--- Video adventuring ---

Again, although this blog primarily urges the reader to get away from their TVs and computers and experience their world actively as immersive adventures, we can't get away from the fact that, today, cyberspace is part of our world. I've talked about programming and using software to explore concepts and I've talked about opencourseware and other video lectures as fun and interesting ways to learn and to prepare for real world adventures.

Documentaries offer another form of learning, usually a little lighter than the extensive lectures and courses. They can also present another kind of adventure.

TV offers a variety of documentary venues - channels like the National Geographic, Discovery, and History channels, to name a few, but I like the Internet sources. Several websites provide access to documentary films that you can "surf" through and find surprising gems. I've noted that MIT uses the Internet Archive as a repository of video lectures. It also uses iTunes U. I might add that YouTube also hosts a huge variety of educational features.

Here are some addresses:

Internet Archive https://archive.org
iTunes U - You have to have iTunes and you can access iTunes U from there.
YouTube https://www.youtube.com

Repositories will often have a search bar. Internet Archives let's you filter a search for particular kinds of media. That's really helpful when you're looking for films and there are thousands of items to scan through.

If you go to the Internet Archives and just type, say, "psychology" into the search bar, you're going to get all the video lectures available and a lot of other stuff, even if you filter out everything but films. To surf through the documentaries, search on "psychology documentary" and "psychology documentaries".

Video lectures offer in depth presentations of topics. Documentaries tend to be narrow in scope and, usually, geared toward general audiences, but can be surprisingly entertaining.

--- Websites, Blogs, and Videos...Oh my!! ---

2016

Actually, media is a new thing for me - on computers anyway. I operated the media department of the School of Pharmacy at Auburn University as a work-study student back in the 70s but computers didn't have much of a part there. I picked up an equivalent of a minor in computer science - I already had three minors, though, so I didn't get to claim it. Comparing those computers with this one (the one I'm using to compose this blog) is sorta funny.

Computer graphics back then was - okay, I won't go there.

I've even been exposed to HTML, but I can't do everything all at once. I didn't compose this blog from scratch. Fact is, I took the easy way out and used Google Blogger. But, then, I like the results - don't reinvent the wheel - right? All you have to do is just put everything together the way you want it.

I already had a website - The Therian Timeline. I took the easy way with that, too. I used Site Solution, a service provided by Yahoo Aabaco Small Business services. Again, you just tell it what you want and it does it.

I could have chosen a bunch of other such throw-it-together tools on the Internet but, you get the idea.

I'm working on a series of science demonstration videos to go along with my blogs for when I get to physics in a couple of years. See, I plan ahead! I'm a new hand to computer videos so, you guessed it - I took the easy way.

My laptop already had a video program called Dell Webcam Central, so I'm using it to put together videos, along with a desktop recorder called CamStudio Recorder. That way, I can display everything I put on the video - LibreOffice Impress presentations, spreadsheets, webcam videos, whatever - and CamStudio will record it all. So, if I can just live long enough....

Well, you'll get to see it if I do.

Until, then, I'll be here.

Stay well.
Wolf