Room With A View

I’m not a fan of video podcasts or vodcasts as some people call them. I enjoy listening to podcasts but watching someone sit in front of his computer and yak, just doesn’t work for me. That is until I discovered The Show with Ze Frank. I’m a little late to the party on this one.

Ze Frank is a humourist, satirist, musician, and web designer that set out in March 2006 to produce a video podcast each weekday for a year. I found myself at his site after reading a reference on a tech site. What got me watching his show was his use of his camera. Though Ze sits in front of his computer and yaks, the images are not static. Careful and quick camera changes make his work visually interesting. His sense of humour is what keeps me going back each day.

It has an “explicit” tag at Apple’s podcast directory so teachers will have to be careful which episode they use with students but it’s worth a look for those that have older students and kids using video. For those teaching media studies the following the show has garnered is fascinating. Fans of the show are known as “sports racers” and each show is introduced by a sports racer. Racers record their intros and send them into Ze’s wiki. Another phenomena is the sports racer Running Fool. Running Fool is making his way across the US by being passed from one sports racer to the next. He’s totally reliant on sports racers for his transportation and accommodation. It seems to be working.

Lively camera work, quirky humour and a new twist to audience participation make The Ze Frank Show worth a look. The whole thing may turn out to be no more real than The Lonely Girl but hey, it’s no less real than reality TV.

This Wired article is for film buffs everywhere. It’s a story about a company called DTS Digital Images and the man behind it all–John Lowry. Lowry and his company take old movie footage and restore it using digital film scanners and 700 Macs. The company’s list of restored films include the Star Wars trilogy, James Bond films, and many others.

As a teacher I especially enjoyed the last paragraph.

When asked how he landed here, Lowry’s expression turns serious. “I have dyslexia,” he says. “I didn’t read my first book until I was 30.” He pauses, and then smiles. “I’m a picture person.”

Christopher Dawson at ZDNet’s Education IT Blog quotes an ETS study that suggests that kids are not as tech-savvy as we sometimes think. He ends his piece by saying

This ability to think critically can’t be replaced by the order of
search results in Google. It’s time to stop teaching outdated research
skills to students who will never use them. A focus on memorization in
a world where everything we need to remember is a few keystrokes away
is senseless. Rather, a curriculum that focuses intensively on the
ability to evaluate, use, and communicate a wide variety of information
is vital to creating a new generation of skilled, thoughtful members of
an information-driven society.

His post is worth some thought though I’m not certain it’s the student’s IT skills which are questionable. It’s their ability to think critically–or lack there of–that is of concern. The inability to think critically is not the fault of technology. Critical thinking and the challenge of teaching it goes back to the Greeks. What makes the ability to think critically about information so important now is that we have so much information at our finger tips. We need to be discerning users of information.

On the blog Between The Lines Ed Gottsman writes about an 18-year-old that had his friends film him as he stole a pair of glasses. They later posted the video to YouTube. The police were able to use the video to catch the guy. All around it was a pretty stupid thing to do but it raises the point that kids don’t always realize that what they post on-line is viewable by everyone. There are lots of examples which show that many kids don’t realize the impact of what they put on-line. As educators we need to help them be more aware.