Video with Kids:Grandmother time…..

This fresh bright air inspires me to let you know everything that’s been happening in the past few months.

Over the summer I made some videos with my granddaughter Ember, who wrote, directed and produced these little gems of fun. We made them in 3 sessions and had tons of fun.
The last one was done when she and Cora were here last week. All the ideas are hers, and the prep for it all also, including storyboard and editing decisions. Plus the descriptions for titles and for the youtube posting too. I did the tags, the camerawork and sometimes the voice of the mother and grandmother, plus helped her with the editing.

Here they are in order of production!
Mixed Up Fairy Tale

Muffin the Fantastic! Parts 1 and 2

Habitat: with Ember and Cora Dickson

Guess: when and who!

Guess when was this said and who said it!

 The service environments available to ordinary persons,
whether of travel or general consumer services, far exceed the power
of any private wealth to provide for itself. The richest men have
become hotel hermits, unable to find any more conspicuous means of
consumption than those that are adapted to their personal or commer-
cial security. If personal wealth has become a comic and frustrating
encumbrance in a world of universal public services, the school and
university are in an equally paradoxical situation insofar as they
are committed to providing packaged information on a wide variety of
subjects. Today the general public has access to every kind of infor-
mation--quite independently of our educational programs.

        This new electric access to information has suddenly cast
the audience in the role, not of spectator or consumer, but of ex-
plorer and investigator. The immediate need and future of education
is not in the dissemination of knowledge, but of ignorance. The open
university of the U. K. made the ordinary mistake of putting the old
curriculum and old classroom on the new TV media. The immediate need
is for these media to bring to the microphone and the studio people
from every field of knowledge and endeavour to explain to the public
not their knowledge but their ignorance, not their expertise but their
hang-ups, not their breakthroughs but their break-downs. The universi-
ty and school of the future must be a means of total community partici-
pation, not in the consumption of available knowledge, but in the crea-
tion of completely unavailable insights. The overwhelming obstacle to
such community participation in problem solving and research at the top
levels, is the reluctance to admit, and to describe, in detail their
difficulties and their ignorance. There is no kind of problem that baf-
fles one or a dozen experts that cannot be solved at once by a million
minds that are given a chance simultaneously to tackle a problem. The
satisfaction of individual prestige which we formerly derived from the
possession of expertise, must now yield to the much greater chores and
satisfactions of dialogue and group discovery.

Yes, it was 1971 and the speaker was Marshall McLuhan. Convocation Speech, University of Alberta. See the full text here.

Seeds of Compassion

I was just watching the Dalai Lama webcast at the Seeds of Compassion site – he’s at an arena in Seattle, in the same sunny weather we have here in Vancouver.

Dave Eggers Talk and TED Wish

So inspiring! This video of Dave Eggers’ talk at TED is just under 25 minutes long but worth every minute – see this to the end.

Aside: I’m glad to see it’s also posted on YouTube since WordPress.com wouldn’t let it through via the direct link to the TED site.