmates perceived me.
Nothing kills a joke deader than someone’s desperation for approval. Me, I had to stop growing. However you do it, make sure it doesn’t matter to you if they don’t laugh.
This makes step one a heckuva lot easier ’cause, worst case, you have a good time; best case, someone else has a good time too. It also makes the whole funny thing seem effortless, which is a high priority.
Here’s one of the most cloying movie trailers in my recent memory for what I have little doubt is an equally cloying movie: Dan In Real Life.
The most grating element in a storm of grating elements comes halfway through. Dane Cook’s sister makes a limp joke at the expensive of his illiteracy.
CUT TO: some other scene, the family bursting into spontaneous laughter, like, whooping laughter, the kind that could set off a chain of embolisms around the table, at something else entirely.
That joke-laughter cutaway is a truly desperate maneuver. A lot of folks won’t mind it. But those folks will find you amusing no matter what you do. The folks who can darken an audience’s collective mood (talking about Gladwell’s Mavens here) this will drive them up the wall.
You’re nudging them in the ribs, whispering “geddit?” telling them how to think, feel, and react. This is a buzzkiller and a dealbreaker in what should be an effortless transaction.
Maybe you don’t have a laugh track but maybe in your mental script you’ve got a line reading “pause for laughter” one which you signal with an involuntary “… um …aha … heh …” and some nervous laughter.
Rather breeze right by it. Onto the next.
There are a lot of practical, workmanlike applications of humor in the classroom. You get those indifferent kids, sullen and detached, suspicious of any teacher evincing warmth. In these situations, you have to retract.
If you’re a desperate humorist around those kids (the exact opposite of the indifferent joke-teller you oughtta be) they won’t just find you unfunny, they’ll find you alienating.
Instead, you sidle up nearby ’em and carry on an interesting and funny conversation with the kid just past ’em. You drop something witty on the other kid, totally indifferent to the real target here. Resist the temptation to look, but from the corner of your eye, notice the kid chuckling a bit. Strange though it sounds, through your indifferent humor, she has found something completely kindred.
Update: Scott knocks down my entire post with one well-aimed paragraph. Currently blocking his i.p. address.
Kids are like most everyone in that it doesn’t matter how someone tells a joke,but it REALLY matters who tells it. Nobody is going to laugh at something when they think it will put them in the position of looking like a dork. People will only laugh when it makes them seem associated with a person that they consider to be highly admired by others around them… it makes them look like they are in on something that no one else is. In other words, if you read this blog post hoping to learn how to be funny, then you probably shouldn’t try it. Just stick to teaching.
Posted (mostly) without comment. Just a thoroughly great description of what professional development oughtta be and what it so often isn’t.
Cherish the days when some top-shelf designer delivers a keynote address and releases his slidedeck online. Here today is Matthew Ericson, Deputy Graphics Director at the New York Times (maybe you’ve heard of it?) and his presentation, “Visualizing Data for the Masses: Information Graphics at The New York Times.” [70 mb, zipped pdf]
From Information Aesthetics:
He explained how a 30-person team creates the impressive infographics and visualizations we see on the newspaper every week. Matt emphasized their role as journalists (instead of illustrators) and explained how they get from raw data to finished graphical pieces that make information understandable for more than a million readers.
One Cool Thing
Check out how this design super-stud introduces the thirty members of his team.
Okay, so the Simpsons avatar thing has made the rounds, but that isn’t what’s so sick here. What’s awesome is how he plays with opacity to draw his audience’s eyes to individual members and departments.
Nice, nice move.
The Full Content Conjecture
Ericson’s slides are heavy with image, not information. Out of 120 slides, only 17 are textual, and between them, there are only 39 words.
That’s an average of two words per slide over seventeen slides over an entire keynote. I’m a terrible audience, an inveterate fidgeter, a doodler, and deeply critical to boot, but that eye-candy orgy would’ve kept me rapt
Now it’s real tempting for a math-minded fella like myself to come up with some sort of rigid ratio, a litmus test like the 10/20/30 rule to determine if you’re balanced too heavily or lightly on images but I’ve got a conjecture that’s sturdier:
If your slidedeck reads like a script, bullet points marking off your progress while you read them, you’re a) inducing multimedia dissonance cognitive overload and b) using a low-resolution medium (PowerPoint) to display high-resolution data (text)
You have only a few hundred thousand pixels up there and they prefer to consume pictures, charts, and words, in that order.
So:
Corollary To The Full Content Conjecture
Bloggers are as excited about posting their slidedecks to Slideshare after their keynotes as they are about the keynotes themselves. The audience gets shortchanged in this transaction ’cause for the keynote to function effectively online, where there is no voice to tell the story, the blogger compensates with bullet points.
Vicki Davis recently released some slides from a presentation of her cool Flat Classroom Project.
Moving through the presentation online, I found it pretty easy to determine its content since she used bullet points and text to literalize most of it.
Scanning her slides, I realized that the problem is one of approach. The best way to approach a speaking engagement is as a storytelling engagement. So you toss the meat and potatoes of your speech (URLs, bullet points, references) onto a well-designed handout. You toss illustrations onto a screen behind you.
And then you tell a story.
This is why I cast my most recent presentation with an imaginary stock-photo protagonist.
Because stories stick where bullet points do not.
I imagine that if asked to recall the most successful intervals of her presentation, Vicki would cite the moments when she was telling stories about kids collaborating across continents and the tools they used.
Whereas (for example) a slide like this …
… is the storytelling equivalent of this:
I’ve internalized my own preferences so fully on this matter that if I suspect even for a second that a slide is functioning as a script, a crutch to keep me on message (which is to say, if I find myself glancing back each time I click open a new bullet point) I delete the slide on instinct and double up my efforts at notecarding or memorizing. Anything less and I’m transferring my burden to my audience, to say nothing of poor storytelling.
An Exception:
An exception to the Full Content Conjecture:
Vicki drowns this slide in bullets to a really nice effect. This is a lot like Ethan Bodnar’s prizewinning entry in the Four Slide Sales Pitch contest awhile back, a slide meant to be looked at, not read.
If I was presenting, I’d toss that list plus URLs plus a brief statement of purpose for each into a handout, which would complement and compel her visuals. Her story would then be unfettered by information and she would be free to tell a cool story: kids are connecting with each other around the world.
Also, I would’ve built this slide:
In Keynote I can build an animation that with one click pops each logo up sequentially over a matter of two, three, seven seconds – however long I need to tell the story. (Quicktime of what I’m talking about) Regardless, this example of visual storytelling remains a strong point in Vicki’s presentation, and is worth emulating in your own.
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