I love reading. I love watching movies. I love over-analyzing books and movies, seeking to find pattern and structure, motifs and motives. I love to break them down in my mind and put them back together again. I read reviews of books and movies by the ton, sometimes...
The greatness of teachers
I discovered Hulu TV a few weeks ago and have been using it to catch up on previous episodes of The Daily Show. I decided today, as I was working on a presentation to watch Crawford. It is a documentary about "a small town thrust into big politics when George W. Bush...
Wong, Mishra, Koehler & Adams (2007)
Wong, D., Mishra, P., Koehler, M.J., & Adams, S. (2007). Teacher as Filmmaker: iVideos, Technology Education, and Professional Development. To appear in M. Girod & J. Steed (Eds.), Technology in the college classroom. Stillwater, Oklahoma: New Forums Press. Abstract:...
Brilliant advertisement
I don't want to give anything away... watch it once and then once more... [Youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQbl1c63Ofo]
Feeling ignored by Warner Bros.
Amol just sent me this BBC story titled: Warner 'sues over Puttar movie.' That makes me so angry! How come Warner Bros is not suing me... As the BBC story says Harry Potter maker Warner Bros is suing an Indian film company over the title of upcoming film Hari Puttar -...
Life is about editing
A fun and thought provoking, recursive music video by Allee Willis titled "Editing is Cool." The video attempts to capture the process of creating this very video, from the lyrics, to the music to the special effects and so on. Denise Caruso (at Salon) quotes Allee...
The story of stuff
Check out Story of Stuff or watch the movie... [youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ucMJ32-xp64] For the new version of CEP817 or maybe even CEP917
What do they know? Video projects on understanding
In my summer classes I have the participants complete a video assignment on understanding. This year as always my students worked in groups over a week-and-a-half to select their topics, develop interview protocols, video tape people as they answered their questions,...
Manoranjan ka baap
The Indian Premier League, Twenty20 cricket championship was a great success. I had a chance to watch a few games (including the finals and semi-finals) when I was in india and it was a blast. This posting however is about an extremely creative commercial for the IPL...
France Sings for USA
In a previous post I talked about Pangea Day and the Imagine anthem series, where people from one country sing the national anthem of another. Here's another one, France sings for the USA. Enjoy. [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3T60NaNPiMg[/youtube]
Kenya sings India for Pangea Day
NYTimes technology columnist, David Pogue, has a recent blog entry about Pangea Day, a global film festival coming up in a few days. As he says in his note: Pangea Day endeavors to bring the world together and promote understanding and tolerance through film. Over...
2001, 40 years after
Musings on local newspaper headlines, 2001 A Space Odyssey, media and creativity, and ending with some thoughts on the meaning of life... a lot to fit into one blog post but again I had the weekend to work on this. I read our local newspaper, the Lansing State Journal...
The brilliantly twisted mind of PES
I discovered PES a couple of years ago when searching for examples of stop motion animation on the web. One glimpse of his work and I was smitten. Combine a prefect sense of timing and shot composition with a whimsical and surrealistic point of view and you get some...
Clint Eastwood at war
I just finished watching Clint Eastwood's two Iwo Jima movies: Flags of our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima. Clint Eastwood is an individual who I have come to respect a great deal. His evolution from the somewhat rabid "Make my day" vigilante to the nuanced and...
And the winner is…
The Oscars got one thing right tonight: Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova for the song, Falling Slowly from the movie Once. I saw this movie a couple of weeks ago, during my trip to New Orleans, and loved every moment of it. I heard that they had been nominated for...
Taare Zameen Par
Taare Zameen Par (loosely translated as "Stars on the earth") is a new movie produced and directed by Aamir Khan, one of Bollywood's biggest stars. He also acts in it. What is unique about this movie is that despite its Bollywood trappings, it is a somewhat serious...