We’ve been watching the last quarter of the 2010 football season on DVD as a way of preparing for the college football season, which opens tomorrow night. Last night we saw the SEC championship game, which I think I only saw the one time, live. It was an emotional thing, that day. Still fairly stirring.
Tonight we watch the national championship against Oregon. It has its drama, but it isn’t terribly exciting in some respects. Knowing the outcome is, of course, anticlimactic in a small way. The win was the thing, but that SEC championship game was the most complete effort of that amazing season. And knowing what it meant, and knowing it came at Darth Spurrier’s expense made it all the better.
All of which is to say nothing new, except this. It was this video that really made me look forward to this season.
Ronnie Brown is a bad man. (Hard to believe it has been nine years since some of that footage was shot.) The New York Restoration Choir sounds great. Bring on the football.
Would you like a bit of history? NPR has a great piece on what was one of the rhetorical inspirations for Martin Luther King’s I Have a Dream speech. You can hear it! I knew the provenance of the imagery, but I’d never heard the original speech before. It is fascinating in every way, though that’s not really the voice I imagined Pastor Archibald Carey Jr. having. Give it a listen.
Here’s a longer read on the future of NASA:
NASA is looking for a rock. It’s got to be out there somewhere — a small asteroid circling the sun and passing close to Earth. It can’t be too big or too small. Something 20 to 30 feet in diameter would work. It can’t be spinning too rapidly, or tumbling knees over elbows. It can’t be a speed demon. And it shouldn’t be a heap of loose material, like a rubble pile.
The rock, if it can be found, would be the target for what NASA calls the Asteroid Redirect Mission. Almost out of nowhere it has emerged as a central element of NASA’s human spaceflight strategy for the next decade. Rarely has the agency proposed an idea so controversial among lawmakers, so fraught with technical and scientific uncertainties, and so hard to explain to ordinary people.
It just doesn’t sound like the same agency in some ways, but there is some boldness in the plan, if you read on.
Here’s a conversation that delves into the origins of online scholastic journalism. Before WordPress, before a lot of tools, you had to hand-code everything. Now, not so much:
Yet there persists an odd notion that a newspaper staff is more deserving of awards for its online journalism and that its online work is more authentic if they built their website or even their WordPress theme themselves. There’s a confusion in this logic –– a failure to distinguish the tool from the content; we only tend to see this confusion when working with newer tools. No one would question the value of using a word processing tool and writing on a computer over using a typewriter. No one would question the value of using desktop publishing software and new printing technology over hand-set type. No one would question the value of a photo taken with a digital camera over one taken with a film camera and printed in a darkroom. That’s because we’ve recognized that Microsoft Word, GoogleDocs, InDesign, PhotoShop, and digital SLR cameras are tools that allow our students to do better work.
We now need to make that same recognition with our understanding of WordPress and its templates. Buying a good WordPress template is the same as buying Adobe CS7 or buying a new digital SLR camera. CS7 won’t create your design for you, a camera won’t take its own pictures, and a WordPress template won’t write and publish stories, photos, and videos in a timely and relevant manner. New tools create new efficiencies and new opportunities –– they allow us to report better, write better, design better, and connect with our audiences better, and our national contest and critique standards need to evolve to reflect the new realities of the tools used for web publishing.
I bolded my favorite part. This debate isn’t restricted to online tools designed for efficiency versus the most laborious method possible. Value the journalism over the tool, or the medium for that matter.
One more PBS thing, a series of serious and concerted thoughts on a digital curriculum from Dr. Cindy Royal:
what I am proposing is curriculum in which digital is the foundation, and the basic skills of writing, reporting and editing are injected into digitally focused courses, as opposed to inserting a digital lesson or two into traditional classes.
Most programs have courses at their core that introduce basic skills, things like Media Writing, Media Law and Introduction to Mass Communication. Other programs also require courses in Media History or Mass Media and Society. I propose we flip and reconfigure these courses with a digital emphasis.
That’s worth a read if you’re interested in journalism or pedagogy.
Did I mention I renamed my work blog? I renamed my work blog. Made it a little more inclusive, avoids any university branding concerns and just sounds more vaguely fun. So check out the creatively titled Multimedia Links. Several new posts this week as we’ve gotten back to the classroom:
I try to get as many students as possible to read that site, so there will be more to write this year.
More, more, more!
We want more.
