Thursday, April 09, 2020

Curriculum Development On Fast Forward

Given the covid crisis, there's more of a push to get some innovative high school level curriculum out there, where people can see it.  That means "open on Github, in a repo" to a lot of people.

I call it Camp MightyMoose, remembering my fascination with Mighty Mouse as a rug rat.

Just when I got hooked on TV by 2nd grade, the family unhooked at moved to Rome, Italy, a conservative Catholic town with RAI deferring broadcast until people could get home and watch it. Housewives had plenty to do without gazing at all these good looking guys in the soap operas, or whatever -- why not speculate?

Maybe they just didn't have enough content, not having their on LA (an entertainment capital, and TV savvy early in the game).  Spaghetti Westerns would be filling the void on the big screens.

So from TV addict, I went what felt like cold turkey.  I'm sure it was good for me.  I did a lot more reading, listened to the same few records over and over. One was Bob Newhart doing comedy. Another was just sound effects.

TV is a firehose of interesting content these days.  The allure of living out one's life vicariously in the matrix has never been more feedable.  Cocoon and bliss out.

Atop the early internet of passive asynchronous reading writing and viewing, the layer of live streaming has been added.  These pycamps I'm leading are a genre of live streaming.

That genre, in turn, depends a lot on talk radio, which in the old days was less often prerecorded. We shouldn't neglect the board meeting format, as another popular form of people-to-people live streaming.

When I do long format gigs, I look to artists such as Unirock and other immersive talk radio Youtubers.  They create an environment of immersive listening with constant chatter, some using musical breaks.  How campers chime in depends on group dynamics.