Day 3 Thoughts

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Description: MIT 20.219 Becoming the Next Bill Nye: Writing and Hosting the Educational Show, IAP 2015. View the complete course: http://ocw.mit.edu/20-219IAP15.

Instructor: Elizabeth Choe

License: Creative Commons BY-NC-SA

More information at http://ocw.mit.edu/terms

More courses at http://ocw.mit.edu

PROFESSOR: All right-- so end of day three. This was probably maybe the more challenging lecture for you guys, which is funny because it's probably the one that I was most comfortable with coming into the class because George and I had done it before. That's basically what happens during pre-production of "Science Out Loud" is we work with the students one-on-one honing their scripts and their ideas.

But I do recognize that it's very uncomfortable from the other end and very challenging to think outside of your perspective, to anticipate an audience, to learn how to host-- hosting is really hard and maybe you have a better sense of it now. But I'm going to try to figure out how to get some of the raw footage from Open CourseWare up today. But it's really stunning to see the difference when you guys are just talking during class, which is inherently very engaging.

For anyone who thinks that they're not good on camera, I challenge you to watch some of the footage from Open CourseWare because that's just not sure. You guys are very engaging on camera when you're not aware that you're on camera. But the difference between that and when you're just reading out loud-- I don't know what it is about just human nature that you sort of inhabit this completely different persona and completely different talking voice.

I do hope that you found today productive, even if it was a lot of getting rid of stuff that you had written last night or a lot of stuff that you had made beforehand. I do believe that this is collectively a process that propels forward. And its very normal. For George's draft, we literally went back and forth 10, 15 times-- same for mine. And it's what makes it fun.

I feel really good about everyone's ideas for their episodes, at least. It's really just a matter at this point of figuring out the best way to structure things and the best way to phrase and delivers things. And that's really what's going to make the big difference in the end but when it comes to the core ideas and the topics, they're all quite fascinating and they're all videos that I would watch, that George would watch. So that's a really good place to be.

I can see that people are being challenged outside of their traditional modes of thinking or maybe their comfort zones, which I think is a really great thing. I also totally empathize with it and know how uncomfortable it can feel sometimes. But I'm really happy with where we are right now. There's definitely a lot of room to grow from here but that's sort of the point.

So hopefully, we're supporting you enough on this. Let us know if there's anything we can do. I loved the Hourglass piece that George showed today just because it's funny to see that a person like Hourglass-- who's really great on audio, a really great host-- even he struggles with delivery sometimes.

In taking his sort of jumbled mess of words and hearing him deliver the point of it and seeing the big difference between the two, I hope that you guys see that that's sort of what we're trying to get you all to the point, of being able to distill this cloud of ideas into a message that is very concrete and very compelling.

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