Saturday, November 3, 2012

A Film School Masquerading as a Website



Are you looking for a film school that you can afford?

It's a click away.



[Note: Sometimes you may need to click on this link more than once, but don't give up. The site is well worth your investigation.]

The "MakingOf" website is constructed and maintained by Christine Aylward and was begun with her friend Natalie Portman.








Above is a sampler from an interview with the Oscar and Emmy award winning screenwriter Aaron Sorkin, which I am using for a course that I am developing for Brandman University--  ENGU 348: Writing and Producing for New Media in the 21st Century."

Below is another interview from the rookie screenwriters of the hit film "500 Days of Summer" Scott Neustadtler and Michael Weber.





[Note: Sometimes you may need to click on these links more than once, but don't give up. The site is well worth your investigation.]


Another good YouTube film resource is DP/30

http://www.youtube.com/user/TheHotButton/videos?view=1&flow=grid






Saturday, September 8, 2012

Why knowing about cultural marginalization is important for everyone



I use the following quote from Howard Glickman about the novelist Walter Mosley to introduce the civic engagement exercise in my Intercultural Communication class.


The novelist Walter Mosley, was wonderfully provocative as he reflected on what he calls 'the great equalizing effect of aging.' Mosley, whose mother was Jewish and whose father was black, put it this way:  'White people become black people when they can no longer care for themselves.' The older you get, he added, 'the more you move into the Third World – marginalized by the rest of society.'”

 Aging is the great equalizer and hopefully humanizer.















Thursday, August 30, 2012

Literature and Intelligent Living (with pic.)



Here is a great quote about the value of experiencing good literature:



Each good literary work teaches us how to interpret it just as each life experience forces us to interpret its meaning.
In this way good literature is an often entertaining -- and relatively safe -- proving ground for intelligent living.”
John Freed



The author



Thursday, March 15, 2012

The Liberal Arts for What They're Worth


What is a liberal arts-based education?

A brief manifesto from the introduction to Dr. Freed's
PHLU 304: Multicultural Ethics class at Brandman University


"Nearly all contemporary human problems are more failures of 1) communication, 2) cultural memory, 3) introspection, 4) observation, 5) analysis,  6) interpretation, 7) common sense, 8) integrity, 9) courage to act, 10) civility, 11) compassion or 12) imagination than they are insufficiencies of material means to solve them. Developing these skills is the prime directive of engaging with the liberal arts." 


The teaching methodology for this course is chiefly “inductive” – posing the significant questions for the start of a set of “threaded discussions,” producing a wide-range of relevant [and hopefully intrinsically interesting] primary materials aided by student commentary through the “discussions” as data to be drawn upon, and challenging students to arrive at their own supportable syntheses and answers through the many short writing assignments and required rebuttals.

Brandman University believes strongly in “discovery learning,” which means that students only truly learn what they discover themselves. “Learn by doing” is squarely in the John Dewey, Jean Piaget and Jerome Bruner traditions. Learn natural or social science by doing experiments and research. Learn art by painting or making a film. Learn writing by writing a poem or short story. Learn ethics by thinking and acting ethically. And all students can access this type of learning whether they are in pre-school, college or graduate school.

The objective of this course is to confront us all with a wide range of real issues that replicate how philosophical knowledge about multicultural ethics is constructed and communicated. The ability to absorb, critique and construct new knowledge is our indicator of a truly educated person. Brandman believes that most of these people have had liberal arts based educations – the kind that you get at Brandman.