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.
This is one of the most thought-provoking comments this blog has ever seen, one which was posted weeks ago but which still messes with me:
David Cox: What percentage of the population do you think has the eyes and/or ears to know the difference [between soundtracks done well and done poorly]? When I watch a movie or listen to a song, I don’t see the things that you see. I try, but I don’t understand why certain shots are done certain ways or why a particular piece of music was or wasn’t used. Can I learn that? I don’t know. But if my audience won’t know the difference, should I take the time to learn it?
Two incomplete thoughts:
1. The software programmer should not write your lesson plan.
The programmer cares about consumers, not students. The programmer’s job is to make as many features accessible to as many consumers as easily as possible, without glutting the program. Your job is to challenge your students. Your job is very, very different. So don’t feel weird telling kids not to use a) bullet points in PowerPoint, b) filters in Audacity, and c) the “Add Track From iTunes” button in iMovie. The existence of the button does not make good pedagogy out of the button.
2. To put students in a place to care about the difference between good and bad production and not to equip them is wrong.
Which is to say, if you don’t know why those closing montages at the end of Grey’s Anatomy and Lost are insipid shortcuts to genuine emotional interaction with a story, then you should have the humility to recuse yourself and say, “Maybe I’m the wrong person to teach students to make movies.”
This isn’t about amateurs and experts. That fight is over. The amateurs have won and I wouldn’t reverse that ruling if I could. But it’s extremely important to understand where teachers fit into the new creative structure, a structure which has seen the quantity of published media increase at the same pace as its median quality has declined.
We must act as bulwarks against that decline, not accelerants of it.
I’m mixed. On the one hand, YouCube is a pretty interesting way to compare remixes of a thing (ie. David After Dentist) to the thing itself.
On the other hand, this strikes me as just another one of those tool that depends entirely on a teacher’s pre-existing digital storytelling skills but which also distracts her from developing those skills. (ie. Why learn how to make one video really well when you can put six average videos on a cube!)
This is a classic game. It’s been around in various forms longer than I’ve been alive. Choose your velocity, choose your angle, cross your fingers, and fire. Discovery has simplified the game nicely, removing some noisy variables like wind speed, which you’ll find in other versions.
I first saw Discovery’s incarnation several weeks ago and have been on-and-off obsessed ever since by the question: what can I do with this? The point of this post is to throw up my hands and report: nearly nothing. I have no idea what the students do here.
I mean, it’s far from worthless. If a student can get past level ten, then she clearly has some understanding of angle and velocity and the dialog between the two. She might even ask herself some interesting questions, like, which angle gives you the longest range? But I won’t drag the laptop cart across school for those small potatoes, for that two-step lesson plan of 1) guess and 2) check.
Here is the most rigorous, reasonable question this game can ask, a question which it is fundamentally incapable of answering: can you develop a method for hitting any target in one shot? This is a question either a) Discovery didn’t think of or b) Discovery thought of but, for whatever reason, didn’t make accessible to students.
Either way, it’s frustrating. It’s frustrating that:
All of which is frustrating. The game uses mathematical notation for angle and initial velocity. It comes packaged with its own assessment system
Which makes it an interesting answer to Scott McLeod’s question, where are the Internet resources for your subject area? Because this game isn’t from some arcade site which I’m hopelessly trying to bang into a lesson plan. It’s from Discovery, which isn’t exactly apathetic to the needs of educators. Why didn’t the thing come with a lesson plan?
My takeaway here is that the people who know the Internet and the people who know instructional design aren’t the same people and they aren’t talking to each other enough. We are left to our own devices.
BTW: Just a little over a year later and Colleen King comes through for the team: Tactical Rescue Missions for Intergalactic Good. Great work.
Will Oldham, musician, actor, guy-who-takes-his-craft-extremely-seriously:
People are constantly contacting me saying, “I’ve been editing my movie, and I’ve been using your song in the editing process. What would it take to license the song?” And for me it’s like, “Regardless of what you’ve been doing, my song doesn’t belong in your movie.” [emph. mine]
A good song is a fully articulated capsule of theme and story. So is a good movie. What are the odds that the songwriter’s fully articulated capsule of theme and story aligns exactly with yours? In the event that they don’t align, whose theme/story – the professional’s or the amateur’s – do you think will override the other’s?