Every Christmas-break our family creates a stop-motion video new year’s greeting card. We have been doing this for 4 years or so and it is an incredibly fun way to spend time together. It has become a “signature” thing we do as a family. Anyway this year was no exception – though it took us much longer than before to come up with a good idea – and then to execute it was another challenge. Anyway, here it is (on Vimeo).
A very wonderful holidays and a very happy new year to all of you,
from Shreya, Soham, Smita & Punya
Just a few comments on the making of these videos. First, all our new-year videos are stop-motion videos. That’s how we made the first one and it has stuck. Second, all these videos are somewhat typographical in nature – playing with words and their representation. Third, these videos rarely feature us either individually or as a family. A hand or a still-frame may show up once in a while but for the most part our videos are made with inanimate objects.
This year I tried to change all three of these, suggesting that we make a live action video, with us as actors – and have some kind of a puzzle that was not related to words. After spending days thinking about this, working with various ideas, this whole line of thought was vetoed down by both Soham and Shreya. It was interesting to me that over time we had not only become a family that makes videos but a family that makes stop motion videos! How cool an identity is that! Of course, this meant that we then had to start over from scratch to come up with something that fit what we had done in the past.
Speaking of videos made in the past, you can see them by following the links below:
I was recently at the Iowa Technology & Education Connection (ITEC) conference in Des Moines IA. I had a wonderful time meeting old friends and making some new ones. I was also asked to be part of a video that would be shared with ITEC members and other online sources. I received an email today letting me know that this video is now available on the ITEC website (and for embedding).
This was one of the most pleasant and professional interviews I have ever been involved in and I like how the final video has turned out. I think it is a pretty good introduction to not just the TPACK framework and our conceptualization of its development but also to our recent work on 21st century learning, creativity and trans-disciplinary learning. Enjoy.
Back in November 2010, I had been invited by the Bloomfield Hills School District to speak to their administrators and leadership about issues related to social media and what it means for schools and districts. You can find out more about this session here. As I said in my previous note, I built on a previous presenter, social media guru Shel Holtz, and led a series of brainstorming activities with the participants about specific things they could do (short- and long-term) to meet some of the challenges being put up by these new media. I think the sessions went well.
I found out yesterday, through the magic of Google Alerts, the Bloomfield Hills AV team has released a video of that afternoon’s events. Here it is. I think they did a pretty good job of capturing, in around 30 minutes, all that occurred over a couple of hours that day. Sadly Vimeo does not let me embed the video so I am just providing a link to it here. Enjoy.
Back in January I was invited to speak at the Drexel Learning Games Network (DGLN) seminar series. As I had written in my original post (TPACK & Games @ Drexel), DLGN is the brainchild of Aroutis Foster, former graduate student, now rising star academic and researcher. As the DLGN website says
The Drexel Learning Games Network is made up of faculty and staff at Drexel University interested in game-based learning initiatives. It was established in the School of Education in Goodwin College with the goal of supporting teaching, researching, and designing of games for learning from K- to infinity.
I had mentioned that though I am not primarily a games and learning researcher, I have done some work in the area, primarily through collaborations with colleagues and students around MSU. I had a lot of fun constructing this talk, attempting to make some connections between my TPACK work and the idea of learning from games.
I see digital games as being an important part of learning – but in a somewhat different way than merely learning by playing games. In fact I have been somewhat skeptical of how one can use games for developing disciplinary knowledge. My experience has been that there is a fundamental tension in designing educational games – where the demands of designing engaging gameplay often conflict with the broader pedagogical goal of respecting the core concepts of the discipline or content to be covered. For instance a recent dissertation on how participants were learning Chinese from playing a massively multiplayer online role playing game (Zon) showed that my concerns were justified. Most participants focused on the gameplay rather than on the tasks that were connected with learning the language. I don’t think that finding this balance between gameplay and learning content is impossible to achieve – but that it is maybe the most important challenge faced by educational game designers.
I tried, in my presentation, to make some connections to learning from games by repurposing games – i.e. seeing their pedagogical potential outside of just playing with them. I of course used the TPACK framework as guiding my talk – but also brought in issues related to trans-disciplinary learning and design.
Last summer Matt and I created a couple of TPACK commercials for a video presentation we had been invited to make at ISTE in Denver. You can see the commercials here and here and the entire video here. Recently, Spyros Doukakis, a PhD candidate at the University of Aegean, Department of Primary Education, and also a secondary teacher of Mathematics at The American College of Greece, contacted us to let us know that he had added subtitles in Greek to one of the commercials! He also told us that he had been planning on translating and dubbing them into Greek – but for some reason felt that working on his PhD was more important! Really
So what we have below is a spoof-commercial created by a professor of Indian origin at an American university, starring a Turkish graduate student, subtitled by a graduate student in Greece! What an international production this is turning out to be. Mete Akcaoglu, a graduate student in our program, and the star of the video is on his way to international stardom! Enjoy.
For the past couple of years now, our family has been creating new year’s greetings using stop-motion video. This year was no exception. Here it is (on Vimeo)
A very wonderful holidays and a very happy new year to all of you,
from Shreya, Soham, Smita & Punya
You can see other videos made by us… just follow the links below:
Dr. Clare Kilbane, Associate Professor at Otterbein University in Westerville, Ohio recently created an enhanced podcast/vodcast explaining TPACK as a part of an ARRA grant implemented in the state of Ohio last spring. This podcast/vodcast was designed in the style of “podcasts created by Commoncraft (with permission from Lee LeFever of course).” It now available to view on Vimeo.
Also, students in the Curriculum Design and Educational Innovation program at Twente University have been blogging about their work with TPACK. I was informed of this by my friend Petra Fisser faculty member at Twente University, and the faculty lead on this course. I have had a long relationship with the faculty and students at Twente (see here and here and here). As an extension of this, Petra wanted me to comment on the student blogs – which was difficult given that there were 23(!) of them. What I did instead is read through all of them and send some feedback to the class as a whole. [I have included what I wrote at the end of this posting, just for the record.] I also promised to provide links to their blogs on my site, for other people to read. If you do visit these pages, take a moment to post a comment or a thought. I know it will be greatly appreciated by the students. Here are the links
Here is the feedback that I sent to the whole class.
Dear friends –
Thank you for inviting me to your class (albeit virtually). When Petra asked me to look over your blogs I said yes enthusiastically, and looked forward to reading and commenting on all of your posts. At that time, however, I did not realize that there were 23 blogs I had promised to look at and comment on. I have read all the posts but given my busy schedule, I realized it would be impossible to comment on every post and I didn’t want to post on some and not on others, so I decided to write this extended note to all of you.
Reading all your blog posts was great fun. It was good to see all the different yet similar takes on the TPACK framework. Clearly all of you have approached the topic quite thoughtfully and seriously. I was also pleased to see some of the examples you guys provided about examples of TPACK. TPACK has multiple uses, as an analytic framework for researchers (so that they can use it to study actual classrooms and what happens there) but as importantly as a tool for defining a better kind of practice. This is why the examples, the mindmaps, the images, the cartoons, all were great for me to see and read. In fact for most of the blogs I went ahead and read the posts about flexibility and pedagogy as well. So I got a great introduction to the course, though in a backward sequence (TPACK followed by pedagogy followed by Flexibility).
I think this idea of placing flexibility first in the sequence was a great one because it introduced you to what I think is the most crucial aspect of the TPACK framework – the idea that one can start with any of the three knowledge bases and still end up with an integrated curriculum design. And this requires flexibility, since once you include a new pedagogy in your thinking it will necessarily change how you think of how content is to be represented and what technologies can best do that. So what is important here is the end goal – that of integration rather than how you get there.
One misconception that seemed to see had to do with the conceptualization of TCK. TCK is often described/defined as or ability to match the technology to the subject matter content to achieve specific subject matter goals or learning outcomes. Though that is not wrong it is misses an important point regarding how technology (historically speaking) has shaped and changed the representations and cognitions in the disciplines. Be it physics or chemistry, art or music, new technologies have provided new ways of understanding and new ways of representing these understandings. Think of how the advent of fMRI, eye tracker technology, PET have led to flowering of the field we now called neuroscience! Thus TCK is more than the matching it is also understanding how technologies have changed content over time and this is important for teachers to know.
That’s all for now. I have truly enjoyed reading your blogs and I wish I had the time to post comments to each of you individually. I am writing this to you from 30,000 feet above sea level, from an airplane, as I fly from Detroit to Las Vegas for a conference. How awesome can technology be!
Another final piece of advice (or suggestion) is that each of you continue to maintain your blog. I have found writing to be the best way of thinking – often I don’t know what I think about a particular topic till I start writing a blog post about it. Suddenly things that seemed clear become vague and things that I hadn’t given much thought to come to the forefront. The discipline of writing and articulating what you are thinking (for a real audience) on a regular basis is a wonderful cognitive tool to have. I have been blogging for a couple of years now and frankly I blog not for any body else (I mean I love it when people comment on my posts) but that is not the reason I blog. I sincerely hope that these beginning steps that are taking in this new medium will not stop once the class if over and that your posts will not depend on an assignment given to you by a professor but rather will emerge from your own thinking and experience. And that will be awesome.
Thank you for listening to me and I look forward to future interactions, hopefully in Enschede sometime soon.
Here is the second of the two commercials created specially for our ISTE Radio/Video show. The first one (a take-off on the UPS/Whiteboard commercials can be seen here). Enjoy. As always, the director’s commentary is provided below.
The backstory: I have, for many years now, wanted to create a short video along the lines of the Mastercard “Priceless” commercials. I have had many different ideas, but never really got a chance to do so. So when I came up with the idea of the Radio/Video show for ISTE, I decided this was the time to go do it.
The activity shown here (with tennis balls, flip cams, markers and transparencies) is one that I have actually done multiple times, in venues around the world. This is a simple activity that exposes a fundamental misconception people have about how objects fall. The question I ask is where the tennis ball would fall if dropped by someone in three different conditions: standing still, walking or running. Most people say that the ball would fall at the feet in the first case (right answer), and behind the person in the other two cases (wrong answer). It turns out that the ball always falls at the feet of the person – assuming, of course, that the person keeps moving at the same speed after letting go of the ball. Why the ball does so has to do with Newton’s First Law, something many people can recite back to you, even while getting this question wrong.
After I get all the responses (and it is always amazing to me just how many people get it wrong), I ask people to go and create a video of the actual experiment. I typically give them 45 minutes to an hour to do the entire thing. There is something to be said for being able to see what “really” happens, to go frame-by-frame through it. It better than any physics lesson, this activity exposes people to just how wrong their intuitions were.
There are many layers to this assignment. In some cases I have had people tape a transparency sheet to their computer screens and then track the parabolic path of the ball. You can go ahead and measure the height of the person’s hand knowing the frame-rate of the video, actually calculate the value of g, acceleration due to gravity.
Anyway, that assignment became the core idea behind the video. The entire commercial was shot, narrated and edited one Sunday afternoon. I got a group of my daughter’s friends together and we shot the still frames of them dropping the ball and shooting the video. The script was narrated by my son. Despite multiple takes he could not correctly pronounce the word “pedagogy” so tweaked the script to drop that particular word (which of course meant that Technology and Content were out as well!). The tag line “There is some knowledge you are born with, for everything else there’s TPACK” emerged out a conversation with Matt Koehler.
Our ISTE Radio/Video show needed a few commercials to break the monotony – so we created a couple. Here is the first one, a take on the UPS / Whiteboard commercials. Watch and enjoy (director’s commentary provided below).
The idea for this video came from my wife, Smita. I was talking with her about possible commercials to spoof, and that we needed something that people would recognize right away. She suggested the UPS-whiteboard commercials and bingo! I knew this was the one. A bit of doodling on paper and watching some of the original commercials on YouTube later, the strong resemblance between the UPS logo and the intersection of the three circles (that make up TPACK) struck me. And, as they say, the rest just fell into place. One of the things nice about the UPS commercials is the manner in which the “long-haired guy” changes the image with little moves here and there. I think our version does the same, at two different levels. The first is the manner in which the seeming UPS logo is shown to really be the crucial meeting point of the three circles, and then, at the very end, how the color of the marker changes from green to red! Tiny touches but they make all the difference, if you ask me.
The star of the commercial is Mete Akcaoglu, a doctoral student in our program, selected for his hair (we needed someone with longer hair to correspond with the star of the actual commercials), his “cool” Turkish accent, and his acting ability. Essentially what happened was that Mete just happened to walk by my office and got immediately “volunteered” to be the star. Not that he had much choice I do think he did a great job.
We checked out a variety of places with whiteboards (meeting rooms etc.) but all of them had some problem or the other (excessive glare, strange reflections, and inadequate lighting). Finally, Leigh Wolf was gracious enough to lend us her office (even though, I am sure, it was a huge distraction). The commercial was filmed with a Flip camera and edited with iMovie. Matt Koehler found us the right music – and 20 minutes later, we had a final version.
You can see the commercial in “context” by going directly to the ISTE10 TPACK radio/video show, but be prepared to spend 15 minutes on the entire program.
Back in 2007, I was second author on a paper titled Teacher as Filmmaker, in which we described an approach to teacher professional development that involved teachers creating short, evocative movies, which we called iVideos. You can read the paper and abstract (below).
In our Masters program in Educational Technology at Michigan State University, K-12 teachers create “iVideos” – short, two-minute, digital videos designed to evoke powerful experiences about educative ideas. For example, an iVideo might enable viewers to experience the vastness of space, the interconnection between people and their environment, the timeless themes in great literature, and other compelling subject-matter ideas. How might these teacher-made iVideos serve as catalysts for teacher technology education and professional development? We describe the conceptual foundation of iVideos by building on the metaphor of teacher as filmmaker – an idea that highlights how teachers and filmmakers both strive to create powerful experiences for their audiences. In doing so, we argue that teachers are enabled to transform ideas and practice by immersing themselves in deep pedagogical consideration of subject-matter, significance, audience, learning, epistemology, and aesthetics. We also discuss how this approach develops teachers’ competency and efficacy with technology.
A week or so ago I received an email from Dr. Matthew Kearney, from University of Technology, Sydney informing us that, inspired by our work (as laid out in the above paper) students in their “pre-service teacher education elective class chose to make some ‘idea videos’ on a range of current issues in K-12 education.” You can see these movies by going to
It feels great to know that our work was useful (and even inspiring) to others. Dr. Kearney adds that:
I would like to invite any interested student teachers at MSU to view an ‘ivideo’ of interest from our gallery and leave their reactions as a ‘comment’ at the bottom of the relevant page. (Our student teacher ‘filmmakers’ will be monitoring these pages for any feedback / comments / questions on conceptual or technical aspects of their iVideos.)
PS Please feel free to forward this invitation to any other teacher education institutions / staff who may be interested in this exercise.
Please take a moment to check out these videos. They are quite well done and worth a moment of your time. Drop a comment if you can, it will mean a lot to the students.
I have written about the value of seeing humor in the futility of existence (see this and this) but humor can also be found in the existence of futility. Below is a motivational video that demonstrates this fact. Enjoy…
As the young man says, “You can do anything that you think that you can do.” Well, may be not!
I have been tracking the Hitler-Downfall parodies for over two years now and it seems that they keep getting better and better. But over the last few days comes the news that Constantin films, which owns the rights to the original movie asked YouTube to find and take down every video that included a clip from the film. So the parodies have been vanishing from YouTube, which is a tragedy for creative freedom and the the right to create and disseminate parodies. This was one of the funniest Internet memes, capable of delivering pitch-perfect commentary on everything from Hillary Clinton’s loss in the Democratic Primaries, to the fact that the iPad did not have a camera! Farhad Manjoo has a great article about this meme (and links to a couple of awesome parodies), titled: YouTube vs. Der Führer
One of the interesting points he makes about the Content ID technology that YouTube uses to identify copyright infringement. As he says:
At its heart, Content ID is like a souped-up version of the FBI’s fingerprinting database. The entertainment industry keeps sending YouTube new reference files for movies, TV shows, songs, video games, and other content. YouTube scans every new upload and the millions of videos in its database against each of these files. David King, a YouTube product manager, told me that the system can find extremely fuzzy matches. It can spot when a copyrighted video has been transformed in some way by an uploader—for instance, it can finger a basketball game even if you pause, rewind, and then replay a clip from it, and it can identify Eric Cartman if you record a clip of South Park by holding your camera up to your TV.
How amazing is that! Also Manjoo points out that one of the smartest things that Constantin films could have done is take advantage of this free publicity to run advertisements for the original movie/DVD. As Manjoo says,
Constantin never bothered to exercise its rights to run ads on the Downfall clips… according to YouTube, the vast majority of content owners who take part in Content ID are now recouping revenue from videos rather than pulling them down. Constantin would have earned a lot of money—not to mention avoided a lot of bad publicity—had it done the same thing.
It appears that some of the clips have started coming back, as users complain about their videos being taken down. YouTube policy automatically posts videos back if a copyright infringement claim is contested.
Personally, this has been a video / remix that has already given me hours of entertainment. It is a simple idea but with great potential and a wonderful example of the creative possibilities of giving people the opportunity to appropriate, mix and publish media.
From the Saline Schools, right here in Michigan, comes a video about how teachers and students are using cellphone in the classroom to enhance teaching and learning. Check it out
I have had a lot of fun this year playing with video. Most of these experiments were done with my kids (nothing like combining work with pleasure). One of the things we had done last year was a stop motion new year’s card. So we just HAD to create one this year as well. Enjoy!
[FYI: Links to last year's creations can be found below]
Best Wishes for 2010!
from Shreya, Soham, Smita & Punya!
Here is a list of other explorations in video made in the past year or so with family. As you may notice some of these movies (particularly the series Explore, Create, Share) are ones that I use in my teaching – nothing like getting your kids to do your work for you
Our family’s stop-motion animation festival continues with our latest offering: Finding Nemo, the sea-quel!! This movie was conceptualized by Shreya and filmed by all of us over a couple of days. What was interesting about this movie was just how many technologies got utilized in creating it (a complete list comes at the end of the movie) – and just how seamlessly these different tools could be integrated together. As we have been making these movies I have seen a greater level of sophistication and thinking from both my kids about the possibilities of stop-motion animation in particular and the visual aspects of telling a story through film. I can pretty much step back and let them do it. That has been fun to watch.
Anyway, before the movie, I need to give a shout out to our family friend, Amol Pavangadkar, who made all this possible by helping us create a really cool animation stand. We were inspired by this design and here it is, in use, by Shreya’s friends, as they made their animation movie.
So using this set up we have already created three movies. You can see the first one here, the new year’s card here and the third one below. Enjoy, Finding Nemo, the sea-quel!
Leigh Wolf, my partner in crime as far as the MAET program goes, recently presented at Ignite Lansing. She talked about her two passions, teaching and food (not sure which order to place these). Specifically she talked about food photography and the connections she sees between what she does there and her other life as an educator. It is a lovely presentation, and the video is now available on YouTube. Take a look.
Have you heard of the marshmallow experiment? It is a pretty famous experiment conducted at Stanford back in the 60′s. Walter Mischel a psychologist conducted this experiment on four-year olds in which the children were given one marshmallow and promised a second marshmallow if only they could wait 20 minutes before eating the first one. Turns out that some children could and others couldn’t wait. Following up on this study Mischel and his collaborators found that those who waited were better adjusted, dependable and, on some measures, more successful than those who could not delay gratification. In fact they found that these children scored an average of 210 points higher on the SAT!!
I had read of this experiment a while ago, it had also been the focus of a recent RadioLab segment and then I began running across a video titled Oh, The Temptation. As the director describes it he used, 2 Hidden Cameras, A bunch of Kids, 1 Marshmallow each to create this movie. He agrees that this was “not an original idea, but very fun to make.” And it is great fun to watch…
I am always looking for examples of looking at the world differently – of making the familiar strange and the strange familiar. This is of course connected with the veja du assignments I give my students.
I just came across a couple of very interesting video examples of this on the site LikeCOOL. This site has everything from after-office neckties, to inflatable boxing gloves… but in between these crazy things are some cool videos. Here are three (in increasing order of coolness):
Two robots made entirely using Lego Mindstorms NXT Retail-kit that can solve Sudoku problems and the Rubik’s Cube! How totally cool is that. LEGO Mindstorms is a line of Lego sets combining programmable bricks with electric motors, sensors, Lego bricks, and Lego Technic pieces (such as gears, axles, and beams). See Wikipedia article on Lego Mindstorms
See the videos below, and check out the website for the project: Tilted Twister
Sudoku Solver
Rubik’s Cube Solver
This is truly amazing… What is also great is that the designer also include directions for making these robots. I gotta get myself one of these
I had posted something similar here (from Bic to vase).
There is something deeper here than just cool design ideas though. What this video highlights is improvisation, creativity and a sense of play to repurpose artifacts for purposes other than what they had been designed for. In fact some of these designs find a use for what most of us would regard as trash.
It is this creative repurposing that is critical in this new world of teaching and technology (Technology Integration 2.0 and the TPACK framework). Teachers often look for the perfect technological solution to pedagogical problems they face. The fact is that there is no such perfect solution. In fact I argue that there is nothing like an educational technologies. Most technologies we regard as being educational in nature were not designed for this purpose. And yet, everything from a Excel spreadsheet to a Wiki; a GPS device to Audacity can serve as an educational technology, if appropriately repurposed! The sooner teachers realize that we live in a world where nothing is an educational technology…. and yet, everything has the potential to be. the better if will for all.
Scott McCloud over at Dangerously Irrelevant in his most recent post asks “Are our training efforts helping educators or enabling codependence?” This is a great question and one that all teacher educators with an interest in technology need to confront. I have always struggled with this – and varying levels of success in my own teaching (and in the MAET program I now direct). As he suggests what is needed is to develop a “willingness to probe, investigate, and experiment … [to] learn and master the tools.
It seems to me that videos such as this one highlight exactly the kind of free-form creativity we need to encourage in teachers: the ability to see a side-table in an old magazine, and a vase in a bic pen. It is only through similar creative repurposing that technologies can become educational technologies.
P.S. A key aspect of creative repurposing has to do with looking at the world with new eyes! Check out this movie titled SURFACE or Veja Du assignment on this very site.
As Steve says (you can read his full post here) such remixing can provide interesting opportunities for teachers, particularly given the extremely powerful tools we have access to today. Think for a moment about this video. Constructing it requires, clearly, a knowledge of the technology. This requires some level of effort to acquire but frankly that is not particularly daunting. However this technical knowledge is not enough. To create a piece such as this one, utilizing a variety of narrative devices as well as visual styles and tropes, requires having a sophisticated understanding of visual and cinematic styles, their history and meaning. However, this is not enough either. Most importantly, and possibly hardest to develop, a the soft touch the video show. This is exhibited in the subtle irony and humor and in the fact that the video does not try too hard. This soft touch is the mark of a true artist, a person comfortable in their knowledge, comfortable enough to be willing to play with it, to push it to its limits, and yet, sensitive to not going too far.
Teaching, in my opinion, with our without technology, is similar. One can know the techniques, but that is not enough. One can know their history and how they help make things meaningful. This is valuable but not enough either. It is only when we develop this soft touch, this “feeling for the organism” of teaching that true transformational teaching can occur. This is not easy to achieve – but a goal worthy of aspiring to.
My mashup of a commercial has been on YouTube for a while and just yesterday I noticed that someone had left a very thoughtful comment… and that comment got me thinking… and hence this posting.
To start with, if you haven’t seen the videos here they are again.
Here is the original commercial:
And my response:
The comment by user witchyrichy to my mashup was as follows:
Nice mashup…but I’m not sure that I agree that a lecture is still a lecture. The technology makes it possible to break that lecture into segments, review different sections, and even, as you did here, cut and paste the important pieces into something new. I listened to a talk by Steinem through Yale’s itunes site: yes, it was a lecture but it was one I would have never heard otherwise, one I could share with others, etc. So, a lecture isn’t always a lecture, imho.
I think the witchyrichy makes a really good point here and something that had been nagging me a bit. What is somewhat ironic is that Matt Koehler and I have been trying for the past year or so to develop a new form of presentation, one that takes a lecture and makes it dynamic. A good example would be the keynote we gave at the SITE 2008 conference Thinking Creatively, Teachers as Designers of Technology, Pedagogy & Content. We “appropriated” a bunch of ideas from Larry Lessig and Dick Hardt (and in the case of the SITE keynote, Steven Colbert!).
To add (self)-insult to irony, I have blogged about lectures and how they can be creatively constructed previously here. Read my earlier posting about The 60 second lecture.
To sum it up, it appears that I may have gone a bit overboard with my critique of a lecture. That said, the larger point I was trying to make in my mashup, about a lecture not necessarily being the best use of technology for teaching, still stands.
A few months ago I had created a video mashup of a commercial (see the original and my mashup here). This video ended with three key words, encouraging people to Explore, Create, Share! I then got the idea for creating short videos to represent these three ideas.
I also set some constraints on myself. First, these videos would be short! This meant each video would be between 30 seconds to a minute in length. Second, these videos would be, as far as possible, one continuous shot with minimal post-production and editing. Third, these videos would always end with a typographical representation of the word. Fourth, and finally, these videos would have some kind of a “surprise” at the end.
I was helped in my task by my kids and my cousin Sonny Mishra who composed three original clips of music for the three videos. Sonny has done an amazing job. All three pieces of music are unique, attempting to express musically the theme of the video. That said, all three pieces have a certain family resemblance, so that they all sound connected somehow, at a deeper level.
I have been working on these videos, off and on, with my kids for the past few weeks. We have created original videos for two of the three themes, Explore and Create. Here is the one on Explore (the video on Create can be seen here).
Though I liked what we had come up with for Explore, I also felt that the video was flawed. Essentially, everything happens so quickly that it is difficult to see, till the end, what the objects are that were picked up from the basket. This I felt, robbed some of the impact of the video. So we decided to shoot it again in a slightly different manner. Did it work? Find out for yourself by seeing 7 tools… one big job!. Another change was that this time my daughter was the performer!
What do you think?
(Other videos created by me, with our without my kids, can be seen here.)
One of the many things I have to do as a faculty member is review grant proposals. This is an important service to the field, but truth be told, given how busy I am I do see it as somewhat of a chore. I was recently reviewing some educational research proposals for a grant giving agency – and I was struck by something that led to this post. (I guess, it is less of a chore if it leads to a blog-post!).
I must say, without giving too much away, that these proposals were broadly related to education and not restricted to just the field of educational technology. That said there were two that were directly technology related, one having to do with virtual partners and the other with webbased learning. It is not surprising that these two would focus on technology directly.
What was surprising however was just how infused with technology all the other projects were. In each of these “non-tech” proposals various forms of technology were used for every aspect of the research from the kinds of information being collected, to how the information was collected; from how the informaiton was analyzed to how it would be reported and disseminated. For instance, there were studies on probing athletes cognition using fFMRI technologies, and another on collabrating across continents using webcams. There was one study that handed student-teachers Flip cameras to help them create digital stories, and subscriptions to surveymonkey or specialized statistical analysis packages!
What this shows clearly is just how fundamentally how we conduct research (in the field of education) has changed with these new digital technologies. And it has changed not in some flashy “pay attention to me, I’m so cool!” kind of a way but in a more insidious and sneaky manner (but no less revolutionary for that). These technologies have become transparent to the researchers – and are just seen as being part of what they do. Now I am sure this is not something unique to education. This is happening in each and every discipline from astronomy to zoology. What this means is that our disciplinary relationship to the world is now mediated through these new tools and devices. Read the rest of this entry »
Over the past couple of weeks my kids and I have been working on a series of short videos around these three words. The first one we made was around the idea of “Explore,” titled To see .. or not to see.
We created the second one, around the idea “create” this afternoon. Soham suggested calling it Emergence (the title of a Radio Lab podcast we had been listening to a few days ago).
Original music for this series was created by my cousin, Sonny Mishra.
You may notice a certain level of self-plagiarism going on here. We had created a similar video as a new year’s card (see it here). But the idea worked so beautifully for the theme… it would be a shame not to use it. Imitation as they say, is the sincerest form of self-flattery
(Other videos created by me, with our without my kids, can be seen here.)
I have been working with my kids on a series of short videos around the themes of Explore, Create, Share. These three words were used in my video mashup of a commercial (see the commercial AND my mashup here). Original music for this series was created by my cousin, Sonny Mishra.
The first of the set is now ready and up on YouTube. Check out Explore: To see .. or not to see.
(Other videos created by me, with our without my kids, can be seen here.)
I have come across some new TPACK related videos/podcasts (either on youtube or elsewhere) that I feel may be worth sharing. Read the rest of this entry »
