One Day, One World, United by Film

in Film | April 30th, 2008

In 2006, doc­u­men­tary film­mak­er Jehane Nou­jaim (Con­trol Room) made a wish at the TED con­fer­ence (see below) — for world peace. For Nou­jaim, peace starts with cul­tur­al exchange, with get­ting to know one anoth­er. And since we all can’t trav­el, anoth­er way to achieve this is through film and its abil­i­ty to “take you into new worlds” and “across bor­ders.”

Two years lat­er, Nou­jaim’s wish may come true, and the uni­fy­ing pow­er of film will be put to the test. May 10 marks Pangea Day, a day when peo­ple from around the world (from Mum­bai and Cairo to Kigali, Rio and LA) will come togeth­er and watch the same films made by var­i­ous inter­na­tion­al film­mak­ers. “Watch par­ties” will be held world­wide, and the event will be broad­cast via web­cast and mobile phone. Below, we’ve also post­ed a movie trail­er intro­duc­ing the con­cept of Pangea Day. For more infor­ma­tion, click here. (Thanks Natasha for the heads up.)

Nou­jaim at TED

Pangea Day Trail­er

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Teaching on YouTube Goes Viral

in YouTube | April 30th, 2008

Last week, Alexan­dra Juhasz con­tributed a guest piece review­ing her exper­i­men­tal efforts to make YouTube an effec­tive teach­ing tool. And it did­n’t take long for the web to take notice. Soon after we post­ed her review, The Wired Cam­pus (Chron­i­cle of High­er Edu­ca­tion) took an angle on the piece. Next, the ven­er­a­ble Ars Tech­ni­ca used the post as a spring­board for its own sum­ma­ry. And final­ly, that sto­ry soon reached the home­page of Digg.com, which inevitably meant that Alexan­dra’s piece got picked up by umpteen small­er blogs. It’s always fun to watch the rip­ple effects of the web go through their motions.

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Body of War: Paralyzed in Iraq and the Long Road Back

in Current Affairs, Film | April 27th, 2008

On the Amer­i­can home front, the Iraq war has entered its apa­thet­ic phase. The war con­tin­ues to grind on, but the mis­sion gets far less news ink than before, and the debate over the war’s mer­its and tac­tics rarely gets hashed back through. That’s per­haps because many have decid­ed to men­tal­ly park the issue until a new admin­is­tra­tion takes over next year. Or because declin­ing home prices and ris­ing food and gas costs have elbowed the Iraq issue aside. Unde­terred, Phil Don­ahue and Ellen Spiro have co-direct­ed a new doc­u­men­tary called Body of War. Being released in US the­aters this month, the doc­u­men­tary (fea­tur­ing music arranged by Eddie Ved­der) tracks the dai­ly life of Tomas Young, a sol­dier shot and par­a­lyzed dur­ing his first week of fight­ing in Iraq, and it gives you a rare glimpse into the dif­fi­cult road that Young and oth­ers have had to trav­el. All of this makes tan­gi­ble some­thing that the cor­po­ra­tized media has­n’t cov­ered much — the real human costs of this war. To date, 4,361 Amer­i­can sol­diers have died in Iraq; over 30,000 have been injured in hos­tile action; and sui­cides of return­ing vets have report­ed­ly risen to alarm­ing rates. Below, we have post­ed the trail­er for the film. In addi­tion, I’d point you to this recent pod­cast by Bill Moy­ers (iTunes — Feed — Web Site), which intro­duces you to Tomas Young, Phil Dono­hue, Ellen Spiro and the film they made.

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The Story Behind Ansel Adams’ Famous Yosemite Shots

in Art | April 26th, 2008

The New York Times is run­ning an inter­ac­tive fea­ture that will give you the back­sto­ry behind Ansel Adams’ icon­ic pho­tos tak­en at Yosemite Nation­al Park. Just click on the indi­vid­ual images on this page, and you’ll get a dif­fer­ent sto­ry. (Also see the Times’ accom­pa­ny­ing piece: What Adams Saw Through His Lens.)

Relat­ed Con­tent 

Learn the Art of Pho­tog­ra­phy: The Nikon Way

How Cam­era Lens­es are Made

The Best Pho­to­blogs of 2007

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Grateful Dead Donates Archive to UC Santa Cruz

in Music | April 26th, 2008

Sur­viv­ing mem­bers of the Grate­ful Dead announced Thurs­day that they will be donat­ing their archives to UC San­ta Cruz. This pod­cast (Feed — Web Site), fea­tur­ing Bob Weir and Mick­ey Hart (among oth­ers), gives you insight into the think­ing behind this move…

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Scott Sigler’s Infected: Free via Podcast, $16.47 on Amazon

in Audio Books | April 24th, 2008

Hor­ror/s­ci-fi fans, here you go… Scott Sigler’s new and very well-reviewed thriller, Infect­ed, can be down­loaded for free via pod­cast (iTunes — Feed — Web site). Or you can get it in hard­back for $16.47, which I’m not dis­cour­ag­ing you from doing.

With the links above, you can down­load more free books from Sigler. But, I warn you that the books con­tain a good dose of graph­ic lan­guage.

Check out our exten­sive col­lec­tion of Free Audio­books here.

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Thomas Friedman (While Not Dodging Eco-Pies) Argues “Green is the New Red, White & Blue”

in Current Affairs, Stanford | April 23rd, 2008

Speak­ing at Brown Uni­ver­si­ty ear­li­er this week, Thomas Fried­man had to deal with some unfor­tu­nate extra-cur­ric­u­lar activ­i­ties. As he took the stage, two stu­dents call­ing them­selves the “Green­wash Gueril­las” launched pies (video here) at Fried­man and large­ly missed. But they did leave behind some pam­phlets spelling out their motives. Accord­ing to The Brown Dai­ly Her­ald, the Pulitzer Prize-win­ning jour­nal­ist for The New York Times deserved this dis­rup­tion because of “his sick­en­ing­ly cheery applaud for free mar­ket cap­i­tal­is­m’s con­quest of the plan­et” and “for help­ing turn envi­ron­men­tal­ism into a fake plas­tic con­sumer prod­uct for the priv­i­leged.” Some­where the giants of rev­o­lu­tion­ary rhetoric are gri­mac­ing and won­der­ing what hap­pened to their once well prac­ticed art.

Now that I’ve got your atten­tion, I want to point you to a talk that Fried­man gave last year at Stan­ford — Green is the New Red, White and Blue (iTunes). The talk takes you into the heart of Fried­man’s com­plex think­ing about the envi­ron­ment (and all that the Green Gueril­las odd­ly take issue with). And it’s pre­sent­ed with the same intel­li­gence that you’ll find on dis­play in the sec­ond most down­loaded pod­cast on iTunes U: The World is Flat. (This sec­ond talk was pre­sent­ed at MIT, and it’s only exceed­ed in pop­u­lar­i­ty by Randy Pausch’s soul­ful lec­ture, “Real­ly Achiev­ing Your Child­hood Dreams,” which we fea­tured on Mon­day.) Fried­man’s think­ing in the Stan­ford pod­cast (give it a lis­ten, you’ll be bet­ter for it) lays the foun­da­tion for his new book due out in August — Hot, Flat, and Crowd­ed: Why We Need a Green Revolution–and How It Can Renew Amer­i­ca.

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Lifehack for Learning Foreign Languages

in Language Lessons | April 22nd, 2008

Here is a quick “life­hack” for you. You can now learn for­eign lan­guages and stay cur­rent on pol­i­tics all at once. How so? By tak­ing advan­tage of a smart pod­cast con­cept being used by French and Ger­man broad­cast­ers. Radio France Inter­na­tionale (RFI) issues a dai­ly pro­gram called Le Jour­nal en français facile (iTunes — feed — web site), which deliv­ers the night­ly inter­na­tion­al news in slow and easy-to-under­stand French. Along the same lines, the Ger­man media com­pa­ny Deutsche Welle (which puts out many great lan­guage and music pro­grams) also has its own night­ly news pro­gram — Langsam gesproch­ene Nachricht­en (iTunes — feed — web site). It’s essen­tial­ly the same con­cept: infor­ma­tive news pre­sent­ed in very sim­ple Ger­man, and, in this case, it’s spo­ken very slow­ly.

Now, what’s very nice about these pro­grams is that they also pro­vide a writ­ten tran­script of the spo­ken word. So you can read along as you lis­ten and make sure that you’re real­ly com­pre­hend­ing. (See tran­scripts in French and Ger­man). Even cool­er, with the Ger­man ver­sion, if you have a video iPod, you can read the tran­script on your lit­tle portable screen. (See direc­tions).

Final­ly, check out this off­beat sug­ges­tion sent our way by a read­er: Nun­tii Lati­ni (mp3 — web site) is “a week­ly review of world news in Clas­si­cal Latin, the only inter­na­tion­al broad­cast of its kind in the world, pro­duced by YLE, the Finnish Broad­cast­ing Com­pa­ny.”

To learn more lan­guages, please vis­it our com­plete col­lec­tion Learn Lan­guages for Free: Span­ish, Eng­lish, Chi­nese & Beyond.

Relat­ed Resource: See our arti­cle called “Cof­fee Break Span­ish & The Threat to Tra­di­tion­al Media”

Teaching on YouTube

in Most Popular, YouTube | April 22nd, 2008

Today, we have a guest fea­ture by Alexan­dra Juhasz, Pro­fes­sor of Media Stud­ies at Pitzer Col­lege, in Clare­mont, CA. This piece con­sol­i­dates length­i­er blog entries about a course she ran on YouTube, called “Learn­ing from YouTube,” in Fall 2007. The whole goal was to bet­ter under­stand this new media/cultural phe­nom­e­non, and how it can be used in the class­room. How did she set up this class? And what did she learn? Find out below. Take it away Alexan­dra (and feel free to check out our YouTube playlist as well as our piece, 60 Smart Video Col­lec­tions on YouTube) .…

I decid­ed to teach a course about YouTube to bet­ter under­stand this recent and mas­sive media/cultural phe­nom­e­non, giv­en that I had been stu­dious­ly ignor­ing it (even as I rec­og­nized its sig­nif­i­cance) because every time I went there, I was seri­ous­ly under­whelmed by what I saw: inter­change­able, bite-sized, for­mu­la­ic videos refer­ring either to pop­u­lar cul­ture or per­son­al pain/pleasure. I called them video slo­gans: pithy, pre­cise, rous­ing calls to action or con­sump­tion, or action as con­sump­tion. I was cer­tain, how­ev­er, that there must be video, in this vast sea, that would sat­is­fy even my lofty stan­dards, and fig­ured my stu­dents (giv­en their greater facil­i­ty with a life-on-line) prob­a­bly knew bet­ter than I how to nav­i­gate the site.

Learn­ing From YouTube was my first tru­ly “stu­dent led” course: we would deter­mine the impor­tant themes and rel­e­vant meth­ods togeth­er. I had decid­ed that I want­ed the course to pri­mar­i­ly con­sid­er how web 2.0 (in this case, specif­i­cal­ly YouTube) is rad­i­cal­ly alter­ing the con­di­tions of learn­ing (what, where, when, how we have access to infor­ma­tion). Giv­en that col­lege stu­dents are rarely asked to con­sid­er the meta-ques­tions of how they learn, on top of what they are learn­ing, I thought it would be ped­a­gog­i­cal­ly use­ful for the form of the course to mir­ror YouTube’s struc­tures for learn­ing, like its ama­teur-led ped­a­gogy. Yes, on YouTube there is a great deal of user con­trol, but this is with­in a lim­it­ed and also high­ly lim­it­ing set of tools. So, I did set forth the rule that all the learn­ing for the course had to be on and about YouTube. While this con­straint was clear­ly arti­fi­cial, and per­haps mis­lead­ing about how YouTube is used in con­nec­tion with a host of oth­er media plat­forms which com­ple­ment its func­tion­al­i­ty, it did allow us to become crit­i­cal­ly aware of the con­straints of its archi­tec­ture for our atyp­i­cal goals of high­er edu­ca­tion. Thus, all assign­ments had to be pro­duced as YouTube com­ments or videos, all research had to be con­duct­ed with­in its pages, and all class­es were taped and put on to YouTube. This gim­mick, plus a press release, made the course sexy enough to catch the eye of the media, main­stream and oth­er­wise, allow­ing for an exhaust­ing, but self-reflex­ive les­son in the role and val­ue of media atten­tion with­in social net­work­ing. Beyond this, stu­dents quick­ly real­ized how well trained they actu­al­ly are to do aca­d­e­m­ic work with the word—their expertise—and how poor is their media-pro­duc­tion lit­er­a­cy (there were no media pro­duc­tion skills required for the course as there are not on YouTube). (more…)

Encyclopedia Britannica Now Free For Web Publishers

in Media | April 21st, 2008

Thanks to a new pro­gram called Bri­tan­ni­ca Web­share, web pub­lish­ers — be they blog­gers, web­mas­ters, or writ­ers who post fre­quent­ly on the web — can now get free online access to Bri­tan­ni­ca and its 65,000 arti­cles. Nor­mal­ly, this ser­vice runs $70 per year. For more info, read TechCrunch’s scoop on the new ini­tia­tive. To sign up, click here.

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