Welcome to the School's beta blog. Zanne Miller and the team working on our website redesign set this up as an experimental site.
I am hoping that we can use this space to advance our curriculum review discussions.
Last night I read an interesting piece in New York Magazine that is relevant to our discussions. Here are the first couple of graphs:
"We think we know that the professional news media, especially newspapers, are obsolete, that the future is all about (excuse the expression) you—media created by amateurs. But such PowerPoint distillation tends to overlook the fact that mainstream media are not all simply shriveling and dying but in some instances actually evolving. And in evolution, there are always fascinating transitional iterations along the way. Such as newspapers’ suddenly proliferating forays into online video. (And now magazines: Time Inc. just announced a new “studio” to develop Web video.)
Whereas the YouTube paradigm is amateurs doing interesting things with cameras, the newspapers’ Web videos are professional journalists operating like amateurs in the best old-fashioned sense. One of the Times’s new Web-video stars, David Carr (as the jolly-noir, movie-tasked Carpetbagger), recalls that when the Times’ video operation started fifteen months ago, his bosses said, “ ‘Let’s give it a whirl.’ Which is the exact opposite of the Times’ usual DNA. ‘Let’s give it a whirl’—that’s not something that comes up a lot.”
At their best, the newspapers’ online videos are, minute for minute, superior to TV news."
If you haven't visited the Facebook group "Extreme Makeover" set up by students to talk about curriculum, you might want to take a look. (note: Facebook login required).
The group had nearly 70 members the last time I checked and I hope that we can get more students in the conversation.
