Watch this music video for Radiohead's track, All I Need, which is as flawless a visual essay as they come.

And then watch this vodcast [3:48], in which I lay out some guiding principles for writing and shooting visual essays like this.

Radiohead, Child Labor, and Visual Literacy from Dan Meyer on Vimeo.

Alec, this one's for you, bud.

Jason, one of the Animoto guys, responds to my criticism, admitting his utility's limitations as a storytelling medium¹ but then noting its "great pedagogical usages," the most interesting of which is:

… the Animoto presentation is in a style that many students are familiar with (MTV-style videos), I think it adds a great juxtaposition of using an aesthetic with which kids are already familiar, along with learning material than [sic] they are being exposed to for the first time.

Animoto is a staggeringly cool tool which almost everyone — even its creators, off Jason's comment — appreciates for the wrong reason.

Specifically, Animoto creates photo montages better and faster than any other Internet utility but, over the long run, the fact that the montages jitter and bob with the music — its most celebrated and distinctive feature — does nothing for me as a media consumer and less than nothing for me as a educator².

This isn't because I like taking shots at the high-flying School 2.0 balloon or even because this is a matter of opinion. It isn't. Nor do I take some old-fashioned exception to the MTV aesthetic.

But the MTV aesthetic, even at its most arresting, spasmodic, and hypnotizingly awful, gives content some consideration³. Animoto has no such capability. It will adjust the speed of your video to match your song but it does not care even a little about your photographic content.

Its z-axis transitions look great but they are selected wholly apart from your content and, several times per slideshow, they obscure it — cropping out your Auntie's face and strobing several shots over the rest of your family — simply because Animoto doesn't know any better⁴.

"No two videos are the same," claims Animoto's main page but each slideshow shares in common a complete, 100%, de facto disregard for the relationship between form and content. Maybe it's unfair of me to suggest that educators oughtta know better but I'm astonished that this same crowd which dumped all over MTV in the '90s has missed this, that it has endorsed a tool good only for spackling enthusiasm across a crowd as meaningful learning, as meaningful assessment, as meaningful self-expression.

If you're going to teach this at all, you owe your kids to teach it right. Yet my colleagues' enthusiasm for visual expression has outpaced their understanding of it by several orders of magnitude.

What efforts are you making to get this right?

1. which, of course, is the box most K-12 educators are forcing Animoto into, even though it makes VoiceThread look awesome. [back]
2. watch a dozen in a row and let me know how quickly your returns diminish. [back]
3. eg. the lyrics of a dark, dreary song inform the visuals at least a little. [back]
4. cf. the Ken Burns effect, which, stale and tired as it is, zooms, pans, and crops photos all to enhance content. [back]

Teachers : Animoto :: Teenage Boys : Michael Bay

Animoto belongs in the classroom as much as Transformers does in an arthouse.

The masterminds behind both are clearly field-tested and combat-ready¹, but as a storytelling device, as a medium for instruction, as a delivery device for anything but rockin', noisy thrills, light on content, heavy on flash, their products flatly suck.

Again: if you want to strike an emotional chord with your audience or jazz up your Poughkeepsie vacation slideshow then Animoto's got you covered.

But all y'all Classroom 2.0 Animoto-philes²: when has any worthy learning moment come as cheaply and easily as an Animoto slideshow?

• Upload your photos. [Great interface.]
• Browse their archives for music. [It automatically embeds the citation.]
• Uh.
• Wait?
• That's it?

Yeah, I realize it slickly analyzes your music for tempo and adjusts visual rhythm to match but nowhere does it analyze your photos for content. Nowhere does it automate a narrative. Nowhere does Animoto³ do anything more than jab your frontal lobe with a sharp, happy stick.

*poke poke poke*

yeah! yeah! yeah!

Not saying there isn't a place for this, but I am saying it isn't the classroom. This is decidedly the one-size-fits-all visual essay and if I've gotta brainwash your kids when I get 'em from you and reteach 'em the form, it won't be without posting this cranky missive first.

1. Check out the Animoto intro video, which is a motion-graphic marvel, for proof. [back]
2. I only subscribe to their feed 'cause I'm running a heated bet with myself that Sir Ken Robinson's state of the educational union will get 900 individual mentions (" … hey, has anyone seen this video … ") before school's out. So far I'm winning. [back]
3. Or Michael Bay, while we're here. [back]