Do Barack Obama and John McCain have the same web designer?

Have you been looking for a game that combines the fun geography challenge of Traveler IQ with the social responsibility of FreeRice? Look no further. A site called FreePoverty allows you to identify locations on a label-free map while generating ad revenue that donates water to people around the world who need it. Enjoy!

I was doing pretty well at first, but my ignorance of Australian geography turned out to be quite a detriment on the higher levels. Crikey!

Well, I am pleased to report that the Cymbeline project turned out very well.

For their video project, the 8th grade class I was working with decided to create a modern-day talk show (instead of a reality show) with characters from Shakespeare’s Cymbeline as guests. The show includes scenes from the original play, an alternate ending, and a commercial for a Cymbeline video game… all written, performed, and produced by the students!

They presented their video at an in-school film festival, and represented their school at a citywide film festival hosted by my organization. And now, through the magic of the Internet, I share the video with you:

If you want to share this video with others, you can link directly to this post or embed the video from its TeacherTube page (where you can also watch the video if you have trouble loading it in here). We will also be featuring the video on the school’s home page.

UPDATE: The kids put the video on YouTube. It’s a much higher quality than what I was able to post to TeacherTube, so if you want to embed the video on your site, you should use that one.

Via The Shakespeare Geek, we learn of Madeline, who has made good progress on a project to record herself reading all of Shakespeare’s sonnets on YouTube.

These recordings stand out very favorably among the many who have put themselves speaking Shakespeare online. She doesn’t feel the need to over-emote, but instead trusts and enjoys the words of the poet. Shakespeare’s language seems to come very naturally to her, and the videos are a pleasure to watch. Also, I think because she’s so young, she brings a freshness and vitality to her readings, and makes the old poems feel relevant for a new generation.

Here she is doing a favorite of this blog, Sonnet LV:

More here.

Weezer’s new video for “Pork and Beans” is on YouTube, and in more ways than one.

Bonus points for the first one to spot Charlie the Unicorn.

UPDATE: Charlie spotted by Benjamin Baxter.

Clay Shirky has a posting well worth reading about the changing nature of how we spend our time. You should really read the whole thing, but I think his point is well summed up by his reaction to a television producer when he was explaining to her how Wikipedia works:

So I tell her all this stuff, and I think, “Okay, we’re going to have a conversation about authority or social construction or whatever.” That wasn’t her question. She heard this story and she shook her head and said, “Where do people find the time?” That was her question. And I just kind of snapped. And I said, “No one who works in TV gets to ask that question. You know where the time comes from. It comes from the cognitive surplus you’ve been masking for 50 years.”

So how big is that surplus? So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project–every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in–that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it’s a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it’s the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of thought.

And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that’s 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads. This is a pretty big surplus. People asking, “Where do they find the time?” when they’re looking at things like Wikipedia don’t understand how tiny that entire project is, as a carve-out of this asset that’s finally being dragged into what Tim calls an architecture of participation.

The producer still just thought it all a fad, but Shirky would soon have an experience that’s hard to dismiss.

I was having dinner with a group of friends about a month ago, and one of them was talking about sitting with his four-year-old daughter watching a DVD. And in the middle of the movie, apropos nothing, she jumps up off the couch and runs around behind the screen. That seems like a cute moment. Maybe she’s going back there to see if Dora is really back there or whatever. But that wasn’t what she was doing. She started rooting around in the cables. And her dad said, “What you doing?” And she stuck her head out from behind the screen and said, “Looking for the mouse.”

Here’s something four-year-olds know: A screen that ships without a mouse ships broken. Here’s something four-year-olds know: Media that’s targeted at you but doesn’t include you may not be worth sitting still for. Those are things that make me believe that this is a one-way change. Because four year olds, the people who are soaking most deeply in the current environment, who won’t have to go through the trauma that I have to go through of trying to unlearn a childhood spent watching Gilligan’s Island, they just assume that media includes consuming, producing and sharing.

The thing is that this change in our culture is more than just about our attitudes towards media or technology. Students are going to be coming to school expecting a more self-directed, interactive form of learning than we’ve been giving them. They won’t wait to be given permission to publish their writing or participate in their democracy. We need to make sure that school is a place where they can learn to acquire information more efficiently and express themselves more effectively, not a place where they are stifled in their attempts to do so.

I don’t think we’re quite there yet.

Click on the link below and you will see the video for Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up” on YouTube.

Rick Astley Video

Did you do it? You’ve been Rickrolled, sucka!

Happy April Fools Day.

UPDATE: Okay, I’m told that you’re not supposed to tell someone that you’re Rickrolling them. So click the “Rick Astley Video” link above, but pretend like you don’t know what it’s going to be. (But it really is the Rick Astley video.)

Did you do it? You’ve been Rickrolled, sucka!

You can say anything you want:

For hundreds of years, people have questioned whether William Shakespeare wrote the plays that bear his name. The mystery is fueled by the fact that his biography simply doesn’t match the areas of knowledge and skill demonstrated in the plays. Nearly a hundred candidates have been suggested, but none of them fit much better. Now a new candidate named Amelia Bassano Lanier - the so-called ‘Dark Lady’ of the Sonnets and a member of an Italian/Jewish family - has been shown to be a perfect fit.

Via the Shakespeare Geek, who is kind enough to suspect that the whole thing is a put on.

Via the Shakespeare Geek, we learn of a production of Hamlet being performed in Second Life:

This has been another installment of Things Shakespeare Could Not Possibly Have Anticipated.