Originally uploaded by hildoll
I joined facebook, almost causing my beautiful college-student daughter Tinkerbelle to have an existential meltdown when she found out. I only did it so I could see some pictures she had tried to send me in email. I checked back the next day, and two people I don’t particularly keep up with sent me messages. I promised Tinkerbelle I would reconsider facebook. As we say in this part of the world, it’s too much candy for a nickel. I still cherish my privacy. And like my dear nonagenarian friend Miss Martha says, why would I want to join a group to meet more people? I have enough trouble keeping up with the people I already know I like.
Anyway, it was better for us to share the pictures on flickr. Here’s one I like best…a statue in Caen, France.
Another award-winning site I’m familiar with is YouTube. I’d like to say a word about YouTube. It’s video anarchy, like the internet originally was. EVERYTHING is there, unsifted, unrated. Right now, that’s the problem. Before the site was blocked in my school district, kids would use the library computers to watch ultraviolent, oversexed garbage they were sending to each other. Thus the blocking. However, as a whole it’s a record of our culture, such as it is.
I just watched the Muhammad Ali documentary When We Were Kings, and I was trying to think of how I would use this in a classroom. The Will Smith commercial film is not strong enough to use as a teaching tool, in my opinion, but this documentary is the real deal. I wanted to show the film, then show Ali as he is today, physically ravaged but still a hero. I looked on YouTube, and sure enough, there are not one but several videos showing that great moment when he lit that torch at the 1996 Atlanta Olympic games.
There is also TeacherTube. I think we are going to have to post the higher-minded stuff there, or at some other refereed site for educational use. Services like United Streaming are okay for schools, but they don’t have everything, and they are expensive. Although the greatness of sites like YouTube lies in the fact that anyone can post video, that’s also their weakness.
