on learning, film and vanity

I added something new this term.

Instead of the usual hardcopy paper at the end, I challenged my students to "produce" a documentary "youtube.com" worthy on top of the hardcopy paper.

The direction was for them to get a host company, apply what was discussed in class and produce a documentary about it.

I saw the first two batches. Well, let's just say that there's always room for improvement :)

There are groups who thought that the academic requirement were an ode and their chance for their respective close-ups :)

Some, simply did what was required but missed and coming up with a cohesive line of thought. There was no story. Just bad editing. Which is a more direct measure of cluttered thinking.

But gems were found.

And the hypothesis I had at the start was proven correct.

I have always believed that when students write a report and presents it in the usual "powerpoint" methodology, something is left out. A certain essence goes out of the window.

One, in written form, we put a lot of pressure on the the students to have a certain set of vocabulary. A rhetoric. Two, we are actually giving the listener a dangerous creative freedom to "visualize" what the student is actually saying. This usually, if mishandled, leads to a lot of un-cluttering. Such as waste in time.

So, I asked, why do we write a paper when the effort to create a moving picture is so easy and so cheap at this day and age? Why be stuck using a methodology that assumes that computing was so expensive when in fact it is so cheap now?

Plus, wasn't it written somewhere, a Chinese proverb perhaps, that a picture paints a thousand words. And that was a static picture. What if it were moving pictures? Does it follow that it paints a hundred thousand words per minute? :)

But what I like about the "10 minute film" presentation instead of a written report is that the class can watch 8-9 "reports" in one seating. It's so casual. So natural. The reflection is instinctive. Feedback automatic.

Just in case we have forgotten - language, words and letters, collectively was simply a designed methodology, a tool, used to convey thought and meaning. What was instinctive and natural were drawing pictures, wall painting :)

So, why limit the proof that learning happened to the unnatural and the synthetic way when technology allows us now to convey meaning and thought in its natural form?

"... why think like mere men?"