We'll start off this blog with an Info Video selection.
RSAnimate is a section of RSA (Royal Society of the encouragement of the Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce - How they only get RSA instead of RSEAMC out of that is a mystery) that can be found either on thersa.org or on its youtube site.
In particular, the RSA Animate series are a series of videos which take educational/interesting talks and animates them via speed-up whiteboard drawings by obviously skilled cartoonists. This blog wouldn't be much if it didn't give examples of it, so I have two of my favorite talks below to show:
RSA Animate - Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us
This talk by Dan Pink describes some surprising observations about how people become motivated, namely that value-based incentives do not work as well for as many tasks as we may have previously thought. In other words, throwing a bunch of money at people as a carrot on a stick works only in specific contexts, such as manual labor and otherwise non-creative tasks, and is actually detrimental otherwise! It is a very interesting talk which is made better by the fact that it is so well (literally) drawn-out.
RSA Animate - Changing Education Paradigms
This particular one is a talk by Sir Ken Robinson, who is an advocate for the betterment of education. Namely, his chief objection with the Western (and perhaps worldwide) education system is that it was created out of the Industrial Age ideal of making people specifically trained for only a very particular job, and that in the current age where most people can expect to enter into well over 5 career paths in their lives it does not serve children to pigeon-hole them into a particular area.
He also is a huge advocate for the arts of all kinds, in large part due to his philosophy that the arts inspire creative and critical thinking and problem solving abilities that pure mathematics and English studies cannot exercise. Beyond that, he recognizes that individuals are all in possession of differing abilities and talents, and that those gifts should be more readily recognized, encouraged, and developed by the education system.
RSA has many other video in its series, both animated and otherwise. I highly encourage my readers to go and check out more of their videos on Youtube at http://www.youtube.com/user/theRSAorg and enjoy more of these interesting and no-doubt educational materials!
