Blog Juice for Educational Technology

David Gran, an art, film, and technology educator I met in Shanghai, sent me a link, this morning, to a recent article (Is a Cinema Studies Degree the New M.B.A.?) from the New York Times about film schools.  The article talks about how more and more people are entering film schools, while the job market in Hollywood and other motion picture and TV Meccas is relatively stagnant.  Media has become so much a part of our lives, and increasingly a tool for business, political, and even cultural endeavors.

…it is not altogether surprising that film school - promoted as a shot at an entertainment industry job - is beginning to attract those who believe that cinema isn’t so much a profession as the professional language of the future.

The article points directly to DVDs being produced by street gangs to scare member into loyalty, and the uses that terrorist are making of video for intimidation.  There is power in video media, not just for harm, but also for good.

Several times in the article, the term literacy was used to describe what film students are learning.  Elizabeth Daley, the Dean of the USC School of Cinema, the nation’s oldest film school, said,

“The greatest digital divide is between those who can read and write with media, and those who can’t,” Ms. Daley said. “Our core knowledge needs to belong to everybody.”

What if college shifted away from profession preparation, and more toward specialty peparation (media, deep mathematics, information structures, social structures, behaviors, physical systems, biological systems, etc.) and we went to college for those specialties, and then market ourselves based on what we’ve made ourselves an expert in.

Just dreaming off the top of my head!