Excerpting Mr Robinson

I felt very lucky today to have been raised in a non-mashup culture as I listened to Sir Ken Robinson‘s excellent presentation on Changing Education Paradigms (no links yet — wait for it…).

I first watched the RSA Animation of his talk at YouTube. I recognized the animator’s style (I’m still trying to figure out what artist that arm represents) from a previous RSA Animation, Philip Zimbardo’s The Secret Power of Time. This time, I looked away from the screen as I took notes.

When I watched Zimbardo, I had to do it twice. I found the cartooning at first fascinating, then annoying, and ultimately distracting. The cartoonist has his/her own take on the presentation, and draws very appropriate animations, but they have their own interpretation. So this time, watching Sr Ken, I focused on my own notes, creating my own interpretation of the talk instead.

Then it stopped. At first I thought YouTube had stopped streaming, but no, it was over. I looked at my notes, and sensed something wrong. It seemed to have been cut off. So I went looking to see if I could find the whole presentation, assuming there was in fact a whole one somewhere. I found it at about the same time Dr Couros responded to my tweet.

The whole speech is here. When I viewed it, I learned a number of things:

• The context for Mr Robinson’s remarks was a global crisis in human resources that he sees as reflecting the ecological crisis. I learned about idea of the Anthropocene age, as a new geological era dominated by manmade systems. I heard him connect the teen suicide rates to this crisis. I was able to begin to connect some dots about teen suicide, the internet, and a larger context of global change.
• I learned that he lived in California, and sees Las Vegas as a place of pure imagination, because it has no geographic or economic reason to exist, which gave me a different perspective on cities in general.
• At the start of his talk, he told me what the RSA was. The organization goes way back to the Enlightement and was not only the Royal Society of Arts, but of Manufacturing and Commerce as well. Manufacturing and commerce are two of my historical interests. I went to the RSA website, and discovered that they are a wonderful island of rationalism in an increasingly irrational world.
• He mentioned Chris Woodhead, so I looked him up on Wikipedia and discovered that he was the Chief Inspector of Schools and a believer in traditional education.
• In my (and his) generation, we used to remove people’s tonsils unnecessarily, because it was the medical fad at the time. Most people my age (and his) are tonsil-less. He connected this fact to the current trend for medicating ADHD, which has been a concern of mine for some time. I have long felt that most children given the medication should be allowed to go play instead of sit still.

The point is, I would have learned none of this if I had only watched the animation, which had excerpted certain parts of this talk. Did someone edit his talk to the parts they thought would create a good animation? was the goal to create the animation, or to create a shorter version for those with shorter attention spans? Robinson’s points were easy to follow, yet the drawing seemed designed to make it easy for us to follow them. Kind of fed into his ADHD argument, I thought.

The content of his talk was more complete within its context than excerpted from it. The animation was essentially a mashup, not a presentation by Sir Ken. It left out much of his humor, his personal environment, the global motive for challenging educational paradigms, his books, and the observation that teenagers don’t wear wristwatches. These were replaced with delightful, if distracting, cartooning.

The experience reminded me of the argument in music about dissecting albums, where some bands don’t want their albums, which are constructed so that songs are heard in a particular order, dismantled by people downloading individual songs. I see the value in both the individual song (in this case, the animation) and the whole album (his entire talk), but I don’t want them to be confused. If you’d like to see his whole talk, enjoy!