Category Archives: adult learning

An Early Morning Revelation

adult learning

I have been waking up at 5:10 AM every morning for the past week. For the past two mornings, I’ve decided to get up. And, it’s amazing how much you can get done while it is still dark outside and everyone else is in bed. This morning, I decided to get some reading done for my ed tech pro dev class. We’re reading about andragogy, which overlaps with my adult learning class. In an article by Sharan Merriam that I had already read for the adult learning class , Andragogy and Self-Directed Learning: Pillars of Adult Learning Theory, the opening sentences struck me in a way they did not the first time I read them: “The central question of how adults learn has occupied the attention of scholars and practitioners since the founding of adult education as a professional field of practice in the 1920s. Some eighty years later, we have no single answer, no one theory or model of adult learning that explains all that we know about adult learners, the various contexts where learning takes place, and the process of learning itself. What we do have is a mosaic of theories, models, sets of principles, and explanations that, combined, compose the knowledge base of adult learning. Two important pieces of that mosaic are andragogy and self-directed learning.”

It occured to me that you could substitute children, student and pedagogy, and this would describe all educational endeavors! And, as I scanned the article again, I was struck more and more by this notion of the artificial divide between children and adults that leads to assumptions about adult learners that simply may not apply to all adults and assumptions about child learners that simply may not apply to all children. In the post-modern educational world in which we know so much more about how the brain works, I think the only assumption you can make is that we are each individual learners who may ourselves differ in the ways we want to learn depending on the circumstance and content of the learning. I would not have wanted to be a self-directed learner of statistics but I am happy to be a self-directed learner of Final Cut Pro.

Video Production Time

adult learning, Video

After doing the update, I actually re-read my learning contract where I said I was going to create a weekly vodcast of videos. In retrospect, I was underestimating the amount of time it takes to create even a short video. The Corkscrew Swamp Sanctuary movie must have taken 20 hours or more. Of course, I was learning how to use Final Cut Pro so that explains some of the time. But creating videos that tell a real story takes time: importing, reviewing, choosing, adding audio, adding titles, applying the “Ken Burns” effect.

So, I asked myself, what could you do on a weekly basis? In just about two hours, I was able to create this 30 second video of a whimbrel and upload it to YouTube. It includes a voice over, opening title, and transitions. The footage was already imported so it was just a matter of identifying which clips I wanted. I also had to look up the directions for how to create the fade to black transition. (Basically, you just add a cross-dissolve transition to the end of the clip.) I also spent 10 or 15 minutes fooling around with export options and decided on using m-peg 4 with the pre-set for broadband high.

NB: Add another 15 minutes and who knows how much more time since I uploaded the video to YouTube only to discover that when they converted it, the opening title is gone.  So I’ve got some research to do.  I did discover that YouTube has a video guide that looks helpful.  Unfortunately, it didn’t answer my question about what happened to my title?

Learning Contract Update

adult learning, blogging, documentary film, learning contract

I will admit up front that I am procrastinating.  I *should* be doing some bibliography work for my media literacy research project.  Instead, I am doing everything else–watching Triumph of the Will, canceling my cell phone, doing laundry.  It is amazing how much I get done when I am procrastinating!  Is there some adult learning principle at work here?  What we learn we were are supposed to be learning something else?

Anyway, as part of that procrastination, I thought I would doing a learning contract update.  I have taken the first steps towards learning Final Cut Pro.  I am pretty happy with my first movie and got lots of positive feedback from the class.  This weekend, I want to dig into some of the Lewis and Clark footage I’ve got.  I’m considering doing something that combines footage from our trip with excerpts from my journal and the L&C journals.  Contrast their journey with ours.  First, though, I need to get a look at what’s there.  It’s been seven or eight years since we took the trip.  I reviewed some of the footage this summer, but need to go back through it with a “cinematographer’s” eye.

Continue reading Learning Contract Update →

Leni Riefenstahl

adult learning, documentary film, Holocaust

The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl

This film documents the life of Leni Riefenstahl. It was long–over 3 hours–but well worth it. I watched it in several installments because I got tired of reading the subtitles.

Riefenstahl was a controversial filmmaker because her most well-known works were about the Nazi party. Triumph of the Will documented the 1934 Nazi party Congress in Nuremberg and is considered the most powerful propaganda film ever made. In addition, the film won numerous awards outside of Germany for its revolutionary filmmaking techniques. Riefenstahl also made Olympia, the official film of the 1936 Olympics. Like her previous film, this one is recognized for its innovative techniques–she was the first filmmaker to set a camera on railroad tracks. But, it is also condemned for its portrait of the Nazis.

Throughout the documentary, Riefenstahl reminds us that she was never a member of the Nazi party. Indeed, the filmmakers point out that she was often out of the country when the worst events, like Kristallnacht, happened. Yet, she is often mentioned in Goebbel’s diary as being present at Nazi events, something Riefenstahl denies. She was acquitted at the end of the war of any war crimes (she was accused of using gypsies from a concentration camp in one of her movies), but she was also unable to continue her filmmaking work because of her association with Hitler.

Her life and work offer fertile ground for considering the moral role of the artist. Throughout the film, Riefenstahl, who lived to be 101 years old, focuses on her aesthetics, claiming she was fascinated by Hitler but not a Nazi. But at times, she seems to be in denial about her own actions. It is interesting that several reviewers in the Internet Movie Database seem to be apologists for her, suggesting that no one really understood Hitler’s plan in the late 1930s. Yet, excerpts from Mein Kampf seem to make it pretty clear. Riefenstahl claims she never read it. I have a copy of Triumph of the Will sitting by the television but I’m not sure I want to read it.

I can’t help but contrast her with Alice Lok Cahana, a visual artist featured in The Last Days, a film about five Hungarian Jews who survived the holocaust. Cahana’s work is focused on the Holocaust, endowing it with a moral purpose: “”I started to paint only about the Holocaust as a tribute and memorial to those who did not return, and I am still not finished.”

A Horrible Lesson

adult learning, documentary film

Watching a documentary about the life of Anne Frank–Anne Frank Remembered–that includes powerful first-person accounts from Auschwitz survivors.   One of the women talked about arriving in Auschwitz on the train and the horror of having to stand naked in front of the German guards.  It went against all her values and she said that she learned at that moment that her values were no longer important.  She had to learn a whole new set of beliefs and values, and, she said, if you didn’t learn them, you would die.  Another woman comments on how the horror became somewhat commonplace.  The first time she saw the cart of dead bodies, she looked away. The next time, she noticed but was not as frightened.  Finally, the third time, she didn’t even notice.  Her brain, she said, was learning a new way of living.