The Chutry Experiment

From what I’ve seen so far, John Oliver’s HBO show is brilliantly funny and insightful. This monologue on net neutrality is a perfect example of his ability to show why an arcane concept like net neutrality matters and why some of its biggest advocates are struggling to communicate this to a wider audience. The entire thirteen minutes is worth your time and Oliver even directs his audience on how to become involved in this issue by leaving comments on the FCC website.

In case you missed them elsewhere, here are a couple of recent publications where I discuss my Introduction to Film and Visual Literacy course, which I have revamped into a class focusing on documentary ethics In the course, students watch documentaries, and we discuss them, in part, in relationship to ethical principles. The course also includes a service-learning component, in which my students create short documentaries about a local community group. Here are the articles:

• “Local Truths, Tactical Pedagogies: Documentary, Ethics, and Service Learning,” Cinema Journal Teaching Dossier 2.2 (Spring 2014). This article discusses the course in general and how I responded to my university’s decision to significantly rework our core curriculum to a “literacy” model.
• “Using Video Annotation Tools to Teach Film Analysis,” Profhacker, June 2, 2014. This article focuses specifically on a video annotation tool I was able to try out, Social Book. The tool allows students to comment direct;y on specific scenes within a film. It also makes it easy to locate student comments by going to their avatar on a timer bar.