The King of Kong & the Ongoing Myth of Objective Documentary Films

This past summer I saw the critically acclaimed documentary, “King of Kong” at the inaugural meeting of a Full Sail documentary film club. Great film. When one of my fellow film viewers confessed that he wanted to punch the antagonist, Billy Mitchell, in the mouth and everyone in the room agree; it was clear that the documentary makers had achieved their goal. I remembered reading comments before watching the film that some critics felt that the film’s editors “crafted” the footage to make Mitchell look a bit worse than he actually was. I didn’t say anything about this at the meeting because everyone else was ready to lynch Mitchell for being such a self-important asshole. In fact, one person was amazed at how well the filmmakers let Mitchell show what a jerk he was. Maybe, or maybe it was just really good editing.

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Weak Logic at Health Care Townhall Meeting

Another proud moment in the Health Care debates. I had to have buddy, Dr. Siegel, explain the idiotic logic being employed by the “Obama is Hitler” crowd opposing health care reform. Follow along carefully, it’s a hazardous journey into poor logic and bad language skills: according to these nuts the government wants to take over health care which is a form of socialism and it’s a national program, so what Obama is proposing is national socialism which is what the word “Nazi” came from. Therefore Obama is Hitler. Yeah. I have to agree with Barney Frank. This isn’t even English. It’s bad enough that the whole world thinks that we are stupid because of the eight-years of W. Now we’ve got crazies wanting to block health care reform because… well, because their fucking crazy. Sad.

And just in case you’re not pissed off enough about the disinformation about health care reform being slathered about by the conservatives… here’s the first of three parts of Jon Stewart trying to talk about policy with Betsy McCaughey, Former Lt. Governor of New York:
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The Creative Commons Solution

Part three of my three part media merry-go-round: Creative Commons (Part 1: Copyright; Part 2: Fair-Use; Part 3: Creative Commons). After I’ve scared them to death with the all powerful Copyright, and confused them with the slippery Fair-Use, it’s time calm the nerves with a little common sense Creative Commons. I wish it was really that simple. So, as before the following is the ongoing working prototype for part 3:
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Roll Over Beethoven and Copy… Right!

Part of my course at Full Sail is about media issues, you know, stuff like Copyright, Fair Use and Creative Commons. The “M” in our program title (EMDT) is Media and my students, who are in their ninth month of a year long Masters degree program, are expected to stare down this huge subject and come up with a reasonable approach to something that I tell them occupies the life’s work of an army of lawyers, policymakers and troublemakers. As I lay down guiding principles to understanding the moving target that is Copyright/Fair Use/Creative Commons the discussions tend to be quite lively and informative for all participants. One thing that I’ve never fully appreciated is how difficult and expensive it can be for teachers who want to follow copyright law who teach band, or theater or any of the other arts.

One teacher wrote in her class blog:
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World Music – nomadak tx

Cultural Anthropologist, Michael Wesch, offered up the following video as a follow-up video mash-up to the viral hit collection “Thru-U” by Kutiman:

It has potential, but seems much less “manufactured” than the Kutiman collection, and a bit less attention to detail, particularly some of the mismatched rhythm tracks. The preceding analysis of course completely misses the point, that this is much more a work that reflects the amazing creativity unleashed when incorporates all of the creativity being released online. This is most definitely “world music.”

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Copyright This!

Since the very first month of teaching my graduate media course at Full Sail University my students have struggled with the vagueness and conflicting messages surrounding the topics of copyright and fair use. Tasking educators, many of whom are very new to online anything, to creating an unending number of audio podcasts, videos, blog entries and assorted media projects and then telling them that they cannot use any images, music or videos that they might find on the Internet is like inviting them to a party and then telling them that they are not permitted to having any fun. it’s downright confusing. Then for me to try to be authoritative on what is permitted and not permitted, while knowing that the subjects of copyright and fair use are life-work of an army of lawyers and policy makers, makes the whole thing downright silly.

So after one of our class sessions, one of my more media savvy students made the following comment in his blog:
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Relevant Media vs. Cool Stuff – Online Learners Pick the Former

One of my students recently wrote about his experiences as an online curriculum development person who works for an online university that has a division that partners with traditional higher-ed institutions to help them bring graduate programs online. He noted that the upper management was all crazy about stuffing as much media into every course, then joked that they were much less energetic about paying for the media or what it takes to create it. That’s kind’a typical. Then he made the following comment about student usage of this media content:

Careful analysis of click-tracking data is showing that only around 50% of the students are actually watching the media elements integrated into the courses. We are trying to understand the reasons why students aren’t watching the media. Sometimes, it is clear that they are just not seeing the value in the media pieces. And admittedly, not all the media is uniformly excellent. However, we are also finding that our online students are incredibly task-focused. They do exactly what they need to do to complete the assignments and nothing more. As an online student myself, I guess I understand that one! (d. lungren)

My words of wisdom to this student:
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The Lie of the 4th Screen

The following video was brought to my attention by a coworker as we both love watching stuff being presented at the TED conference. Alas, this video continues what I believe is a false cultural perception about the increasing general dehumanizing nature of technology. Admittedly it needs to be a bit bias, it’s a Nokia ad. But there is something that the ad misses about why these technologies succeed.

From the big screen to the small, the ad would have us believe that what was once shared (the big screen), was lost in the next two steps (TV & computers) but wonderfully recaptured in this latest iteration, specifically the N-Series Nokia devices. Um… bullshit.

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Streaming NASA.TV

I love this stuff. I wanted to put a streaming viewer of the ongoing Endeavor mission on my blog and remembered that a video podcaster was doing this via Ustream. I’d used this source last Spring when I watched the landing of the Mars Phoenix lander. Funny that there was nothing available directly from NASA but that this video podcaster was taking the NASA stream and making it available using the Ustream.tv embed viewer. I love this stuff. jbb

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The Matrix Runs on Windows (XP, NOT VISTA!)

Sometimes after all of the political stuff and musings on religion it takes a giant step in the direction of silliness for it all to make sense. Thank god for YouTube and CollegeHumor…

And just in case you were still taking your life too seriously…

Is it me, or does Times New Roman look a lot like Ryan Block formerly from Engadget?

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