• The technology is secondary. One has to have an ear for music/audio.
• The technology is always changing. One has to always be learning.
• People skills are as important as technical skills–maybe more so.
• One has to be entrepreneurial. There’s no job security.

Rip: A Remix Manifesto takes a different view. Instead it suggests that culture has always been built by building on the work of others. It’s just been in the last 30 years or so that copyright laws have made it illegal.

Food for thought.

Lately, my son and I have been working on separate video projects. As a result, hard drive space has been at a premium. GrandPerspective is an open source utility that graphically shows what’s taking up space on a hard drive. When I first heard about it I thought it sounded goofy but after giving it a try it’s great. (Pictures work for me.) It showed me quickly what was taking up all the space on my drive. Some of the files I didn’t need and so just deleted them. Others I burned to dvd. I went from using 96 gigs on my hard drive to 55 in no time. It’s well worth checking out.

(Thanks to Bob LeVitus and Chuck Joiner at the MacNotables podcast for this.)

beginning to attract those who believe that cinema isn’t so much a profession as the professional language of the future.

Ms. Elizabeth Daley, the dean of the University of Southern California’s School of Cinema-Television comments that

filmic skills are too valuable to be confined to movie world professionals.

She goes on to say that

“The greatest digital divide is between those who can read and write
with media, and those who can’t,” Ms. Daley said. “Our core knowledge
needs to belong to everybody.”

We live in a media rich world. We need to recognize this in the way we teach and learn.

Thanks to David Warlick for getting me thinking this morning.

Robert Thompson read a blog entry by Philip Greenspun where Greenspun wrote about his frustration with a charity that supposedly bought water buffaloes for people. Robert Thompson lives in rural China. He offered to buy Greenspun a water buffalo and give it to a needy family. Greenspun took him up on his offer. The Water Buffalo Movie is Thompson’s account of the story.

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.