A Viral, Collaborative Game of Rapid Community Language Teaching
This video begins a series that purpose to teach the flow of the game, the sequence in which we slowly build fluent proficiency. Do not confuse the bookend “the Big Set-up” with the technique “Set-up!”, an important (but much smaller-scale) piece of introducing the game.
more about "Bookend #1: “the Big Set-up” on Vimeo", posted with vodpod
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September 16, 2009 at 11:21 am
Jay Bazuzi
The “bookend” metaphor doesn’t resonate with me. Maybe it’s because my books are either packed on their shelves (like yours!) or they fall over… Anyway, I don’t get what makes these concepts “bookends”.
The first thing you say is “This is the first bookend”, and then spend 2 minutes describing bookends in general. The video might make more sense if you removed that statement. Even better, I think, would be to have one video that introduces bookends (much like the video about technique Technique), and remove the introductory material from this video.
At 0:35, I think you meant “increasingLY”.
Also, lots of gesticulation in this video, which I find confusing.
Still, I’d rather have this video as-is, than not have it at all. Maybe something for you to come back to on the next iteration.
September 17, 2009 at 11:05 am
Willem
Jay-
Thanks again for your close attention to the videos. As an aside, I’ve made all of these videos as a first attempt to get video of the game up and out there in a useful ways. You will encounter many more speaking errors and odd moments, along with technical glitches.
Expect many, ever-improving iterations of these same basic WAYK videos, as we get a sense for what works and what doesn’t (with your help). We don’t need help with speech errors and such so much as an overall sense of “does the video communicate the game well?”. Can you learn it by watching the videos?
Regarding “Bookends”: this metaphor is our first attempt at breaking the game down into bite-sized stages for making videos. We call them bookends because each subject has a somewhat clear beginning and end bookending it in place.
For example, “What is that?” begins precisely with the question “What is that?”, and continues until you can quickly answer the question for every object on the table. When Evan asks “Who is that?”, the next round begins, continuing until you can quickly answer “Whose is that?” for each object on the table. When Evan gives the “Craig’s List” of “Want, Have, Give, Take”, and then some time later Eric answers the Question “Who has what?”, you have experienced that bookended subject.
A normal in-person player of the game will never experience or notice these events as “bookends”, but for the internet, we need to break down the game into the shortest video chunks possible. I’d love to hear other descriptions of these “video chunks” besides “bookends”, if you feel you understand the challenge before us and have some better characterization to offer.