If I had a perception problem or a new optical illusion for every class day in psychology, we’d start every day happy.
This is a great ad. It gently pokes your pride in your ability to see what’s going on — from a bicycle safety campaign in Britain urging motorists to look out for bicyclists:
1 Comment | 
psychology, Television, Video and film | Tagged: Bicycle safety, Media, Perception, psychology, Television | 
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Posted by Ed Darrell
Here’s a video from the guys at Fast Draw, about economic stimulation, offered first on CBS Sunday Morning on February 17. Great stuff for a high school economics course.
Will CBS make this available for teachers?
There is a commercial you gotta view for 15 seconds prior to the video — my apologies.
Vodpod videos no longer available. from www.cbsnews.com posted with vodpod
*
Write or call CBS Sunday Morning to plead for released copies:
ADDRESS:
CBS News Sunday Morning
Box O (for Osgood)
524 West 57th St.
New York, NY 10019
E-MAIL: sundays@cbsnews.com
TAPES: Log on to the CBS Store or call 1-800-542-5621.
TRANSCRIPTS: 1-800-777-TEXT
2 Comments | Classroom technology, Economics, History, Technology in the classroom, Video and film | Tagged: Business, classroom video, Economics, Education, Politics | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Some guy made this video, a story of the life of Robert Lord Baden-Powell, the founder of Scouting, for a Cub Scout ceremony (an Arrow of Light awarding). This one features some impressive historical footage of the funeral of Baden-Powell.
First, I wonder why the National Council of Boy Scouts has not seized upon this idea, and put this video on DVD for recruiting and ceremonies.
Second, there are a lot of people out there with enough video production skill to preserve a lot of history — more people should.
I imagine the person who created this was the father of a Cub Scout. It’s a Latter-day Saint ceremony, so there are two references to Mormons, but otherwise this would be a fine video for Scout recruiting.
Here’s another video, professionally produced, from 100yearsofscouting.org:
Leave a Comment » | Boy Scouts of America, Capturing history, History, Video and film | Tagged: Boy Scouts of America, History, Lord Baden-Powell | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Spectacular blend of history, botany and story.
One of a series of short films produced by KERA Television in Dallas over the past few years, this one by veteran filmmaker Rob Tranchin. A lot more details here — and frankly, the video quality is vastly superior at KERA’s site — go view the film there.
I hope it’s available on DVD for classroom use, especially around Dallas, soon.
Hundreds of historic trees grace America’s cities and countryside. We could use a dozen more films this good to tell their stories.
6 Comments | Biology, History, Science, Texas, trees, Video and film | Tagged: Biology, film, History, Media, trees | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
How many different lesson plans can you get from this video? How about from this video with the add-ons?
Vodpod videos no longer available. from www.willbrehm.com
posted with vodpod
You can see a higher quality version at Will Brehm’s “Story of Stuff” website.
The site offers a lot. E-mail updates on issues, cheap DVDs of the movie ($10.00 each for the first 10, $9.00 each for the next 10 . . . you may want to get a copy for each social studies classroom), background stories to the movie, story of Annie Leonard, background sheets, lists of organizations working on the issues and reading lists and more. I found no lesson plans, but you can surely cobble one together for an hour class, with 20 minutes taken up by the film. Plus you can download the movie, for free.
Go noodle around the site: There are lots of possibilities for student projects, student discussions, in-class exercises, homework, and fun.
This movie details, quickly and with good humor, the economics of recycling, the economics of waste disposal, and the economics of production. This provides a great gateway to talk about civics and government, and how to make things happen like garbage collection and recycling; a gateway to talk about economics, especially the various flows of money and goods; a gateway to talk about geography and how we have used our land and rivers to bury and carry waste; and how we use natural resources generally.
This would also be a good video for Boy Scout merit badge classes for the Citizenship in the Community and Citizenship in the Nation badges.
Contrasted with most of the industrial grade video I’ve seen for economics classes, this is fantastic. It’s better than any of the sometimes ambitious, but ultimately dull productions from the Federal Reserve Banks (are you listening, Richard Fisher? Hire Will Brehm’s group). (No offense, Osgood — yours is the best of that lot.)
Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., probably has political objections to the movie, claiming it leans left, which indicates it’s in the mainstream. If you’re using any other supplemental material in your classes, this just balances it out.
3 Comments | Business, Business Ethics, Capitalism, Cartoons, Classroom technology, Conservation, Economics, Environmental protection, Ethics, Free market economics, Freedom - Political, Geography - Economic, Law, Lesson plans, Natural resources, On-line learning, Public health, Student projects, Technology in the classroom, Video and film | Tagged: Business, Economics, environment, pollution, Technology | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Someone should have said “every really good idea can be summarized in 30 seconds.” To whom shall we attribute that: Lincoln? Einstein? Twain? Jefferson? Jesus? Round up the usual suspects, indeed.
The School of Arts and Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania sponsors a series of lectures — some topic distilled down to 60 seconds.
These are geographies of human thought. A map of what to think, sans details. Here, we get the history of humans in 60 seconds (plus a few), from April 19, 2006:
Human History
George H. Walker Endowed Term Professor of History
- First, tribes: tough life.
- The defaults beyond the intimate tribe were violence, aversion to difference, and slavery. Superstition: everywhere.
- Culture overcomes them partially.
- Rainfall agriculture, which allows loners.
- Irrigation agriculture, which favors community.
- Division of labor plus exchange in trade bring mutual cooperation, even outside the tribe.
- The impulse is always there, though: “Kill or enslave the outsider.”
- Gradual science from Athens’ compact with reason.
- Division of labor, trade, the mastery of knowledge, plus time brought surplus, sometimes a peaceful extended order and, rules diversely evolved and, the cooperation of strangers – always warring against the fierce defaults of tribalism, violence, and ignorance.
- No one who teaches you knows what will happen.
You can find video here : Kors, Human History, high bandwith; low bandwidth.
A couple dozen such lectures, from 2006 and 2007, here.
Tip of the old scrub brush to Dr. P. M. Bumsted.
Leave a Comment » | History, Lessons of history, Teaching, Video and film | Tagged: History, presentation | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
How come the science guys get all the really cool videos?
I found this from Mollishka at a geocentric view, and I crib it entirely from there:
Ever wanted to see what it looks like when a sphere gets turned inside out, or simply know what is meant when people talk about turning closed surfaces (like a sphere) inside out? Hat tip to Scott Aaronson for this video:
As it turns out, I actually recognize several of the intermediate steps (for a few of the algorithms they show) as neat-o sculptures that often show up near math departments.
a geocentric view has several other features I found interesting. It’s written by a graduate student in astronomy — go noodle around.
1 Comment | Point of personal privilege, Science, Technology, Technology in the classroom, Video and film | Tagged: Education, Mathematics, Technology in the classroom, video | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Teacher magazine reports that NBC News made available to teachers more than 5,000 chunks of news video and still photos from their news archives, for use in the classroom.
The service requires a free subscription to HotChalk through December. After that, a school subscription to HotChalk is necessary, starting in 2008.
Great resources, but I predict few teachers will have the connections to put these to work in the classroom. Comments are open, of course, for you to share your experience. Please comment on how useful you find these images, and how you use them.
Historic photo of woman on early cellular telephone, NBC News photo, from HotChalk.
Leave a Comment » | Education, Geography - Economic, Globalization, History images, History video sources, Images, Video and film | Tagged: Classroom technology, Education, history video, HotChalk, NBC News, video | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Tim Lambert at Deltoid tracked down the facts in the really odd story about a court in Britain ruling that the film Inconvenient Truth contains errors — a case I noted in a post about Al Gore’s winning a Nobel Prize for his work on climate change. Deltoid said:
A UK High Court judge has rejected a lawsuit by political activist Stuart Dimmock to ban the showing of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth in British schools. Justice Burton agreed that
“Al Gore’s presentation of the causes and likely effects of climate change in the film was broadly accurate.”
There were nine points where Burton decided that AIT differed from the IPCC and that this should be addressed in the Guidance Notes for teachers to be sent out with the movie.
Unfortunately a gaggle of useless journalists have misreported this decision as one that AIT contained nine scientific errors.
Got that? The British Court said Gore is right.
I’ll bet I’ve seen that case cited a half dozen times today, with claims that Gore’s film is generally wrong.
Tim’s detail on the case, and the nine allegations of “error” (scare quotes from the judge in the original opinion) should be read by anyone following the climate change debates. I doubt that any Gore critics will read, nor, just to be nasty, that many of them can.
This is another political hoax in the making. Bad reporting, caused largely because the news of the case hit as the announcement of Gore’s Nobel Prize win crossed the news wires, makes Gore a target for the denialist and right-wing spin machines. Though their charges are inaccurate, they will make the charges, and repeat them endlessly. Buckle up — it’s going to be a bumpy night.
3 Comments | Accuracy, Climate change, Jurisprudence, Law, Natural history, Natural resources, Science, Technology in the classroom, Video and film, War on Science | Tagged: Al Gore, Climate change, denialists, video in the classroom | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
We still had movie newsreels in 1957. ASAP Retro, a part of Associated Press, I think, features the classic Ed Herlihy-announced 30 second explanation of Sputnik that was seen in movie theatres across America in late 1957 and early 1958.
You’ll need a live internet link to use it in class.
I do wish that more of these newsreels were available for easy use by teachers in classrooms, say on DVD, in short segments.
1 Comment | 1957, Cold War, History, History images, Science, Space exploration, Space Race, Video and film | Tagged: 1957, Space Race, Sputnik | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Can’t figure out how to embed this in WordPress (there’s gotta be a way). You need to see it, especially if you are owned by a cat like our Smokey. Fortunately, Smokey hasn’t found the baseball bat, but she plays mantle hockey with anything and everything. Plus, she’s fond of shredding paper — books, magazines, bills to pay — knowing that such noise usually gets us out of bed.
It’s a production from an English group. Big money, no doubt — could we ever hope to find such productions for classroom use?
3 Comments | Personal, Video and film | Tagged: , animation, cats, video | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Cartoon Brew has an upload of an animated ad for the abominable Creation Museum in Kentucky, Ken Ham’s monument to denial of reality and campaign against science. (I wish I knew how to upload a link here . . . if you have suggestions, pass them along.) Here’s Youtube version:
Yes, it’s nice animation. As art, it functions rather as the opposite of Picasso’s Guernica, though, doesn’t it? Instead of revealing a truth, even a horrific truth, it is art aiding a campaign of deception.
What do you think?
Does biology need to recruit the ghosts of Tex Avery and Chuck Jones to keep pace? Or is this just one more demonstration of the scientific and moral vacuity of creationism?
We still can’t get legal copies of that brilliant Civil War animation from the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum, but we can get crap on television from Ken Ham. It’s just a matter of time before Ham has a slick DVD promo for his museum, mailed to 40,000 high school biology teachers . . . what’s the hurry, and why are we in this handbasket? Going where?
Update: Soyeon Kim, the animator/designer for the commercial, notes in comments that the creators of the ad did not realize it was a creationism museum, since they’d never heard of anything other than legitimate natural history museums. Think of the moral dilemmas: A paying client, versus accurate information. The poorly-paid biology teachers in Dover, Pennsylvania defied their employers and refused to teach creationism. At what point should one simply refuse to go along, even for pay?
1 Comment | Cartoons, Creationism, Evolution, Museums, Religion, Science and faith, Video and film, Voodoo science | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
There is a lesson in here about common purpose, maybe even one about democratic action as opposed to a rigid patriarchy (though I confess, I don’t know that water cape buffalo don’t also have a rigid patriarchy).
In any case, the large, gentle creatures beat out two competing, sharp-toothed predators, to save a calf. Parents uniting can do great things.
Amazing video, really:
Tip of the old scrub brush to Telic Thoughts — the most thoughtful post they’ve had there in some time.
5 Comments | Natural history, Travel, Video and film | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
The Journal of Chemical Education put up on their website a series of videos showing various chemical reactions. They’re cool — go see (did I mention I’m a bit of a chemistry geek, too?). Some of the stuff flames. Some of the reactions explode.
So, where are the history/economics/geography videos?
1 Comment | Science, Technology in the classroom, Video and film | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Faithful readers here may note some long, substantive comments from another “Ed,” who is connected with the Open History Project, it turns out. I’ve linked to the OHP before, but not often enough. It really is a treasure trove.
For example, there is a page of links to computer/internet media works. Included there is a fascinating animation from the British site accompanying what was a PBS Masterpiece Theatre program in the U.S. from Charles Dickens’ novel, Bleak House. The animation, by a creative crew called Rufflebrothers (Mark and Tim Ruffle), covers the life of Charles Dickens. As a simple cartoon, it’s droll — notice Dickens’ siblings dropping dead in an early scene. As a piece of history pedagoguery, it’s brilliant. [It’s Flash animation, and I can’t copy it to paste a sample.]
(I can’t find this animation on the PBS website for Bleak House — but there is another, simpler timeline, covering Dickens and more authors.)
Watch the British animation of Dickens’ life, then go back and take it scene by scene. A pocket watch allows you to see what else was happening in history at that moment. Careful linking allows you to get much more detail — in the scene where his siblings are shown dying (as they did, in fact), the feature gives the details of each of Charles’ brothers and sisters, opening a door of new understanding for the inspiration of the characters in Dickens’ work (It was originally Tiny Fred? Really? After Dickens’ younger brother Frederick?).
Imagine such an animation for the life of George Washington, or for the life of Abraham Lincoln, or Henry Ford, Queen Victoria, Sam Houston, Mark Twain, Theodore Roosevelt, or Albert Einstein.
What in the world can we do to encourage BBC to do more like this? Who else can get in on the act?
What other treasures await you at the Open History Project?
2 Comments | Cartoons, Education, History video sources, Humor, Literature, On-line education, On-line learning, Pedagogy, Technology, Technology in the classroom, Video and film | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
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Ed Darrell on Texas's Colorado River
Come on in, the water's fine. Come often: Cleanliness is next to godliness.
Millard Fillmore's Bathtub 