I can’t vouch for the accuracy of the claims in this video, nor do I know who produced it. My intuition is that it’s pretty much on the mark, however. See what you think… Just click on the triangle to start the download. Click on the image itself to go to the sponsoring site.
UPDATE: FarrFeed reader “Marco Polo” writes that he posted a comment on the above, but I don’t see it in the database — maybe it will soon show up. In the meantime, here’s some fill-in-the-blanks info on the video from his own blog. I did figure out that the music was from “The Last of the Mohicans,” which I think is stunningly appropriate:
FYI, the movie in its final form was edited and posted by Scott McLeod, and the original was created by educator Karl Fisch at Arapahoe High School (wherever that is) as a presentation for his school’s start-of-the-year faculty meeting. History and background are at Karl’s blog The Fischbowl here and here.
The music apparently comes from the movie Last of the Mohicans (starring one of my favourite actors, who has an equally interesting father). The content comes from a number of educators and writers who write about this shrinking world and the role the Internet is playing in that.
The movie is well made and thought-provoking, but it rings a little US-based nationalistic to me. Unlike much of the (US) edtech blogosphere, I’m not a Friedman fan. I am excited about the possibility of a world grass-roots community linked by optic fibre, getting themselves informed and making their voices heard, because global warming and peace are global issues and it’s been blindingly obvious for the past 10 years that our leaders are both unwilling and incapable of leading us where we humans on this beautiful blue planet urgently need to go. (A panel of top scientists were on TV recently debating Prof Lovelock’s Gaia theory on which there were many differing views. On one issue only were these scientists unanimously agreed: governments and political leaders will not make the right decisions in time to save the planet.)
I think we will survive as a species, but that it will be touch and go right up to the last minute. And that minute may come sooner than we think.
Thanks for the details, Marco! I especially agree with the last three sentences in the quoted material above and your take on Friedman and the nationalistic slant. However, “saving the planet” is probably a misconception. We aren’t capable of destroying the planet, just (?) killing the thin film of organic life on its surface — what we know of life on earth, in other words, the ecology that supports the ability of humanity to survive. The planet will deal with this (and us) in appropriate fashion soon enough — them ol’ earth changes comin’ down — and then life will regenerate. But you won’t be watching videos of this on YouTube, and most humans will be long dead & gone.
Our civilization is an evolutionary dead end, but the species is another matter. Just imagine how it might feel to gaze out over a grassy plain full of grazing animals under a clear blue sky 10,000 years from now… You may be barefoot, but it’ll be a beautiful day, and you may be able to do other things you’ve never even dreamed of.
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John,
FYI – Arapahoe High School is in Centennial, Colorado.
As far as the “nationalistic” piece, that was not the intent – please follow the link to the original post to get the context of this presentation. It has a U.S. flavor because it was created for my teachers and students at my school which does happen to be in the U.S., therefore it was designed to capture their attention. If I had known it was going to spread like this . . .
I understand about the perspective. Perhaps “America-centric” is more to the point, and how could it be otherwise? Marco as you know is writing from Japan, and one could certainly say it doesn’t reflect a Japanese background.
I think it’s excellent, of course. Powerful, too. I’ll bet “sobering” is the next word people expect to hear, but there’s a kind of liberation that comes with that awareness. Thank you for doing this.
Let’s hope all that potentially arriving computing capacity is dedicated to something other than new types of weapons, centralized control or surveillance, eh?