Sadly, the world lost David Foster Wallace, in 2008. Fortunately, his writings live on. Recently his thoughtful 2005 Kenyon College commencement address was given new life in “This is Water” a video by The Glossary.
Wallace concludes: It is about the real value of a real education, which has almost nothing to do with knowledge, and everything to do with simple awareness; awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time, that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over. This is water.
Read his full address here. Listen to his full address here.
I was streaming a show on Hulu last night and saw this ad for Intermezzo sleep medication. (Video below)
I was amused by the disparity between the cute animation and the ominous narration of the mandated health warning. I thought this would make a good exercise to illustrate techniques in “close reading” and demonstrate the approach advocated by William Kist’s in New Literacies and the Common Core Educational Leadership ASCD March 2013.
Close reading requires students to consider text (in it’s different forms) through three lenses: what does it say, how does it say it, and what does it mean to me?
Here’s the steps to follow:
Visual elements: Turn the sound off on your computer and watch the Intermezzo commercial (below). Make a list of visual details you observe – character, mood, lighting, editing, set design, shot composition.
Narration: Now turn the sound on and listen to the soundtrack without looking at the screen. Outline the verbal information given about the product in a T-chart. List benefits on one side and possible adverse effects on the other.
Musical soundtrack: Listento the ad without watching the screen again. This time focus on the musical soundtrack – instrumentation, tempo, mood. Write some adjectives that come to mind while listening to the ad (ignoring the narration.)
Compare your three lists – visual elements, narration and musical soundtrack. Be ready to use specific textual evidence to defend the observations in your lists. Here’s a few guiding questions to consider:
How do your three lists compare? To what extent do the visual elements, narration and musical soundtrack reinforce (or contradict) each other?
What do you think the ad’s creators were trying to communicate?
What artistic and narrative choices did the creators make to communicate their message?
How successfully did the ad sell the product? Would you consider using this product? Why?
Drug companies are required by the FDA to list all a drug’s possible risks. What impact does that requirement have on the content of this ad?
Congratulations – you’ve been exploring Common Core: Reading Standards for Literature, Integration of Knowledge and Ideas, Standard 7, Grade 7. Compare and contrast a written story, drama, or poem to its audio, filmed, staged, or multimedia version, analyzing the effects of techniques unique to each medium (for example, lighting, sound, color, or camera focus and angles in a film).
Reading Standards for Informational Text, Integration of Knowledge and Ideas, Standard 7, Grades 11–12. Evaluate the advantages and disadvantages of using different mediums (for example, print or digital text, video, multimedia) to present a particular topic or idea.
If a question has a correct answer, is it worth asking?
If something is “Googleable” why would we spend precious class time teaching it?
When we ask students to summarize, do we actually want to know what’s important to them?
What do you suppose students think they are supposed to be doing when we ask them to analyze?
Do you ever ask your students questions you don’t know the answer to? Why not?
Here’s a TEDxCreativeCoast video – The Future Will Not Be Multiple Choice – that answers those questions and showcases the power of a PBL / design-based approach to learning. Turn curricula into design challenges, classrooms into workshops and teach students to think like designers.
While you watch it, try to think of a meaningful career that looks like filling out a worksheet.
Note: Since I first publishing this post, I took the leap and updated to iBA 2.0. (Of course, I had to because iTunes only accepts new books created in iBA 2.) I published three books in the new software and was also able to successfully open iBA 1.0 files in 2.0 and even copy widgets and other content from 1.0 to 2.0.
Over the last few months I’ve been blogging regularly about my iBooks Author (iBA) learning curve and the production of my first iBook. Along the way I have come to rely on the advice of Dr. Frank Lowney Projects Coordinator, Digital Innovation Group @ Georgia College.
BTW – Frank published The Coming ePublishing Revolution in Higher Education on iTunes. It’s an insightful guide to etextbook revolution – winners, losers, and the factors that will determine the outcome. (67 pages, 20 graphics, 28 media files, 25 video files and 5 interactive widgets.) A bargain at only $0.99!
Frank’s been most generous with his time and advice on technical aspects of formatting videos for use in iBooks Author. Recently he contacted me about some troubling features in the new iBA 2.0 which I summarized in a post – Read This Before You Upgrade to iBooks Author 2.0. As a result of that post, I was contacted by Jay Welshofer (Apple’s Senior Product Manager for iBooks Author and Keynote) who has been working with Frank to better understand the video encoding issues with iBA 2.0.
Rather than expose my veneer of understanding of video technology, let me quote some of my correspondence with Frank so that others can benefit.
I begin with three questions I posed to Frank about iBA 2.0 video optimizer ~ Frank’s replies:
1. Does it do an acceptable job on quality? (a bit of a change from your earlier appraisal) ~ Yes, the quality is quite good if the source is good. I haven’t yet done a lot of testing with lower quality source but that’s on the todo list.
2. Does it increase file size ? ~ Absolutely. The bloat is up to three times the size of what Handbrake outputs with no appreciable difference in video quality.
3. Does it wipe out subtitle tracks ~ Every time. Alternate audio tracks and chapter tracks too. Of course, chapter tracks are not relevant to iOS video except in the Videos.app which has an interface for chapters that is separate from playback. Older versions of quicktime presented chapters as a drop down menu in the controller which lends itself to all kinds of neat pedagogical uses.
To reinforce his point Frank ran a test video conversion comparing iBA 2.0 and Handbrake and supplied a video sample of each. He writes:
Dear Peter and Jay,
I have been unable to reliably replicate my initial report where video quality was significantly lessened by the IBA media optimizer. Actually, this optimizer does a pretty good job of maintaining video quality no matter what you throw at it.
However, there is still the problem of file size bloat that started this whole line of investigation back in the IBA v1 days. As you’ll recall, IBA would reject many videos and recommend re-encoding in QuickTime Player and that would create files 2-3 times larger. This was a concern to many IBA users due to the 2 GB limit on iBooks in the iBookstore.
Back then, the workaround was to tweak the output of more efficient systems such as Handbrake such that IBA wouldn’t reject them. Now, with IBA v2, the use of QuickTime is no longer optional and the file size bloat issue is with us again. The new workaround is to use the video replacement surgery tactic that I described earlier. It’s a bit more daunting than the earlier workaround because you could break the whole iBook just by getting the name of one video file wrong, a typo for example.
As promised, I’ve constructed a hardball case documenting this issue as follows. An executive summary in the form of a screencast comparing the iBooks Author encode to the Handbrake encode will have more general interest. Here it is:
The source file came from a “pro” level HD DV camera and was provided to us as a ~16 GB DVCPRO HD file at 720p. As you can see from the video, iBooks Author encoded this as a 1.5 GB file (causing a warning about the 2 GB limit) whereas Handbrake 0.98 (Apple TV 3 preset) produced a 532 MB file, a third of what IBA produced. Also evident in the video should be the fact that there is no discernible difference in size or quality.
BTW, I used QuickTime Player 7.6 for this demo because it can play two or more videos sychronously allowing much better qualitative analysis. QuickTime X Player cannot do this.
This clever and fast-paced 6-minute animation provides insights into how teenagers learn. An “insider’s guide” to the teenage brain, it answers the question – “If you were a teenage speaker brought in to address a crowd of teachers on the subject of how you and your peers learn best . . . what would you say?”
Done in hand-drawn whiteboard / voiceover format it sets out eight essentials for learning, including my favorite – reflection. Share it with your students and see if they concur or use it as a discussion starter for your next faculty meeting.
