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David McGavock

Transom » Radiolab: An Appreciation by Ira Glass - 0 views

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radiolab storytelling resources

shared by David McGavock on 24 Sep 11 - No Cached
  • Real journalism – and by that I mean fact-based reporting – is getting trounced by commentary and opinion in all its forms, from Fox News to the political blogs to Jon Stewart. Everyone knows newspapers are in horrible trouble. TV news continually loses ratings. And one way we broadcast journalists can fight back and hold our audience is to sound like human beings on the air. Not know-it-all stiffs. One way the opinion guys kick our ass and appeal to an audience is that they talk like normal people, not like news robots speaking their stentorian news-speak. So I wish more broadcast journalism had such human narrators at its center. I think that would help fact-based journalism survive.
  • particularly the places where the story turns, or where the hosts are to take different sides of an issue, those moments are always improvised.
  • Thus the utterly effortless chitchat that floats you so cheerfully from plot point to character moment to scientific explanation to the next plot point is actually worked over second by second and beat by beat, over the course of weeks.
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • Jad’s an Oberlin-trained composer so he’s always either writing the music to fit the stories on his show, the way a composer writes a film score, or he adapts other people’s music so well you can’t tell it wasn’t custom made.
  • And all that meticulous work is in the service of something that’s the opposite of careful and meticulous: this totally chatty, happy, loose, spontaneous-sounding conversation between Jad and Robert and their interviewees.
  • on Radiolab. They invented this insanely concise, entertaining way to tell that story, and they have no problem hurtling through it quickly.
  • For my part, I find it comforting that this level of excellence is so labor intensive that they only can make ten full shows a year (plus, sure, 16 “shorts” that they distribute on the Internet). If they could do an hour of this every week, I think I’d have to quit radio. What would be the point of continuing? How could anyone compete with that?
  • There was an entire hour recently that took up the provocative question: from an evolutionary perspective, why would it be useful for us, or for any creature, to ever help one another? To ever be good? That’s a really hard premise for stories with ideas and emotion and strong characters and interesting plot lines.
  • “In an almost comic attempt to make their job hard, the duo take only the most difficult subjects from science and philosophy: ‘Time,’ ‘Morality,’ ‘Memory and Forgetting,’ ‘Limits.’”
  • What’s striking is the ambition of all this. Jad and Robert seem to be inventing their effects and techniques as they go.
  • Sometimes it seems like the only people who understand how terrific the show is, are listeners.
  • Radiolab also does a beautiful job figuring out a mix of stories that’ll move us from one idea to the next over the course of an hour. Lots of their episodes have a coherent argument to them, an argument that takes an hour and several stories to lay out.
  • Radiolab: An Appreciation I marvel at Radiolab when I hear it. I feel jealous. Its co-creators Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich have digested all the storytelling and production tricks of everyone in public radio before them, invented some slick moves of their own, and ended up creating the rarest thing you can create in any medium: a new aesthetic.
  • A 2010 NPR/SmithGeiger survey of news consumers who rightly should be in the public radio audience, showed that one of the biggest reasons adults say they choose not to listen to public radio is that they’re put off by the tone. One survey respondent said: “This type of story could be interesting, but the reporter’s voice and intonation is soooo affected, upper class, wasp, Ph.D. student-like, it detracts from the story.
  • This information is presented quickly and cheerfully. There’s a bounce to the whole thing. Music plays behind. Jad looks at a map, as he’s talking to Laura, naming the cities the balloon passed on its flight across England. It’s visual. Do I need to explain here that part of making great radio is remembering that you always need to give the audience things to look at?
  • All this banter also helps them solve a storytelling problem
  • David McGavock on 24 Sep 11
     
    Radiolab: An Appreciation I marvel at Radiolab when I hear it. I feel jealous. Its co-creators Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich have digested all the storytelling and production tricks of everyone in public radio before them, invented some slick moves of their own, and ended up creating the rarest thing you can create in any medium: a new aesthetic.
  • David McGavock on 24 Sep 11
     
    Telling a story - capturing the attention and curiosity of people. Sparking our humanity.
David McGavock

Pop-Up University | DMLcentral - 0 views

dmlcentral.net/...pop-university

rheingold university pop up Cooperation learning culture

shared by David McGavock on 01 May 11 - No Cached
  • Networked social learning is most effective and truly magical when students who don't know one another one day start scouring the world for knowledge to bestow on each other the next day and spend their time contributing to each other's learning. It’s the unpredictable synergy that can happen when a group of strangers assembles online to learn together.
  • But the knowledge-sharing gift economy is a human creation – one that can't be predicted, commanded, or summoned but has to be nurtured, cultivated, and facilitated.
  • Michael Wesch's "A Portal to Media Literacy" made clear to me something I had been feeling my way toward -- a pedagogy that is more about collaboration than technology, in which the technology is central, but is a vehicle for co-discovery.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • Henry Jenkins taught me about participatory culture and the importance of teaching skills of credibility (what I call "crap detection") transmedia storytelling, collective intelligence, and network smarts.
  • I learned from Mizuko Ito that young people use digital skills and knowledge exchange as social currency in fan cultures – using social media to learn about things that really matter to them, such as multiplayer games, Pokemon, mashups and fan videos.
  • Cathy Davidson's bold experiments in peer-to-peer learning, including "crowd-sourcing grading," gave me a working model to emulate and appropriate.
  • it only made sense to begin by mobilizing social media skills in parallel with introducing the subject matter. Teaching about social media doesn't make a lot of sense unless students can use social media in their learning
  • The choice to participate in creating and not just consuming the culture in which we live is crucial, and presenting that choice in terms that can engage students is critical.
  • The first acts on the first day of class are crucial – what chaos theorists call "sensitive dependence on initial conditions."
  • As one of my mentors, Lisa Kimball, taught me, a good online facilitator pays heed to the containers, but also thinks in terms of tempo. I knew the importance of engaging as many of the co-learners as possible in the first live session and the first weekend of forum and blog discussion.
  • David McGavock on 01 May 11
     
    If Rheingold U, my current experiment in cultivating wholly online, multimedia, unaccredited, for-not-much-pay learning communities, originally germinated out of fun and impulse, the next stage was more scary-serious. As soon as I took people's money and started telling the world about my intentions, I was obligated as well as motivated to make it work - not just to deliver a rich set of learning materials, but to conjure actual social learning magic
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