Miscellaneous Thougts (A Bit Scattered).

Artist in His Studio1630-32 Oil on Panel Colnaghi, London.

Daily Thoughts

Sometimes you think of things that are not quite in your domain of expertise. I noticed that the supermarket is now renting DVDs with a company called DVD Xpress. It mostly sells very trashy movies, but sometimes these are a way to find what people want to watch. I picked up a brochure to bring to work. They have been asking us to find more popular material.

There is also a listing of bestselling dvds and rentals on Video Business. http://www.videobusiness.com/ . Sometimes you just notice these things as part of surfing the web.

I watched part of The Ultimate Avengers, The Movie an animated movie based on the Marvel comic book, The Ultimates. It was quite fun. I especially liked them finding Captain America frozen in ice. It is fairly simple and straightforward with many of the classic heros, Thor, Ironman, Captain America, The Black Widow. I liked that Nick Fury, Agent of Shield is black in this story. It adds a nice touch.

There is a short piece about the history of the Avengers as an extra. Kurt Busiek is one of the people interviewed. In addition, there is a second film, The Ultimate Avengers: Rise of the Panther which looks quite interesting. You watch the film and think, this is more about the interactions of the heros with each other than the villains. The villains seem to be the generic evil enemy of the month.

This morning I went to see my doctor again. I lost another three pounds. I wasn't expecting it. I still am doing the Yoga RX exercises, but I didn't do too well with my diet during Thanksgiving. The pumpkin pie and sweet potato pie got me. I have to watch myself for the holidays. No sweets.

I am honestly feeling a bit distracted. Billy The Blogging Poet just quit doing blogging. He is going to do a new green enterprise, a recycling franchise. It looks kind of interesting. I wonder if he is going to focus at all on recycling books and cardboard. He was part of the Metaxu Literary Cafe. I think I lost a decent part of my readership when Metaxu Cafe closed. http://recyclebills.squarespace.com/recycleblog/

I found something interesting while wandering the internet. It is called mibook. At first it looks like an ebook reader, but when I got to the site, I found something very different than a standard ebook reader. http://www.mibook.com/ This is a specialty focus ebook type device. The sample focuses on cooking, gardening, and home renovation. In effect it is a how to book device focusing on a specific niche.

I feel like today is a day where I am picking up bits and pieces from all over the internet. Sometimes I do that when I am blogging.

I did not read a book at the laundromat today. I did not read anything. I watched a film and watched some television at the laundromat. Maybe, I needed a break from reading books.

All commercial content except for the books and dvds which I post from Amazon and the Powells.com search box has been removed. I also removed some links from my link exchange. I did this to make this blog more focused as well as indicate it is not a particularly commercial blog. Project Wonderful is no more, so are a few other things. Some of the services I used were not providing adequate results for the amount of time I put into them.

I did not even realize that I didn't have some widgets which I used regularly. I just put in my Fuel My Blog Widget. I generally prefer widgets that are somewhat interactive. Twitter is interactive (it is a microblogging platform), Fuelmyblog is interactive (it has a forum and thumbnail directory), Blogcatalog is a community (it has a forum, directory, thumbshot guide, and many other features. These three are what I am focusing on. More than three is too much.

I am not that fond of Technorati, Stumbleupon, and Entrecard. These are focused on building traffic, not interacting with people. It is like being in a horse race with other people to get the most people to visit. They often take a lot of time, with not much depth.

Perception And Format In Media

The Globe Theatre

One of the things I notice a lot is that people are being assigned to read plays in high school and college. Shakespeare is one of the most assigned authors. The thing which bothers me about this is that in the class room Shakespeare is read not shown. I enjoy watching Shakespeare far more than I enjoy reading his work. In fact, there is very little effort to get people to critique the live play in the classroom setting. In effect the experience is being changed from its original intention. The context changes. Individual words on the written page are analyzed for their meaning.

Many students come in confused about Shakespeare because they have no way to place the words with the actions. They set aside the script of the book unable to understand and ask for the movie. The problem with this is which movie. Are they going to take the Laurence Olivier stage dramatization, or are they going to take the action film Romeo Must Die with Jet Li in it. This actually happens. Quite often they take the wrong movie. Those who take the video get a context for what they are reading and can understand it far better. I think generally if a first person first sees a play, then reads it, there is a better context for understanding.

However, the Jet Li problem with Romeo Must Die is not a joke. Imagine a person in high school or college in the future coming into the library and asking for the Neil Gaiman version of the dvd of Beowulf. It is not out yet, I am looking forward to the dvd. They come in and get a fantasy version of Beowulf then use it to write their class assignment. Angela Jolie as Grendel's wife is very different than original. Because, they don't want to be bothered they don't read Beowulf because it is "too hard" and they hand their assignment based on the movie. I can imagine the confusion on the teachers part. Beowulf is a lot harder than Shakespeare for many students to understand. The language is older.

Another thing which quite often happens is that people come in to get the unabridged audiobook of an assigned book like Catcher In The Rye. I think this may have an opposite effect on understanding. Although, they are not reading the book in question, they are hearing every world in the book being pronounced. If they have difficulty reading, they are still going to get the full experience of the book. In many cases, this leads to better ability to write about the book than reading the title.

I think this is one of the reasons why audiobooks are so popular. People have different learning styles. Some people understand more when they see the movie, other people understand more when they hear the story, and others need to look up close and hold the book. People learn differently.

Getting back to Shakespeare. I notice that very few people read Shakespeare's sonnets. They are meant to be read. I can understand people analyzing individual sonnets much more than analyzing a play.

The other thing which happens is that people read Blooms notes or Cliff notes. These are canned summaries of a book. They guarantee a canned answer which will give a student a passing grade. Many people just want to pass the class and only read the notes. These will most of the time guarantee a passing grade. How do you guarantee a person read the book with these kind of things? I don't think you can. These, however, are better than watching a movie about a book because they at least attempt at accuracy. Many people have lost that sense of value tied in with the concept of a "liberal education." Education in literature is supposed to expand your horizons...

Teachers are finally noticing the multiple formats in the classroom. Quite often people are being assigned to watch movies. Freedom Writers is a popular assignment. I haven't seen it, it is just an example. Maybe, they are asked to watch the Color Purple and comment on the film.

It is also becoming acceptable to use multiple formats for assigned topics. Many people don't even bother with reading books, they just go to the internet. This brings up the idea of authority. How do you know the information being presented to you is accurate. Let us take up the issue of Wikipedia, we say when people want to use Wikipedia, "We cannot guarantee the accuracy of this material." Apparently, Wikipedia is about as accurate as the Encyclopedia Britannica. http://www.news.com/2100-1038_3-5997332.html In away, this is both disturbing and hilarious.

Sometimes authority is more about control of access to information than accuracy. I think people are more disturbed about the loss of the authority of information than accuracy. However, with certain subjects like math, history, or science the wrong information can be presented. There is a real attraction by some students to use radical versions of history that more closely align with their ethnicity or background. These are readily available on the internet. Schools want the standard version so everyone can be on the same page. This must make it very hard for teachers on occassion.

Using multiple formats is often the best thing to do for many assigned topics. Let us take the example of Martin Luther King Jr. A college student is assigned to write about Martin Luther King Jr. Generally, watching video clips of him, listening to his speeches on audio, and reading about him at the same time will give a much better understanding than just reading alone. This is becoming expected because it gives a more comprehensive understanding of the subject.

I wish there were more forward looking teachers who both showed the video in the classroom of Shakespeare, the right one, and asked the student to read the book at the same time. Literacy in both the printed word and media literacy are becoming equally important. It is very easy to make bad decisions about media.