The Fallen World

I just finished watching the Youtube video by Richard Miller and I thought it was awesome. On a purely aesthetic note, I liked the pictures and the music together and his voice was paced wonderfully to go along with the images. I thought I would find the whole thing incredibly boring but I found myself sitting here and fully absorbed into what he was saying and what I was seeing. I think this is a nod to the effects a multimodal presentation could have on a person/student and I hope that one of these days I can make my presentations as effective as Miller did.

Now, I had some responses to the overall theme of the presentation and I must say I didn’t know what was going on at first with all the pictures of apocalyptic images…I wasn’t sure where he was going to go with those and then into humanity. Then, I realized, that he was going to address something that I have pondered often myself and that is the existence and (I hate to use this word) usefulness of the humanities. Here the viewer is presented with devastating images of a world at its end…leaving me, the viewer, with the now familiar feeling of hopelessness and cynicism. I was waiting for the usual argument that we have to change the future or realize what is happening and all that jazz. Instead, Miller continues with an argument that with humanities people can learn to hope again. People and students can begin to realize that the world is not a place where only black and white resides but instead the world is in a constant state of grey. I have thought many times that I wished more people would realize the consistency of grey in our world, and here I found out that is a goal of humanities (according to Miller anyway). When realizing the ambiguousness of our world, a person should be able to see more clearly thus allowing them to possibly make change and not just change in only a critical sense but change with movement. How great! Suddenly I was feeling a new sense of duty as an English major and English graduate student. My point in this university, where my department does not even have proper bathroom doors, is to direct the students about the world and give them hope. Help students to realize the world out there not in terms of right and wrong but in terms of understanding and becoming a global citizen. A daunting task, but I was at least given a task. Of course, this then made me panic because I thought of my composition classroom and realized there is a lot of room for change in order to help students learn and really understand some things but I figure the first step to my own personal change is realizing I have to do it—sorry, I guess that was just an aside. Anyway, I just wanted to say that I really enjoyed this presentation and as usual as I am trying to Blog I want to get everything out but find myself either repeating or leaving out main concepts that are running around in my head, so for that I apologize. ☺