Ideas and Thoughts from an EdTech

HE EMERGED FROM THE METRO AT THE L’ENFANT PLAZA STATION AND POSITIONED HIMSELF AGAINST A WALL BESIDE A TRASH BASKET. By most measures, he was nondescript: a youngish white man in jeans, a long-sleeved T-shirt and a Washington Nationals baseball cap. From a small case, he removed a violin. Placing the open case at his feet, he shrewdly threw in a few dollars and pocket change as seed money, swiveled it to face pedestrian traffic, and began to play.

The rest of the story goes on to reveal that world renowned violinist Joshua Bell peformed on a priceless Stradivarius as hundreds passed by barely noticing. While his concerts command prices over $100 a seat, he made $32 in just under an hour.  The article details this experiment and offers some interesting ideas into human psychology.

For me it reminds me that so much of life is hidden in plain sight and we too often we aren’t paying attention.

Each passerby had a quick choice to make, one familiar to commuters in any urban area where the occasional street performer is part of the cityscape: Do you stop and listen? Do you hurry past with a blend of guilt and irritation, aware of your cupidity but annoyed by the unbidden demand on your time and your wallet? Do you throw in a buck, just to be polite? Does your decision change if he’s really bad? What if he’s really good? Do you have time for beauty? Shouldn’t you? What’s the moral mathematics of the moment?

School is beginning for many. Fall is often a start up for many organizations. There will be to do’s, deadlines and pressures. But hopefully we’ll have time to notice really great things that happen everyday. If you’re involved in education I’m guessing there are a few Josh Bell’s in your building.

I hope you’ll make time for beauty. I know I need to. That’s my sermon for today. Stay well.

Dan Meyer  produced a fantastic 10 episode vodcast over the summer. We discuss his approach, his influences and the challenge of producing high quality, effective video.

Show notes:

Dan’s 10 videos
Ze Frank
David SimonThe WireGraphing Stories
Summer Camp Video

*My feed in itunes is not functioning. The feed validates but itunes says it’s wrong. Any help would be appreciated.

 

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Leave it to Rob Wall to have his handy microphone ready for a podcast with Ewan Mcintosh. After 6 hours of work with teachers, we were ready for a break and what better place to spend a hot August afternoon that in a local Scottish tavern with our visitor. Rob, Alec Couros and I along with Cindy Seibel and Kyle Licthenwald picked Ewan’s giant brain for a few minutes prior to our evening event.

Have a listen:

 

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What a privilege to spend time with a good and smart friend.  Since we began planning for this day back in January, I’ve been looking forward to it.  It was remarkable to see how many traveled a fair distance to attend this one day event.

The day was well crafted by Ewan that included a series of short presentation type deliveries followed by opportunity to discuss and play.

As a group, we decided these were the most important ideas from the morning:

1. R & D is for everyone
2. Building Shared Awareness
3. Remix the curricula
4. Balance between structure and flexibility, saturation and overload
5. Importance of rules in play

The afternoon was spent exploring gaming and the concept of gaming as a learning tool.

One participant summarized his learning this way, “One mistake I’ve made is I’ve never played with a computer”. This was a telling statement about how we view ourselves as learners.

Lots of ideas were explored and my goal was that folks left willing to continue to innovate, explore, learn and share. Not entirely new but a fresh set of eyes always helps.

Working out a New Game photo: by Ewan Mcintosh

I’m not sure I completely believe that but certainly my last post hints this.  Today I see Barbara Ganley, who is one of my longtime blog heroines and thinkers refering to the post and of course takes the idea much further and further complicates and spins the idea of writing and imagery to new depths. (that’s a compliment by the way)

Then I grab this little gem from Garr Reynolds about Ken Burns:

When you think about it, often the photo really is more powerful than video at telling the story. The photo captures a moment in time allowing the viewer to slow down and think and wonder and reflect. Photos allow for greater emphasis and may have less distracting elements, giving the presenter or narrator/film maker more freedom to augment the photo (or the other way around). We can learn a lot from documentary film, especially the kind like those created by Burns which rely so heavily on still images. One tip is to avoid the usage of imagery as ornamentation. What you see in Burns’ films is a simple and powerful use of photos and other imagery that support the narrative and illuminate the story on a visceral level, thereby making the experience richer and stickier.

As someone who has been using video for a long time and is considers himself a better videographer than a photographer, I am becoming more appreciative of the still image. As Burns says in the video excerpt below, “video is simply a series of 24 still frames per second”.

You can think of stills as slow motion. As a sports enthusiast, the advent of slow motion has transformed the viewing of sports and allows us to gain an understanding of the intricacies of athletics in ways never before possible. We’ve had this for a long time with stills, it was simply hidden in plain sight at least for me.

Being part of the photo a day project has been for the most part a great learning experience. Prior to this year, I had been an avid flickr user and photography enthusiast. This project has elevated this and strengthened my appreciation for the power of imagery, composition and community.

Imagery

I’ve written at lengths and perhaps ad nauseum about the value of imagery. But the idea of mindful seeing is certainly something that has become a part of my day. Good storytellers listen intently to others. They find beauty in words. I remember a few years ago reading about Barbara Ganley taking her camera on walks and her efforts to embed photography into her writing classes. The idea of always having a camera with me stuck. My family and friends know it’s always with me and they too are seeing things they never saw and calling on me to capture moments. This is actually one reason I’ve fought moving to a larger SLR and have stuck with my compact camera.

Composition

One of the greatest features of digital photography is the low cost of failure. Taking a photo everyday forces you to be creative. It’s been interesting to develop vocabulary and understanding of composition and at the same time playing without really understanding why I’m doing what I’m doing. I’ve taught several introductory courses on digital photography and can’t emphasis enough the value of taking a gazillion photos.  No doubt it adds to her workload but I’m better at culling prior to downloading. Yet it still takes time. I still use iPhoto as my primary orgainzer/editor. I’m comfortable with its funtionality.  On rare occasions I use Aperture or Fireworks but iPhoto is my mainstay.

Community

This is obviously the key to this project. I subscribe to all the members of this group and have pretty much viewed all their photos. Knowing we are all trying to learn together, and yet have no formal ties, makes this a really interesting community. I’ve definitely learned from many and at times consciously and other times subconciously have copied their styles. Why wouldn’t you?  The community has also done well encouraging one another via comments. Of the 52 members, I’d say almost all have kept up and are active and those who have not, who cares?

I’d like to set up something similar for our schools this year. I’m not sure how I’d structure it but knowing the value I’ve found in this along with my push to include more intentional uses of images in learning makes think I have to figure out how. Any ideas are welcome.

I picked up Martha from summer art school. The following conversation ensued:

“Dad, who is your favourite artist?”

“I”m not sure, I don’t really know much about art.”

“I like Van Gogh. I remember a painting he did with stars but I can’t remember exactly what it was. When I get home I’ll google him and show you. Dad, don’t you just love google?”

I regularly upload videos to a variety of services for a variety of reasons. Youtube is my site of choice, mostly for ease of use, audience and user familiarity.  Recenly I noticed blip as having particularly good quality so I have several videos there. I’d used Vimeo a while back but not much lately. Flickr recently introduced video and seems handy for short videos. I’ve also used Revver in the past but it’s been a bit flaky lately.

Last week I shot an impromptu video with my Canon SD750 Digital camera. I dropped in into imovie 08 (which by the way was designed exactly for this type of quick video and sharing) and uploaded it to the four sites. Here are the results:

Big Dog Meets Little Dog from shareski on Vimeo

The default setting for youtube won’t give you the high quality you get from the other sites. I found this site which rewrote the code to use the higher quailty video.

With that, it’s hard to differentiate between the four. Blip is larger by default but I’ve resized manually to make it similar to the others. Unless there are some other features here I’ve missed, I’m not prepared to recommend one over the other. Are you?

Update:
From Ian’s request I also uploaded the original 15MB .m4v file to my server and it is embedded here. It is better quality than the others since it hasn’t been converted to flash. However it’s download size and also server bandwidth might be an issue.

I also added a google video. I couldn’t find a high to embed the high quality format.

 

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