Friday, February 17, 2012

#Hashtagging, Texting, and Explaining JayScribble

So I was watching NCIS on CBS (No, they don't pay me to say it, its just what is always on at my house for some reason...) and in the bottom left I saw during like the first two minutes of the show "#NCIS" which to anyone who is unfamiliar with the internet or Twittering (Tweeting? Tweetering?) doesn't know what this means.

Anyway, about Julyish my friend Dave introduced me to this idea of kind of "Tagging" things in facebook, twitter, etc. posts. The idea was, you place a Pound Sign (#) before whatever you wanted to tag the post with, and then people could search the tag and see how many other people had the same tag.

Here a few months ago, I find that I was only a small part of this idea, and that it's on Twitter (Yeah, I'm on twitter, feel free to follow me @AlexPopichak). I also found out that if you go to the web version of twitter, you can click on a hashtag and it'll take you to a thing where you see the Hashtag's search page. I don't think there's anything yet for #The2015Blogger. Hmm...

So on an unrelated note, I have been texting like crazy for the past few weeks. I have found that I am quite good at texting, albeit almost never in a timely manner. It helps a lot that I have a keyboard cellphone, though.

Anyway, my teacher claimed that text communication and internet communication are a step backward as far as communication goes. I have to say I disagree with that. At first we only had talking. The only way to reach someone was to think of something, then form it with your mouth, and then hope they interpret what you really mean. Then we had this thing called writing, with the same aim, only using physical characters instead of words. This made it easier to get a point across, because you didn't need to rely on the telephone (the game, not the instrument) method or be everywhere at once. Now we have texting.

In my opinion, texting is the closest thing we can get to telepathy. It combines the ideas of writing with the words coming straight from the mind. I might be going out on a limb, but I believe I have some form of a point here.

So the next best thing to telepathy or actually being in a place in person (and I hope you'll agree with me on this one) is appearing via video. Jay Scribble and his brother do this once a week.

Anyway, JayScribble did this series in his Vlogbrothers videos back in 2010 regarding the French Revolution. I enjoyed it personally (although he talks really fast) because it got all of the information in your head in a memorable way with visual aid.

So we were studying the French Revolution in class, and I asked my teacher (She prefaced class with "we're watching a video today") if she was talking about some dry half-hour video with a video sheet. She was. So I introduced her to JayScribble and his French Revolution series. I just asked her to take a look at it.

My American Cultures teacher prefaced her class the following day with "We're watching a video series today that Alex found." And then for the next half hour we covered the entire French Revolution a la John Green. At the end of the series she made the comment that she feels that she talks REALLY SLOW in comparison to JayScribble.

I find it ironic that about a month before that, he had created a World History series on a separate channel. You can check that out online at YouTube.com/CrashCourse.

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