TPACK commercial II, Mastercard “Priceless”

by | Tuesday, July 13, 2010

Here is the second of the two commercials created specially for our ISTE Radio/Video show. The first one (a take-off on the UPS/Whiteboard commercials can be seen here). Enjoy. As always, the director’s commentary is provided below.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WPTS-EMmLws[/youtube]

The backstory: I have, for many years now, wanted to create a short video along the lines of the Mastercard “Priceless” commercials. I have had many different ideas, but never really got a chance to do so. So when I came up with the idea of the Radio/Video show for ISTE, I decided this was the time to go do it.

The activity shown here (with tennis balls, flip cams, markers and transparencies) is one that I have actually done multiple times, in venues around the world. This is a simple activity that exposes a fundamental misconception people have about how objects fall. The question I ask is where the tennis ball would fall if dropped by someone in three different conditions: standing still, walking or running. Most people say that the ball would fall at the feet in the first case (right answer), and behind the person in the other two cases (wrong answer). It turns out that the ball always falls at the feet of the person – assuming, of course, that the person keeps moving at the same speed after letting go of the ball. Why the ball does so has to do with Newton’s First Law, something many people can recite back to you, even while getting this question wrong.

After I get all the responses (and it is always amazing to me just how many people get it wrong), I ask people to go and create a video of the actual experiment. I typically give them 45 minutes to an hour to do the entire thing. There is something to be said for being able to see what “really” happens, to go frame-by-frame through it. It better than any physics lesson, this activity exposes people to just how wrong their intuitions were.

There are many layers to this assignment. In some cases I have had people tape a transparency sheet to their computer screens and then track the parabolic path of the ball. You can go ahead and measure the height of the person’s hand knowing the frame-rate of the video, actually calculate the value of g, acceleration due to gravity.

Anyway, that assignment became the core idea behind the video. The entire commercial was shot, narrated and edited one Sunday afternoon. I got a group of my daughter’s friends together and we shot the still frames of them dropping the ball and shooting the video. The script was narrated by my son. Despite multiple takes he could not correctly pronounce the word “pedagogy” so tweaked the script to drop that particular word (which of course meant that Technology and Content were out as well!). The tag line “There is some knowledge you are born with, for everything else there’s TPACK” emerged out a conversation with Matt Koehler.

See the Whiteboard/UPS commercial or the entire ISTE10, Radio/Video Show.

A few randomly selected blog posts…

Design is for life

Quote for the day: Parents look at their children today when they are 3 years old and say "Oh god!, He doesn't know how to operate the computer! How is he going to go ahead like this?" They should instead be worried if their child doesn’t know design. They should say,...

Solving the rubik cube, blindfolded

A YouTube video of Soham solving the rubic cube blindfolded! [youtube width="425" height="355"]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ymi-iG8uhR4[/youtube] [Thanks for Michael Gondry for the idea.]

The Theater of Creativity

The Theater of Creativity

Dr. Tatiana Chemi is assistant professor and researcher at Aalborg University, Denmark. She has a background in theater that gives her an unique perspective on creativity, the creative processes and the contexts that allow creativity to flower. In her research she...

It HAS to hallucinate: The true nature of LLM’s

It HAS to hallucinate: The true nature of LLM’s

Though Generative AI is receiving a great deal of attention lately, I am not entirely sure that the discussions of these technologies and their impact on education and society at large genuinely engage with the true nature of these technologies. In fact I have argued...

The Postman always rings twice: Unpacking McLuhan (3/3)

The Postman always rings twice: Unpacking McLuhan (3/3)

This is the third of three blog posts about how media influence our thinking. This is the second of three blog posts about how media influence our thinking. The first post, uses the invention of writing and print to unpack the meaning of McLuhan’s statement, “The...

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...

TPACK Newsletter #21: September 2014

TPACK Newsletter, Issue #21 (September, 2014) Welcome to the twenty-first edition of the (approximately bimonthly) TPACK Newsletter! TPACK work is continuing worldwide. This document contains recent updates to that work that we hope will be interesting and useful to...

The gullibility of experts

Does it matter whether a brownie is served on a paper plate or on china? Is the Patagonian Toothfish less tasty than the Chilean Bass? In an earlier posting (perception of taste) I had cited research showing that wine with an expensive price tag was judged to be...

The revolution will be twittered

The recent (and ongoing) evens in Iran sadden me deeply... but also give me hope. The scenes and news emerging from there speak of courage and a need and demand for freedom. What is also amazing has been the use of technology particularly twitter to get news out of...

1 Comment

  1. Jordan Walker

    That came together incredibly well. Great video ad!

    Reply

Trackbacks/Pingbacks

  1. TPACK Commercial – Mete Akcaoglu - [...] presentation we had been invited to make at ISTE in Denver. You can see the commercials here and here and the…
  2. EduTech Today Newsletter » Blog Archive » A Message from the Director - [...] TPACK Commercial/ UPS Whiteboard version TPACK Commericial/ Mastercard priceless version [...]

Submit a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *