JRG, Int'l Comm Video and Photography

Tribute to Y. Harburg: For the Rainbow in the Wizard of Oz
Click to watch: Sing-A-Long With Yin! Way Over the Rainbow!

Odeo.com offers a great way to publicize events that makes sure those who attend stay in touch. Yesterday, our college hosted a Faculty Development Day. I chaired two 45-minute workshops on Evaluation and Assessment in the Classroom. After the event, I recorded a 3-minute assessment you can listen to here. The workshop title, "How Do We Know We Got There?," becomes polemical when comparing it to an interpretation of M.C. Escher's "Ascending and Descending Staircase." This "impossible" staircase underscores the need to envision systems that "make people think from new perspectives." We need to make the impossible possible again (T. Bahls, "Escher and the Creation of the Impossible") . Thus, a revision of Bloom's Taxonomy is underway in a discussion of key words, model questions and instructional strategies for a new taxonomy of learning, teaching, and assessing. As our Speech Dept. Chair stated, at the end of the entire day, "You can choose to see the glass as half empty or half full, I choose to see it as half full."
There is a Blogger account, requirement, to leave comments. If this is not your cup o' tea, just e-mail me, at videoprof@gmail.com. I will include any comments for you, below. Otherwise, there are no comments required in Thanksgiving 2005 to all participants of Faculty Development Days where our constant "beginnings" are best described as the "Stone Soup," of on-going collaborations.

Further Thanks go to Dara Birnbaum for yet Another Extraordinary Thanksgiving 2005! Thank you, Dara. Hopefully, All Of You will make Our December 11, 2005, Americas Vocal Ensemble Concert, At St. Peter's Church, With A Program In Catalan! (Right, Chris? Just Click Here for the Invite!) Sample the music of The Americas Vocal Ensemble by clicking here.

The following describes an indebtedness and Thanksgiving to aspects of my own background and heritage. My Voice and Diction students may be seen here singing, "'Tis a Gift To Be Simple," where an NPR sound file, one month after 9/11, records an appreciation for American values when interpreting Aaron Copland's "Applachian Spring," in the two NPR radio commentaries accessible here.

Puerto Rico Discovery Day, 19 Nov:

NJN, New Jersey Public Television, offers online, a program entitled, "Images/Imagenes," which changes programs weekly. This week, it was on Puerto Rico, because today was Puerto Rico Discovery Day:

http://www.njn.net/television/webcast/imagesimagenes.html

A multimedia slideshow presentation by National Geographic on Puerto Rico

may be accessed here:

http://magma.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0303/sights_n_sounds/media2.html

Other access to worldwide television channels over the internet, may be found here:

http://www.tv4all.com/

and

http://www.beelinetv.com/

Google, of course, offers its Google Video of the Day, where I discovered the following video, of the Consul General of Venezuela, which is where I grew up:
http://tinyurl.com/d25qn

 (There are many more documentaries available at http://www.arcoiris.tv

which merit mention, whereas TeleSur is the Vzlan alternative to Fox News and

CNN broadcasts to Latinamerica. ArcoIris.tv offers marvelous films and documentaries,

in many languages (just search under LINGUA, here).

Listen to Pablo Neruda's Nobel Prize in Literature 1971 lecture here:

http://nobelprize.org/literature/laureates/1971/neruda-lecture.html

which, coupled with the documentary, of "Neruda Fugitive," found at

ArcocIris.tv,  is on the list of docs, here:  http://tinyurl.com/aqq65  This doc

is a great accompaniment to Pablo Neruda's Nobel Lecture, for, Neruda's lecture

has to do with his exile crossing the Andean mountain range, documented on film

as per the following description of "Neruda Fugitive," listed, here:
http://tinyurl.com/aqq65

  "Neruda Fugitive" - Testimonies, is a 57-minute
documentary that shows how Nobel Prize 1971 Chilean poet Pablo Neruda
spent 13 months hiding out.

The story, told by direct witnesses, was filmed in the
actual locations where the events took place. It follows step by step the
poet's adventure that started in February 1948 when Neruda had his
Senator appointment taken away. Police began an unsuccessful cutthroat search for
him.

The poet moved from house to house during the night. For the most part, he was
welcomed in their homes, where he was allowed to hide. Sometimes strangers protected him
even though they did not personally know him.

From all of them, Neruda received a great deal of solidarity. He managed
to elude encircling by police and relentlessly writes his major work:
El Canto General.

At last he manages to leave Chile, crossing by horse the
Cordillera of the Andes, following a smugglers' path until he arrives at the
city of San Martin de los Andes in Argentina on March 4th 1949.

1. Audio Books

2. Films

   One film, archived here, dates back to 1949, on
"Stagefright, and what you can do about it."

   http://www.archive.org/details/SpeechSt1949

3. Video:

At http://www.democracynow.org/podcast-video.xml

Click Here to Download "A Tribute to Yip Harburg:
The Man Who Put the Rainbow in the Wizard of Oz."


4.  Conversation Practice for English as a 2nd Language Students: