Assignment

Prepare a short podcast or video close reading of some part of The Education that you plan to cover in your critical essay.  To accomplish this assignment, you will need to record and edit yourself (either audio, video or both) and then sign up for a service (such as YouTube or Soundcloud) that allows you to share (and embed) your audio/video files online.  Once you’ve attempted all of that, you should briefly explain and share what you’ve done through a short blog post at the course website.

Technical Guidance

• Don’t worry too much about minimum or maximum length on this assignment, or even production values (yet), especially if you are an AV novice.  Just see if you can “get in the game,” so to speak, and make some progress in the longterm goal of learning how to generate multi-media content online.
• There are many different ways to record and edit audio and video, but the three most popular (and free) programs are iMovie (Apple), Moviemaker (PC) and Audacity (audio only).  Here are video tutorials for each, but remember that for such popular programs you can find a litany of other supporting resources online simply by Googling your technical questions.

• To sign up for YouTube or Soundcloud, just go to those sites and follow their directions for Signing Up.  Both are free.  For now, you should also set your sharing status to public to simplify things.  But after the assignment is submitted and evaluated, remember to revert to private or to delete your channel if you don’t want the work to be open and searchable on the Internet.
• To see numerous examples of multi-media close readings, consult Lincoln’s Writings: The Multi-Media Edition and also read these posts from Prof. Pinsker at Quora:

Producing AV Close Readings

Common Core and Close Reading Strategies

Prof. Pinsker prepared both of these posts for the online “Understanding Lincoln” course, but they address useful tips for this particular assignment.  Also, please note that Quora (a crowd-sourced Q&A site) prompts users to sign up before reading more than one post but registration is free.