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Category: tech enthusiasm

Total 120 Posts

Asilomar #1: YouTube Math

By • December 7, 2008 • 7 Comments

Session Title

YouTube Math: Politics, Advocacy, And The Internet

Better Title

Math: Politics And Advocacy

Presenter

Marianne Smith, consultant.

Narrative

I enjoyed this session a great deal considering I only realized I had little interest in it after it was too late. Smith wrote the only description in the program featuring the word “blog,” so I thought I’d get my token 21-century session out of the way as soon as possible.

She started with two YouTube videos, both out of Washington State, each taking an opposing side in their math war:

  1. Math Education: An Inconvenient Truth, featuring a Washington TV meteorologist, polished to a shine, representing procedural fluency.
  2. A Parents’ Guide to Math Education in Today’s Classroom [sic], representing conceptual fluency.

We spent fully one third of the presentation on a) those two videos and b) a think-pair-share discussion with our neighbors. Marianne Smith did a fabulous job facilitating discussion between attendees but now, only a day later, I recall little of what Marianne Smith thought about any of this.

She did report that a grassroots site in Washington succeeded in dethroning the Superintendent of Public Instruction (a proponent of conceptual fluency) and installing one of their own (big procedural fluency fan). Most of the attendees in our session advocated not one or the other but โ€“ get this โ€“ a blend of procedural and conceptual fluency. (I love these people.) Smith urged us to become more active on committees at the state level, to write our legislators, and to make YouTube videos advocating our point of viewSmith falls under the same category of tech user as my mom: really eager, really curious novices who use “a YouTube video” and “a YouTube” interchangeably. I can’t help finding these people really, really endearing..

The crowd was satisfied. I’m curious if anyone has written the how-to guide for educational activism using YouTube videos and blogs I thought this presentation would be. Does anyone who matters (on a policy-making level) even read these things?

Visuals

PowerPoint. Traditional. All-white background.

Handouts

A comprehensive bibliography of Internet links, which is weird, right? I’m pretty sure this was the first time I ever transcribed a YouTube link from paper to web browser. Facing the same dilemma in my own session I tagged all my online resources in Delicious, but there is probably a better solution.

Homeless

  • One particularly earnest and agitated audience member: “Maybe we should start a blog … get the word out.” This is how it all begins, isn’t it?

Expecting The Worst

By • December 3, 2008 • 13 Comments

CMC-Northa/k/a Asilomar starts Thursday and I present on Friday.

I have spent, cumulatively, 70+ hours organizing, illustrating, and supplementing a presentation which I have delivered twice to a total of eight people. I’m really proud of these ideas and really eager to discuss them with a larger crowd.

I backed my Keynote slides onto my iPhone yesterday, along with my audio and video supplements. You know, just in case my laptop fries and I have to deliver the whole thing from my mobile phone. Obviously, some part of me hopes my laptop fries.

The Best Vodcaster Alive

By • August 22, 2008 • 8 Comments

I can’t tell you what an exhilarating experience this has been โ€“ writing, shooting, and editing this slate of ten vodcasts. It’s like turning over a rock and finding a new language, one which gives voice to a lot of thoughts you’ve had banging around in your head, thoughts that have been looking for an exit for a long time.

I’m still trying to navigate this new grammar, trying to avoid the film equivalent of run-on, illiterate sentences. I’m finding the equivalence between shots & edits and sentences & punctuation, finding inspiration in Hillman Curtis, who is the most literate voice in online film today, particularly if we control the selection for a certain DIY ethos. Please watch the first half, if not the whole, of his portrait of artist Lawrence Weiner.

You are in the stream of life whether you like it or not. And if you’re going to be in the stream of life then you have to accept the responsibilities. I would like a few more pleasures but there doesn’t seem to be time. โ€“ Lawrence Weiner, on what it is to be an artist.

Vodcasters like Ze Frank understand that good video is largely about compression, about sharp edits compressing the time between thoughts, events, and locations. (ie. here you’re in Belize, now you’re in Chattanooga) Hillman Curtis gets that great video โ€“ like great writing โ€“ moves to a rhythm, one which must speed and slow.

Curtis understands that, in film, as in writing, you can force the reader to slow.

And think.

And breathe.

By breaking up the text.

Or, in video, by lengthening the shots.

A third of the way through the Lawrence Weiner portrait, Hillman Curtis does just that with a long, slow tracking shot, the rails obvious beneath the camera, laying bare the mechanics of film.

The odds are 5:2 at best but I may score a video production class this upcoming school year in addition to my usual slate of Algebra, Algebra, Algebra. I couldn’t be more excited.

[BTW: didn’t score that class. life goes on.]

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