So hey. For the next week, I'm apparently called Anna and have Elle Woods as my blogger image. Sorry about that. I'm designing a pervasive game for a course, and for the next week I am running a demo version. And stupidly I didn't think to create a new google account before starting a Blogger account for the main character. Whoops.

If you're curious, the demo is based at HarvardiAnna. Feel free to check it out* and let me know your thoughts, though remember that this is a very very early beta that is more a proof-of-concept than anything else. It is an Alternate Reality Game designed to complement Harvard's freshman orientation.

*previously this post said Harvard affiliates could feel free to participate, but I am amending that. If you are or were an undergrad at Harvard, please do give me your thoughts but don't post answers - the puzzles are designed for Harvard neophytes. Thanks!

Today I learned that I am the first person in the history of the internet who has blogged about something related to her job, had her boss find it, and had this lead to praise and approbation. :)

I am wondering about a presentation given to one of my classes today by a producer at WGBH. The only time she defaulted to a masculine pronoun (the only time anyone ever defaults to a masculine pronoun in children's programming) was when referring to the writers. FML.

Twitter

I have been talked into joining Twitter. Or rather, Jeana said "why aren't you on Twitter?" and I said "dunno."

http://twitter.com/LizWeinbloom

Facebook's jumped the shark anyways.

Little Einsteins; or, the decline of civilization

I am a big supporter of children’s television, but I have long been skeptical of preschool programming. With the very notable exception of Sesame Street, which is designed to be awesome for parents as well as toddlers, television for preschoolers is largely inscrutable to grownups. There’s just no accounting for the taste of 2-year-olds. Probably because they shouldn’t be watching tv at all.

Often, preschool programs employ the “interactive” model of Blue’s Clues and Dora the Explorer, in which the viewer is asked direct questions by a protagonist who blinks far too infrequently for comfort. On some level I eagerly anticipate the art that will someday be created by a generation whose concept of the fourth wall was demolished so early on – in my day, kids’ tv only got as meta as the seriously over-branded Where’s Waldo, which froze the action intermittently so we could run up to the screen and, you know, find Waldo. But on the whole, these “interactive” shows (and I will never ever call them interactive without a liberal dose of scare quotes) are labeled as educational, while being benign at best – and, far too often, actively idiotic.

Today I watched Little Einsteins. You might have heard of the Baby Einstein brand. The tv version is a Dora-style show on the Disney channel that promotes arts literacy or something. [Note that the actual baby Einstein was deemed to be no Einstein; irony is an undeveloped muscle in the world of preschool programming].

Now, I have no quibbles about the value of arts literacy. I myself once wrote a pitch about talking paintings, though largely to cannibalize art puns from a failed project about singing paintings. And then I discovered that Sesame Street had already done it, as there is no good idea that wasn’t done first and better by the Muppets. Twice.

My quibble is not with the end, but the means. The thought process behind the Baby Einstein franchise is that context-less exposure to Mozart and Picasso at an early age will stay in the system – like acid – and conveniently resurface sixteen years later in the presence of a Harvard admissions officer.

In practice, this means assigning each episode a painting and symphony (in the episode I watched, “Go West, Young Train,” these were a Navajo basket and a phrase from Bizet’s L’Arlsienne Suite #2), and randomly inserting them into a Dora-style problem-solving adventure. But the problem is not at all related to the art. A little red train in the Old West was on its way to a hoe-down, you see, and its bag of goodies – including three violins that ghost-bowed the Bizet, because what’s a hoe-down without some French ballet scoring? – was stolen by an evil jet plane.

Sure, whatever. How about that art? Well, the Navajo basket was not woven into the events, but served as a backdrop. The little red train chased the evil jet into a cave (don’t think too hard, now), and the cave happened to look like the basket. Not that the basket was used as a map or anything. The idea is to divorce the art from its context, remember? They just went into a cave that happened to resemble that basket we saw in the opening credits.

On the music side of things, four measures of Bizet are sprinkled liberally through the soundtrack. A time-honored way to exploit the public domain teach classical music, though Bugs Bunny was a bit more willing to get past the opening phrases. But Little Einsteins goes one better than “What’s Opera, Doc” and uses the Dora model to teach real live music vocabulary too.

Dora’s claim to fame is, of course, the Spanish words. Her dialog is punctuated with random Spanish exclamations (“clap your hands mas rapido!”) that may or may not increase children’s comfort with bilingualism, depending on who sponsored the study. But when Little Einsteins borrows this technique, the result is dialog like this:

“The little red train is going andante, but the evil jet is going allegro! Help the little red train go more allegro!”

What. the. fuck.

Let’s ignore the fact that words like andante and allegro are completely useless for anyone who isn’t, say, sightreading a score or writing liner notes. This vocabulary is not only completely useless, but decontextualized to the point of meaninglessness. Tempo and velocity are NOT THE SAME THING. You can’t “go allegro”! You don’t walk allegro any more than you play the piano at 55 mph. Granted, I have had several conductors fond of obliterating traditional boundaries of units of measure (“the sopranos are two octaves behind and a golf course sharp!” – Dr. Jameson Marvin). But this is ridiculous.

Programs like Little Einsteins will not make your kid smart. They will quite possibly make your kid stupider. But at least they’ll be able to hum four measures of non-Carmen Bizet. And that’s more than you can.

Ceci n'est pas une blog

This is not a blog.

Well, technically it is. But not really.

Due to popular demand (okay, scattered but persistent demand), I will now be providing reading material of the online variety with some regularity.

I have resisted traditional blogging my entire internet-life, for the simple reason that I know myself - I'll get way too into it. (cf: my away messages, in general) Also:

me: here's what my blog would end up being:1) stuff about bbc shows
2) transcripts of our gchat conversations3) whining about my under-employment

Jenny: ...you say all this like it's a bad thing

So this is not a blog. This is digital, public storage space for stuff that I write. And by stuff that I write, I mean anything that I think is a bit clever and want to share, ranging from essays and sketches to emails and drinking games. What there won't be is a play-by-play of my life. Because who the hell wants to read that?

Enjoy! And just because this isn't a blog doesn't mean you shouldn't leave comments. :)