Ethos by Randy Elrod - How To Create Culture: Education

Powerpoint in art form and competitive sport, Pecha-Kucha (Japanese for chatter) applies a simple set of rules to presentations: exactly 20 slides displayed for 20 seconds each. That's it.

Say what you need to say in six minutes and 40 seconds of exquisitely matched words and images and then sit the hell down. The result, in the hands of masters of the form, combines business meeting and poetry slam to transform corporate cliche into surprisingly compelling beat-the-clock performance art. Watch this compelling video...

HT: Wired Magazine : Daniel Pink

September 07, 2007 at 11:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

Technorati Tags: Daniel Pink, pecha-kucha, post-modern, powerpoint, presentations, speaking, speech

August 02, 2007

History Descending The Cultural Staircase...

Who was Marcel Duchamp, and why did his painting "Nude Descending a Staircase" provoke so much outrage at the Armory Show in 1913? What does George Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue" have to do with both the Jewish and African-American experience in the United States? Why was Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises so influential for modern fiction and journalism? How did Alfred Hitchcock, Ernst Lubitsch, and Billy Wilder, among many other émigré film directors, bring European cinematic styles and ideas to Hollywood? Why was Marlon Brando's performance as Stanley Kowalski in Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire so revolutionary on stage and ultimately in the movies?

If you are an undergraduate or a graduate student taking a course in 20th-century American history, you are unlikely to find the answers to those questions.The vast majority of American historians no longer regard American culture — whether high culture or mainstream popular culture — as an essential area of study. They won't even be posed. Nor will the names or the works of the artists, composers, novelists, filmmakers, and actors appear in the lectures or in the books assigned on the reading list.

But one might suppose that a central component of America's history (as of any country's history) is its culture. How can we fathom the values and preoccupations of the American people (no matter what their race, gender, or class) without paying attention to the nation's literature, painting, architecture, music, theater, and movies?

Read more of the important essay by Richard Pells HERE.

August 02, 2007 at 11:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Technorati Tags: American education, culture, Duchamp, historians, Nude Descending a Staircase

January 14, 2007

A Child's Mind...

...isn't a blank slate; it's more of a jungle. Each time a parent helps a toddler read, the child is walked through this jungle from one side to the other. Trip after trip, a seemingly impossible passage becomes a well-worn path.
Children sent to kindergarten skipping merrily along this path to literacy fare far better than those sent to school with machetes.