Archive for the ‘video’ Category
Quick Video Share: Quality Multimedia Takes Years to Master
Just saw this on Crooks and Liars, and think it’s worth sharing to teachers and students alike. Ira Glass, radio host of This American Life on (the USA’s) National Public Radio, shares how expectations - our own, and others’ - shouldn’t be too high for our media creations, because “it takes years” to bridge the gap between our “tastes” and our attempts to attain them in our media productions.
To teachers, this says, “Don’t grade blogging, podcasting, and other things too harshly.” To students it says, “Whether you like it or not, it’s good to hold you to a required production schedule that forces you to regularly create - that’s the only way you’ll get better.” (Reminds me of the old saying, “Don’t wait for Inspiration. She’s a lazy b*tch that has to be chased down.”)
Here’s the clip:
More Free Open Source Goodness: Celtx Media Pre-Production Suite
Life is physically and mentally too cramped for me to write the posts I’ve been planning about Pink’s Whole New Mind and Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody. I’m tutoring three days a week, finishing up my change of visa status (I never thought I’d need a Green Card, but there it is), and moving into our new apartment on Tuesday - after which I hope to be able to think clearly.
In the meantime, I’m enjoying simply sharing some of the amazing free resources I’m discovering these days. Today’s offering: Celtx (click screenshot for full view).
From the Celtx site, a partial overview of the scriptwriting, storyboarding, collaborating, production scheduling, and on-and-on-ing it performs:
Celtx is the world’s first all-in-one media pre-production software. It has everything you need to take your story from concept to production. Celtx replaces ‘paper, pen & binder’ pre-production with a digital approach that’s more complete, simpler to work with, and easier to share.
Multi-Media Friendly: Celtx helps you pre-produce all types of media - film, video, documentary, theater, machinima, comics, advertising, gaming, music video, radio, podcasts, videocasts, and however else you choose to tell your story.
All-In-One: Unlike scriptwriting software, you can use Celtx for the entire pre-production process - write scripts, storyboard scenes and sequences, develop characters, breakdown & tag elements, schedule production, and prepare detailed and informative production reports for cast and crew.
Fully Integrated: Celtx is designed to help your entire production team work together on a single, easy to share project file - eliminating the confusion of multiple project files, and the need for ‘paper and binder’.
There’s more, too: a Project Central community site for global Celtx users, and more beyond that. Check out the site for the goodness - and don’t miss the screencast tutorials to get the full effect. Just wonderful - hats off to Celtx.
It’s cross-platform, by the way, so goodness for all, PC, Mac, and otherwise. (h/t to Ostatic for the excellent Six Essential Open Source Apps for Mac Videographers post. Go there for five more goodies beside!)
Noodling in Kowloon
Standing on a corner
in Hong Kong -
It ain’t so good to be alone
in Hong Kong.
–Screaming Jay Hawkins, “Hong Kong” (psst…do yourself a favor and click the little icon for a classic Screaming Jay number on Youtube, and a Wikipedia link, thanks to the very cool Apture tool)
Just a quickie to show the local flavor of Kowloon, Hong Kong, to Stacy Zheng of Students 2.0, who tweeted, “I’m insanely jealous of you right now. Hong Kong tops the list of my “places I want to visit”. Have fun! :)” - and to show my wife the typical “I don’t speak your language so I’ll take whatever haircut you give me” ‘do I just got in a local barber shop across the street from my hotel.
It’s nice to be back among the Chinese people, among whom I lived in Shanghai for five years, and came to admire more than any people in the 25 countries I’ve traveled. It’s so crazy: they don’t have near the money to spend on English lessons the way Koreans do, yet they speak English so comfortably, with broken grammar but still so communicatively, they far outstrip the Koreans in this respect, who seem so fearful of making a mistake - the internalized grader at work in that so-grade-fixated culture - that they literally do not speak English at all, despite spending more per capita on lessons than any country in the world.
So here’s a bit of fluff from a Kowloon noodle shop [Update: I just discovered Youtube now allows us to annotate our own video uploads, and did that for the below. It's in beta and doesn't work in embeds yet, so you have to click through to the Youtube page to see it. Kinda cool. Think of the educational potential....]:
The Most Important Edu Website I Know: Education for Well-Being Strikes Again
Real-time Twitter Search - Tweet Scan
Education for Well-Being gets my vote as one of the most important educational sites on the web, period. Bill Farren makes the videos he posts there, writes lucid and relevant discussions of them, and links to supplementary resources for possible classroom use. His written posts are as well-crafted as his videos, drawing on a wide body of literature about environmental and social well-being. I’m a hack in comparison. Unsubscribe to me, if that’s what it takes to get you to subscribe to him. I really think he’s that vital to education and the future.
Bill describes his latest video, “Peak Air: Charge It,” as an “attempt to visually define “unsustainable’.” As visual definitions go (and Bill, you should have added “audio” as well, because your soundtracks always impress), it’s first-rate. See for yourself:
Go to the post itself for the written discussion and supplemental links. It’s a full (informal) lesson plan with a great visual aid, just waiting for you to push “play” to start the learning.
Related: Beyond School Posts about (and by) Bill Farren / Ed4WB
Meaningful Meme: Your “Bullied Then, Successful Now” Stories
I received this comment recently on my podcast post, “My Suicidal High School Years: A Happy Ending Bullying Story.” The comment is from a teen named Jack, who is experiencing now what I experienced 30 years ago. I’m sharing it because it’s evidence that the meme I’m about to propose - voluntary, as usual - could have more social value than the bevy of “Stop Bullying!” messages we most often see in response to this ugly subject. Here’s Jack:
Clay,
I googled bullying stories because I wanted something to help me through troubles that I am currently facing in ninth grade. “Stop bullying!” sites really didn’t help me. This was just the kind of story I was looking for. I get called names feverishly because I didn’t make the best impression first semester. I try not to care what other people think of me but it feels like I am always watching my back.
Anyways, this story was very interesting indeed. Thanks a lot for sharing. It helped substantially. [Emphasis added.]
I’ve already thanked Jack, but I want to thank him again. He confirms that for him, at least, “Stop Bullying” messages may be nice and all, but they don’t do much to comfort those trying to cope with being bullied.
I’m not saying anti-anything messages have no positive value. I’m just saying they often fail to help the victims of the thing being opposed. Telling bullies not to bully may be worth the effort, though it’s apparently predicated on the dubious belief that it’s effective to appeal to the compassionate side of bullies, who in my experience have almost always been a pretty heartless bunch. Bullies enjoy psycho-social benefits from bullying - profits, in a sense - in the same way arms dealers do from selling weapons. Appeals to delicate instincts require delicate audiences, and delicacy is a thing usually absent from these hardened types.
But as Jack testifies, just hearing Bullied Success Stories - that survival is worth it and life gets better? That’s a speech-act worth performing.
So the Meme: Share Your “Bullied Then, Successful Now” Stories
I did it in my podcast, a 30 minute story - literally, a story - of my experience of three years of bullying in high school. It’s actually just an mp3 of the class session in which I told the story to my students (there was bullying going on in that grade). I just fired up GarageBand and recorded it as I shared it with my class.
That’s one way to do it. Other ways:
- a blog post
- a webcam video
- a Skypecast
- a Comic Life or photo-essay
- a VoiceThread
- [your idea here]
If none of those work for you, but you have a story to tell, you can also leave a comment or drop me an email volunteering for a Skype conference call, where we can take more of a group story-telling session. I can do the editing and turn it into a podcast.
I hope this makes sense to you. It does to me. Jack’s comment strengthened my belief that, short of somehow stopping bullying - and come on, it’s been with us as long as war - one of the most helpful things we can do is offer ourselves, and our stories, as living proof that the nightmare can be survived, and this dream called life can become sweeter as it moves into adulthood.
I often throw dreamy ideas like this out on this blog, and they land with a thud. This one seems a likely candidate as the latest in that series. But I hope not. My bullying podcast gets a surprising number of visits from people googling “real life bullying stories” and such, and it gets downloaded quite a bit too.
So there is a need.
And instead of putting more energy into “stop bullying” sermons (which I’m not saying we should stop), we can maybe devote it to stories of hope.
I know it’s a busy time, so if you can only get around to it later - this summer, even - that’s fine. Just link here whenever it’s done. If we get enough of these, we can make a permanent site for them on a wiki, or even a dedicated blog.
And by the way: this offer is open to any students out there with anything to say as well. I’d love to host a Skype conference call about this topic.
