Website Wednesday is a (mostly) weekly feature in which we highlight one (or a couple) of sites from the Billions floating around the Intertoobz that just might help you with your Herculean task of educating inquiring minds. Any and all suggestions for future editions are welcome.
Check out Blank on Blank, a (new-ish) YouTube channel (here is the home site) associated with PBS Digital; this is their trailer:
It features voices of the past (John Coltrane, Grace Kelly, Fidel Castro, Louis Armstrong, John and Yoko) and the present (Tupac Shakur, Maya Angelou, Kurt Vonnegut, Bill Murray) talking (in five to six minute excerpts from interviews) about some topic that is timelessly contemporary over cool animation. I can imagine it serving various purposes in various classrooms–as a writing prompt, as a tool for practicing argument (or visual) analysis, as an introduction to important figures of pop culture, music, and cinema history, as a knowledge probe in a sociology or anthropology class, as a model for a project in a digital media class (or other art class), as a snapshot of an historical moment or period, and much more.
On a personal note, a couple of days after I first ran across the site (the Vonnegut video was featured as ‘Video of the Day’ on “The Browser“), I came home and my beloved said, “Hey check this out–David Gerlach (a former teaching colleague of hers at a Chicago High School) has an awesome new project!” and it was Blank on Blank. David was a history/humanities teacher, and now he’s an Executive Producer for a digital video series. I’m not sure what he studied in college, but I’m sure there’s no straight line from what he chose as his major to what he is doing for a career. But I digress. It’s always nice to see cool people doing great things, and this is most definitely that.
The Harold Lounge 