Day 3 Reflections

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Description: MIT 20.219 Becoming the Next Bill Nye: Writing and Hosting the Educational Show, IAP 2015. View the complete course: http://ocw.mit.edu/20-219IAP15.

Instructor: Joshua Cheong

License: Creative Commons BY-NC-SA

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JOSHUA CHEONG: Hi. Joshua here. So excited to do is vlog. This is kind of like my first time doing a vlog in front of a real public audience, and so some of the things I really liked about yesterday was-- I mean, honestly, yesterday was one of the most mind-blowing sessions. I got so many simple, yet I can see how very effective videoing doing, and being a talk show host techniques. And I see how that can connect to my life.

Yeah, the first one I thought that really stood out for me was the one on looking at a member of your audience like your family member or a professor behind the camera, so it's not just a camera. So I mean, yeah. But the funny thing is speaking of this tip, I kind of forgot it, and I'm looking at the camera thinking of the camera, so it's a bit ironic. I guess many of these things require a lot of practice, and that's kind of like what I need to do and get out of the zone of thinking that I'm in front of a camera. I mean, usually, every time you press a camera, there's this red button. Sometimes I think maybe if that red button was eliminated, a lot of things would be different.

Yeah, so I mean, I guess one of my questions I would like to ask as well is what kind of face, what would be an appropriate member of the audience that I would like to put there? I mean, if I put someone who is very respectable like my professor, then I guess the whole tone, tonality of my voice, the whole choice of my vocabulary would try to be more serious. But at the same time, I guess if I put someone like a two-year-old in my imagination in front of camera, I probably would not talk in the same tonality.

So I guess what would an appropriate member of the audience be in front of the camera? Well, some of the other tips I got that really stood out for me was-- yeah. For example, the idea of doing it in a ridiculous way, so basically, George had us come in front of the camera-- not the camera but in front of the screen-- and read off the script, and some interesting things is he tried his best to tell us to say it in many different ways. But although we tried, we kind of like said it almost the same way. And I kind of realized it myself.

And the funny thing about that is, well, I guess somehow wired in our brain to think that there is probably the best way of saying it, and then after we have adapted that way of saying it, we find it very difficult to draw away from that. But the key element in this process that stood out for me is saying repeat. Oh, that's good. Oh, you recorded that well. But can we do that again? And you would do it like over and over and over again, but every time we do it, you want to be different. And so stepping out of your zone and doing something crazy would help you and aid you in the process of coming up with variations of ways to say it.

And I think the beauty of recording is probably that you could get the best version and use the best version in your edits, rather than in a live performance when you only have one shot, and it's kind of like if you don't make it, it's over. So I guess it's a bit different then. But at the same time, it gives me that understanding of like you have to keep repeating. It's kind of like doing many things. If you do well at, you probably have to repeat many times to get it done right. And I guess it's no different here.

Yeah, and overall, I think it's a very, very good learning experience that I have. I'm actually super excited, and I've always come to ask myself, why did I choose to make videos? Why video rather than like anything else? And I've thought that, well, videos in education are not just videos to educate, but it's also to excite. And that's what I want to bring. And my view is I don't see that it should just be about, oh, I learned something. Oh, I'm just becoming smart.

But rather, it should be something that, oh, my goodness, I didn't believe I didn't know this. It's so simple, but now that I've watched it, I used to think it was difficult, but now I know it's so simple. And I know that I can do it. It's kind of like being enlightened in some sense. Or rather, in another sense, it could be seeing something really normal and turning it extraordinary or seeing something really extraordinary, which I always thought was super complicated, and only a small group of people could do-- taking that and turning it into something that I can understand. I feel that that's quite empowering for anyone.

And that's kind of I want to achieve here, and I hope I do with my pictures and my video eventually. I guess one of the hardest things I have with the script and with the way I want to share is that programming and software algorithms are very conceptual in nature, and they don't have a physical form. So usually, I have to choose like analogies that would be physical in nature that represent them.

And one of the key points I learned about how do I avoid sounding like I'm dumbing down my audience, and I found that the tips that Josh gave was to give them a sort of a reply, something like preparing them to understand that this is the really simple way of saying it. So you would say something like, this the really simple way of saying it, but basically, blah, blah, blah. So that kind of like helps you prep the audience to understand that you're giving the simpler picture instead of something more complicated, I guess. And I look forward to the next few lessons, and it will be interesting.

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