Brain Stuffing

An idle moment, a quiet chance for a moment of introspection in the eye of the storm. An opportunity to examine some of the things which have drifted through my mind in the midst of travel and teething, family and food.

Transition Times, Indo, Examiner….
Media Forum, who organised the Critical Media Education Symposium in November is holding a follow-up meeting on the 15th January to discuss some things arising from the day and to launch the summary report of November’s symposium. In addition, I think, they’re looking to try to generate some momentum towards change.
For my part, if I can make it, I’d like to propose that the interested parties should create a full Transition Year module on Critical Media Analysis based on the PaperRound methodology, following the Irish Film Institute’s “Moving Image” module as a model.

I’d suggest a TY module because it avoids the hostility of the National Council for Curriculum and Assessment to the introduction of new items (or ideas) to the curriculum of the examinable cycles.

Anyone who’d also like to be involved in promoting or working gently or hard on such a project- feel free to email me or to leave a comment.

New Faces
Happily, I managed to make Fustar’s Manky Toy Show after all. It was both a spectacular and a spectacular success. Go there and catch the repeat if you missed it live. It occured to me afterwards that while the Navvy, Polyblock One and all the rest danced across my screen, animated into enjoyable life by the pure talents of the Fustar team, the television sigularly failed to offer anything to compare as a draw.

Fustar works within his medium- not putting on a TV-like video stream, or a radio programme, or a newspaper article. He used the unique circumstances of being on the web to give us something new. And something new, in Ireland, should always be welcomed.

Irish Election has the potential to similarly displace commoditised commercial political analysis, news and gossip. Unfortunately, it remains handicapped by its eternal problem of a lack of quality control. Until it finds a way around this problem it will struggle to reach its potential. That limitation remains as long as the new casual visitor forms their first impression of the site by likely reading commentary which might have been planted there by Gavin O’Reilly to prove his case against bloggers

1 Comment

  • fústar says:

    Glad you enjoyed it Simon. It was a pretty exhausting 3 hours and 20 minutes of live blogging but I had a blast. Quite liberating to be able to record one’s thoughts on the fly.

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