Thursday, August 31, 2006

The afterparty.. of a nice book

When I started my [limited] teaching experience, I didn't know about that magic spark of interest that you can see in your students when the "get it". That was a great feeling and a key driver for my motivation as a teacher.

But even before feeling that, there was always something that I always admired among the best teachers that I had: the passion for their subject was visible in their eyes. It was a glowing spark in their eyes, and that was a key complement to the content, and even a complement to the delivery of the content by the teacher. When passion exhuded in their face, the message came across with higher credibility.

I always missed than when reading books. Some claim the movies substract a lot of the creativity and imagination that the reader inserts when reading a book... and hollywood quite often removes a lot of the book's author key messages. But I was more frustated for the opposite reason: I missed seeing that spark in the eyes of the author.

That's why youtube and google video have me that excited recently:

Take "Blink" from Malcolm Gladwell, and the concept of snap reasoning. Reading the book is one good thing... but checking out Gladwell himself in Google video , seeing his gesture when talking about "snap judgements" did add an imagine in my memory to the concept.

Or take professor Cialdini, who wrote a great book "Influence: the psychology of persuasion" in a video excerpt of one of his conferences.

Even non-exciting ones, like Robert Kiyosaki (author of Rich Dad, Poor Dad) get on online video a way of reinforce their messages... and we get a way of feeling closer to them that just reading their books.

Hopefully the merchants of online video don't get too greddy so soon, as Google Video now charges for the high quality version of Charlie Rose's interview to Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner(co-authors of Freakonomics)... will they start charging more for video?

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