Killer concept and execution on this Cold War Kids video. You can activate/deactivate any instrument at any point in the song and change any musician to any one of four tracks.
I have no objection to loading this thing up after the opener exercises and simply playing with it. If the moment offered itself, though, I wouldn’t mind asking:
If we set all the tracks before the video starts, how many different videos could we watch?Further: the song is 3:10 long. If we started watching all of those videos right now, on what day and at what time would our marathon end?
How many times did each musician have to record the song?
The difference between those two numbers is staggering, worth classroom discussion, a sign of the times, etc.
[BTW: Thanks to Karl Fisch for spotchecking my hyperlink.]
By Dan Meyer •
May 25, 2009
• Comments Off on Cigotie, Ctd.
Cigotie and his mom stopped by this weekend to register their opinion on the obstacles to creative growth facing today’s students. Both are extremely good-natured, especially since they are responding to a post entitled, “How Do You Solve A Problem Like Cigotie?”
Cigotie: I also see many kids online doing the same exact thing, as inspirations like Video CoPilot, Creative Cow, etc. And I also agree on how people are getting too sucked into a world, full of copying and project file manipulation, that they have lost all creativity themselves.
Find an area that you’re interested in, blog on it, daily, and then keep doing it for ten years, even when it seems out of fashion, even when it seems like your influence is waning and other people’s stars are rising. Reflect your reading, your learning, your developing understanding of the field. Stay true to your own values, and don’t relent when it looks like you’ve peaked.
If I go a week without blogging, that wobbly, nagging feeling I get owes less to an obligation I have to an audience and more to the fact that this is the place where I learn and an outlet for my excitement. If I don’t blog for a week, then either a) I haven’t learned enough, b) I haven’t been excited by enough, or c) I haven’t carved out enough time to keep that learning and excitement cycling through my brain. Blogging, in any of those cases, is a nice way to step on the intellectual scale and take a reading.
Kate posted a clip which exposes the profits oil companies make by working the rules of rounding to their advantage. It’s mathematically engaging and relevant and well worth dropping into some dead air at the end of class.
But I don’t know what the kids do with it.
Mostly, it runs afoul of the rule of least power which, for our purposes, means the medium has to hint at a question while leaving several square miles of pasture open around it for student exploration. This guy, in contrast, lays out an explicit thesis and supports it completely, leaving little room for inquiry.
Your mileage will vary, obviously, with your class’ enthusiasm for quilting. I appreciate this, though, because it doesn’t just beg that wormy chestnut, “what shapes do you see here?”
Three notes:
Ask: “how many different kinds of fabric do you see in the bottom two rows?” a question which anyone, regardless of mathematical ability, can answer or guess at. (Similarly: the question “will the ball hit the can?” is a prelude to mathematical inquiry but isn’t, itself, strictly mathematical.)
Then ask: “how much of each kind of fabric do you need to quilt the bottom two rows?” a question which is unanswerable without more information. This begs the very, very valuable student inquiry, “what information do I need here?” and the very, very cool lazy-student follow-up “what is the least amount information I can get away with knowing here?” ¶ From there you can go lots of fun places, some of which might involve the practicality of purchasing fabric in one-yard increments with a fifty-four-inch bolt width, something I would know absolutely nothing about.
This never fails to crack me up, like the homework problem is Miley Cyrus and the whiteboard is our Pacific Garden Mall. Or something.
Other classes are even savvier, with smaller groups of friends rotating to one student the responsibility of sending the photo to the others. Digital natives, 21st-century skills, etc.
