GPC Style Captioning: "Who. What. Where. When. Why. How (optional)."

GPC Style Annotation is merely a suggestion for captioning stills.

It was originally introduced in December 2005.

The underlying reasoning behind this format is that

captions written in GPC Style might be both quicker to read

and easier for people to interpret in an international context,

provided that the readers are acquainted with the logic behind this captioning format.

GPC Style Annotation is very direct

and relies less on the traditional grammatical structure of the English language,

potentially making it easier to interpret once translated into other languages

(again, by those acquainted with its logic).

this is the way the microstock sites caption their pics

Seriously?

Since when out of curiosity?

Can you point me to some examples?

Personally I’ve never been a fan of the microstock sites.

Thanks.

The ‘who, what, when, where’ etc style of captioning is prevalent in newspapers and wire agencies, and is pretty crucial for fast image retrieval. Most pictures are now sourced by keyword, not by seeing the image, so clear, concise captioning is very important.

For example, if you’re looking for images of ‘George Bush’, you might not necessarily want to see any images of Dubya’s dad.

So if you didn’t caption your pics ‘George W. Bush Jr’, chances are you’re muddying the waters in the search engine.

Only describe what’s in the image and nothing else – and dont assume the reader will know what you’re talking about.

I typed in ‘10 Downing St’ once, only to be told to type ‘The British Prime Ministers residence, Number 10 Downing Street’ because you can’t assume everyone will know what ‘10 Downing St’ is.

Another example is that ‘The White House’ is also the name of a government building in Moscow.

Patrick, if you are an Aperture user there is a Istock plugin and you can see these categories there. Otherwise you need to register to be able to see them on the upload page.. Sion makes a good point (as usual)keywording is all.. How’s the leg coming on?

The leg is mending slowly and I’m spending quite some time doing…keywording.

I’ve been using Photo Mechanic and its latest version has the ability to import a keyword thesaurus which is something worth thinking about. Potentially its one of the most efficient methods of ‘one man’ keywording.

Thanks fellas. I’ll have to look into this more when I grab some more time.

Patrick…who, what, where, when, WHY? Is why optional? How does one know ‘why’? A ‘why’ is a big mystery in 90% of the events unfolding right in front of our eyes (after all, why is really Monique Honeybush performing burlesque number in the Mercy Lounge?).

I suggest you get rid of WHY if you want to eliminate ‘bullshit’and ‘fluff’. There are no ‘facts’ in ‘why’... on the contrary; a ‘why’ is often a load of bullshit. Just check the USA mainstream media.

all the best.

Well said Velibor!

Agreed; ‘why’ is painfully subjective.

Here are some comments/clarifications I posted on a parallel Flickr post..

“The idea is simply how to write captions to make them as globally accessible to the global-internet-public as possible.

If there is a more globally accessibly method I would like to see it.
Hopefully there is.

This isn’t intended to become an accepted captioning convention,
it is merely a suggestion.

I don’t even write my captions in this format.

GPC is anti-convention and anti-structural.”

“How is optional because it involves process.
Relationship is more important than process to many photographers.”

You’re thinking too far from the caption. It’s nearly always a question of “say what you see” – don’t interpret any more than that.

‘Why’ and ‘how’ are both reasonable captioning protocols as long as they simply explain the context of whats in the picture.

For example, I could caption a picture of some soldiers patroling Kabul As “British soldiers from blah blah regiment (who) patrol (what) in armoured vehicles (how) 25th April 2007, (when) as part of the ISAF force (why) blah blah”.

The why and how in this case simply explain their method of movement and the stated aims of their mission, because people might search for “armoured vehicle” or “ISAF” as a keyword.

The fact that I might think the whole occupation (why) of Afghanistan is a quagmire and military blunder on a par with the Charge of the Light Brigade (how) is my opinion, is purely subjective and isn’t illustrated in the picture – which is why I wouldnt put it in the caption.

Great points Sion. You always give great feedback.

One gripe I always have about American Journalism is the lack of analysis and adequate context in many, if not most, news stories.

While why is definitely the wildcard factor in this formula, perhaps it can be very useful if used responsibly and ethically to provide for analysis and context.

It seems to me as though British journalism is much better at providing analysis. Of course, there’s probably a much higher percentage of Oxford and London School of Communication educated professional journalists working in Britain compared to the US.

It seems to me as though the straight facts (who, what, where, when) belong up front and the why and how belong at the end. How very convenient that this is the “natural order” of these words I was taught by Nickelodeon as a kid.

I remember discussing this style with some co-students back in 2005 and one of dude in the art program (whose name escapes me) gave some interesting feedback.

He said that he thought it was a structure that would serve equally useful in both fiction and non-fiction narratives for images; photos and paintings alike.

I think it could represent one of the shortest, most direct, and universally accessible methods of communicating a story with a single image.

What I like about this style is that it is open to interpretation. People can approach it and define each element how they choose. One person’s when could be another person’s why, et cetera.

Ordered chaos?

Hi, Patrick,
How does this compare with tagging (and keyword) conventions, and, in that sense, is it truly an improvement over those (currently evolving) conventions? (As I’m sure you know, there are many great discussions on the web about tagging and taxonomy.) Additionally, while GPC is obviously less grammar-bound than AP captioning style, I would point out that a proper AP-style caption does not have to be very long to capture those news basics either. (Monique Honeybush performs a burlesque number at Mercy Lounge in Nashville, TN, on April 24, 2005.) Anyone with a grasp of even rudimentary English grammar will understand that sentence just as well as the GPC captioning. Does that make GPC somehow more international then, when you’re still having to translate from a base language? W

Who, what, when, where, why’ etc, is pretty much universally accepted as the baseline captioning protocol, especially for news and editorial pictures.

It conforms to the IPTC standard used in all newspapers and magazines, and the evolving XMP standard too (cross-platform for the Web and other stuff), so is a good start.

Don’t forget that most, if not the total number of your images will be searched for by text-based search engines (for the time being anyway), so there really is a lot to be gained in short, concise captioning, because unless you’re very good at grammar, a longer caption can confuse a search engine.

Compound this with multiple images captioned by several photographers and you have a recipe for search engine disaster, unless all photographers adhere to a standard like an iron law…which of course they tend not to.

I was involved with one photo agency which pretty much went bust because of this problem, and on the other hand have been woken with calls from a wire service at 3.25am (grrr…time difference) giving me a hard time about my captions not being concise enough that day.

If you deal with a newspaper, magazine or agency it’s a good idea to ask them for some caption (and filename) samples so you can fit your captions to their existing search methods.

If you’re just captioning for your own archive, use the Keep it Simple Stupid principle and you can’t go far wrong. Even then, you should be careful. Patrick’s caption:

“Monique Honeybush, performing burlesque number, Mercy Lounge, Nashville TN April 24th 2005. Burlesque fad in Nashville.”

...is more complex than it looks. It doesn’t clearly explain who Monique Honeybush is (I mean her job, not name). It doesn’t explain what she’s doing simply enough. ‘Performing’ is too broad, it could mean acting, singing…what’s she doing?

Dancing.

‘A burlesque number’...’Number’ in a search engine is probably gonna bring up…numbers. You’d have a better chance with ‘dancing’.

It doesn’t explain what the Mercy Lounge is.

Perhaps a more concise caption would be:

Burlesque performer Monique Honeybush (who) dances (what) at the Mercy Lounge nightclub in Nashville, Tennessee, United States (where), 24th April 2005. (when)

Note that captions tend to be written in the present tense.

The “Burlesque Fad in Nashville” line would be placed in the ‘Headline’ field of the IPTC caption set, so the whole image set could be searched for by headline, as well as caption and keyword (which might not bring up the whole set of pics).

‘Fad’ would be a problemn in the caption, because it means a fashion or craze, something too wide to describe the image content.

Search keywords which would bring up the picture would be:

Burlesque
Perform(s, er, ing)
Dance (Dancing, dancer, dances)
Nightclub
Lounge
Nashville
Tennessee
United States

You’d also place additional RELATED keywords in the IPTC ‘Keywords’ field, like:

Cabaret
Stage
Niteclub (alternate spelling of nightclub)
Venue

which would also where you could let some subjectivity come in, e.g, you might add ‘tease’, ‘sexy’ or ‘empowered’ or ‘assertive’ depending on the slant of the story.

Explaining the full meaning of ‘burlesque’ would have to be a job perhaps outside the image itself.

If the image is part of a feature, some agencies I’ve worked with insert a note in the ‘Additional Comments’ IPTC caption field saying the image is part of a set (with more chance of additional sales…), with a note which says the agency has explanatory text which accompanies the set.

It’s simply a case of having a parallel text archive cross referenced to the images, which you can e-mail or fax over.

In this case it makes sense to have the text database name as

“Burlesque_Fad_in_Nashville_24/04/05.txt”

because it’s already in the image headline.

The problem with the kind of tagging which is used on things like Flickr is it isn’t consistent. People keyword too widely.

Consistent captioning and keywording means your images get found. Images getting found means they get seen. Being seen means a bigger chance of being used.

Being used means you get pai..ahem, make the world a better place :)

Now – one BIG caveat to all this is in stock imagery, which tends to use ‘conceptual keywording’...it means it gets keyworded according to what concept and mood it evokes (because that’s how advertisers and designers tend to work).

That a mindblowing art all to its own, and beyond the scope of my frontal lobes right now…but where it coincides with regular keywording protocols is that it’s CONSISTENT.

Typically a caption is written separate from keywording, right?

This caption serves a dual purpose.

Speaking from a multimedia journalism standpoint, trying to shoot, edit, and write captions for your photos all on deadline is very frustrating.

Keywording an edit of a couple still images is a lot simpler than trying to pump out captions for maybe 20 – 30 images for a multimedia piece.

Moreover, I have a different perspective of how a still relates to an entire story. When I think of seeing an image with a caption online, I’m thinking (as a multimedia pj) that I don’t want that one image to tell me a whole story, I want that image to lead me into a multimedia piece. I want a taste, something quick that will get my attention.

Typically, less words are easier and quicker for the mind to process. The internet is an ADHD medium. I want to draw more people into my multimedia stories. I don’t want to lose their attention with overwritten sentence structures that translate poorly into other languages. Perhaps having a slimmer, less-wordy info will appeal to some people’s curiosity into viewing the bigger story to get more info;

the real story.

I recently posted an article (rewrite) about GPC Style on the GPC weblog in which I state:

“GPC Style Annotation is merely a suggestion for captioning stills,

and is not currently intended to become an accepted captioning convention like AP Style,

but can be easily used in conjunction with most AP Style spelling conventions.”

The entire blog post can be read here:
http://gonzopj.blogspot.com/2007/04/new-way-to-caption-your-photographs.html

Great point about properly written AP Style captions,

I agree.

Here’s what a poster by the name of Neshemah on Flickr recently wrote:

“As a copywriter I appreciate this kind of professional information. It is good to have a palet of possibilities and this information is relevant to those who are conscious of the different ways we can understand or misunderstand a message. Point being that when you write, you want to know that your target groups gets the message. In an international context this is extremely relevant considering how poorly people translate from one language to another. (I speak five languages and know.)”

From all the multilingual people I’ve dicussed this with in the past,
the virtually consistent consensus is that differences in grammatical structures present a substantial barrier to internet-related translating.

Theoretically, a GPC written caption placed on an international wire could be lifted in other countries, translated quickly, and then quickly rewritten back into a more concise caption in that country’s native language.

Perhaps rewritten more quickly and accurately than if it was translated from a traditional caption because upwards of 6 descriptive elements (who, what, where, when, why, how) are very clearly defined within the GPC caption.

We are becoming an increasingly smaller world everyday. More and more people who are illiterate or less literate are gaining access to the web everyday. As more developing countries (that potentially use less common languages) come online, I think it is the duty of responsible journalists and global citizens alike to better accommodate these newcomers to the web.

That means thinking differently.

That means thinking change.

Forgive me Sion, as was typing and I didn’t see your posts.

I agree.

The burlesque example provided in the demo is very, very bad.

Each clause can be as long or short as the author intends.

They don’t have to be keyword length.

That’s just I had presented this method (poorly) in the aforementioned example.

To put it more simply, GPC Style is a means of breaking your captions information up into 5-6 categories that (hopefully) follow a consistent logic and order.

Here’s that rewritten blog post I mentioned earlier:

“A New Way to Caption Your Photographs”

GPC Style Annotation for PhotoJournalism is:

“Who. What. Where. When. Why. How (optional).”

GPC Style Annotation is merely a suggestion for captioning stills,

and is not currently intended to become an accepted captioning convention like AP Style,

but can be easily used in conjunction with most AP Style spelling conventions.

GPC Style was originally introduced in December 2005.

The underlying reasoning behind this format is that

captions written in GPC Style might be both quicker to read

and easier for people to interpret in an international context,

provided that the readers are acquainted with the logic behind this captioning format.

GPC Style Annotation is very direct

and relies less on the traditional grammatical structure of the English language,

potentially making it easier to interpret once translated into other languages

as well as easier to read for those with less proficient reading or English skills

(again, by those acquainted with its logic).

The idea is simply how to write captions to make them

as globally accessible to the ‘global-internet-public’ as possible.

If there is a more globally accessible method I would like to see it.

Hopefully there is.

While ‘why’ is arguably the ‘wildcard’ factor in this formula,

it can be very useful if used responsibly and ethically to provide for better analysis and context.

The straight facts, who-what-where and when are up front,

whereas the more subjective why and how close the caption.

‘How’ is optional because it is more process-related.

GPC Style Annotation is a structure that will serve equally useful in both fictional

and non-fictional narratives for both motion and still images;

photos, video clips, and paintings alike.

Conclusively,

GPC Style Annotation represents one of the shortest, most direct, and universally accessible methods

for communicating a story with a single image.

I hope you consider its use.

-patrick

No bother about the caption, your underlying argument about concise captioning is sound.

There are methods of using bulk caption templates and keyword thresaurii which can help in caption/keywording. Even so, I aint gonna say it’s a pleasure, because its a chore.

Any photographer worth their salt should now consider captioning and keywording to be an integral part of their work though, and spend some time on it. After a while it becomes kind of second nature to bang out concise who what when etc captions.

Just look at the image and think really literally. Even if Politician X is standing still, doing absolutely nothing with their mouth shut, on their own…don’t rack your brains trying to think what his motivation is – type “Politician X stands…”.

Even concise terms being translated into languages and back again can cause problems, because of cultural differences and basic language errors.

A particularly shocking recent example a coupla days ago was a woman in (I believe), the US who had a couch delivered from a mail order company. The label on the couch described its colour as ‘Nigger Brown’.

WTF?!!

Turns out the couch had been made in China, and the Chinese furniture company had been using some kind of fucked-up Chinese/English language translator or word processor or something.

It beats me how ANY piece of software would have that term in it to describe anything…but there ya go.

Still, ask me to caption something in Chinese and God knows what offense I might end up causing…so I suppose getting cross-cultural captions to work is always gonna be a problem.

Even visual languages have cultural differences – in Asia, white is the colour of death and funerals, whereas in the West, it tends to be associated with stuff like weddings.

Very, very concise captions could also fall foul of the George Orwell ‘Newspeak’ argument, which says that by removing words from common use, you effectively remove the concepts they describe.

Newspeak, the language that’s supposed to be spoken in his novel ‘1984’, has the word ‘bad’ removed.

Because Big Brother can never, ever be bad.

He can only be Ungood.

Which is of course, good, only not as er…good.

That way, The Party controls people’s thoughts by controlling their language – the less words, the less independence of thought.

Something to think about, in these times where mass unemployment is called ‘downsizing’ or ‘rationalisation’ and kids being blown to bits are ‘collateral damage’.

A really basic question. What is the meaning of GPC?

Where, When, Who, What seems more logical to me when reading a caption… Makes the elimination process during a search faster… Makes writing the captions faster too… (I think)...

Sion, I really need to read 1984 again.

I haven’t read it since I was twelve.
I had completely forgotten about the Newspeak part until you reminded me. It’s all coming back to me, about how they printed a shorter version of the dictionary every year. I can read much better now so it’s time for me to revisit this literary work.

Speaking of social-control through language..

I blame these new fangled terms like ‘downsizing’ on lawyers and public relations.

I’ve got more linguistic ideas I can’t go public with just yet,

but I will eventually.

All in good time.

Marc, GPC stands for the ‘Gonzo PhotoJournalism Collective.’

It’s been suggested before that we change our name to the ‘Global PhotoJournalism Collective.’

Perhaps someday we’ll put it to a vote.

I want to clarify that I don’t personally prefer this caption format.

I just think it can serve a functional utilitarian purpose.

“War is what happens when language fails.”

-Margaret Atwood

Thank you Patrick.

I used to have extensive caption. A first paragraph using the “Where, When, Who, What”. And one or two other explaining the context as a matter of journalistic information. Reading this post, I tried to stick to GPC style and wrote a short article (500 words) for the journalistic information for my reportage on Rice culture in Madagascar in the presentation gallery. You may have a look here:

http://www.photoshelter.com/gallery-show/G0000T.Xpta7Xsfc

English being a second language for me, the GPC style caption is easier to produce. To gather contextual information in a short article makes sense as the caption of each image do not require extensive writing for me and reading from photo user. Will I stick to this method ? I’ll see.

Good point about simple captions and translation into other languages and making it easy for search engines to find pics, but no one is really addressing the issue of posterity here. Remember that your pictures will be used in history books twenty years from now and onward. A caption should have a short paragraph for context after the who, what, when…Context is key to remaining true to a period in history – we are not just illustrators, we are not only trying to sell pictures, we are historians also. Good detailed captions are very important. If you call that part fluff or bullshit, you are a fool.
20 years from now somone is going to need some context or the work will be easilly susceptible to misleading an editor or propagandize the image even more than it may have been at time of first publish.
I am presently archiving my late father’s pictures from the Cental Amrican wars, and I sure wish I had some contextual captions. His pictures are used every year in text books, so I hope someone is getting their shit right about the context. I have seen some of his pictures of Nicaraguan Army labeled as Salvadoran guerrillas. Write good captions for history’s sake.

Thanks for chiming in Eros,

again please let me clarify a few key points..

The demo uptop is a very poorly written example.
The caption example was written a year-and-a-half ago.
I personally like a leaner caption, but that’s not to say that each clause can’t be a whole paragraph (or longer) if the author intends it that way; an example being Marc’s caption (which there is a link to above). The most important concept behind the caption style is the order and framework of the clauses rather than the length of them.

When I used to actually still write my captions like this,

‘Why’ and ‘How’ would usually be full complete sentences.

Again, the example uptop from a year-and-a-half ago is a poor one.

I agree with your sentiments about posterity but I must also again point out that there appears to be what I perceive as a growing divide between how old-school print photographers and new-school multimedia photographers choose to approach the issues of communicating information as well as the goals of posterity.

A traditional still photographer who is accustomed to print is probably going to want a meatier caption accompanying their printed photos because that’s how their photos will preserved and presented in the future.

A multimedia photographer, a new-schooler, is probably going to be more concerned about how much of that same information is conveyed in the audio of their multimedia presentation because that’s how it will probably be preserved in people’s iPods (et cetera) and presented in the future.

It’s all about writing and publishing for your particular medium.

Audio and video is arguably more of a novelty to a professional still photographer, just as captions are arguably more of a novelty to a broadcast news videographer.

See where I’m getting at?

Most photographers on Lightstalkers seem to have a very traditional-print-centric-still-newspaper/magazine-photojournalism perspective, which is absolutely understandable. I however, am 22, and almost my entire generation grew up on computers and video games beginning as children.

We are in the midst of a new era and we have been for awhile.

I personally am more concerned about selling and licensing entire videos or multimedia productions for online publication and syndication, not still photographs for print publication. That hardly ever even crosses my mind. If something of mine is to be commercially published online it will ideally be accompanying a multimedia presentation. Odds are, the only prints of my still images out there in circulation will be a small circulation of framed prints for collectors or friends or something.

I’m sure I’d feel different if I made my living almost exclusively off of print publications, but I don’t and I don’t intend to.

I have friends who haven’t even finished their multimedia journalism degrees yet who are already pulling in $1000 day rates doing freelance multimedia stories.

There’s not a whole lot of us new-schoolers and this is demonstrated by the fact that news outlets are paying out the ass for the services of students in part because there aren’t enough degreed and talented multimedia producers out there relative to the demand for them.

I doubt I could ever come close to that kind of income doing just still photography with a degree.

Patrick,
are high-schools and universities still using hard copy text books? And I mean the bulk of schools, not just the ones with money, and not just the schools in the rich countries. Are you telling me that people will stop reading books in the future? That the world will get all it’s info from computers? Either way, Online, hard-copy, multi media, what ever…context is obligitory. I think the slim caption idea is great, as long as it is backed up by some historical context in print within the photo file.

as eros has succinctly and ass-kickingly put it down right: those who, in the midst of doing the now right-now often woefully forget that the doin’ it the now-way aint a whole lot of beans when the doin’ it in the future-now-way comes rollin’ along….

just as the old fucks who dont embrace what can/is/should be done now in favor of only what was done before are doomed to swing in the rafters, so too the fools who think that the ever-present now-way will save them in the soon-to-come-along then-now way (future)... ;)))

what the fuck am i saying? ;)): need some context for my stupid prose: sorry ya’ll readin’ alot of cowboy books at the moment ;))))...

the person with the most insight is not the man/women of the moment, nor the kisser of the past nor the seer of the future, but the old gal whose bodies stained by the past but tasting the now known’ it aint a whole lot of shit come time in the future…..

i still read books and i still read on line: i still make photos and i still dont care if they ever get printed…

eros is spot on: the only thing we really have are stories and its the same story generation after generation and for those after us to better understand, context, like a landscape, is the marker, inded…..

eros: any place we can see your father’s pics??

cheers y’all

bob
....

I’m workin on that Bob, I’ve got thousands of chromes to edit, scan and then I don’t know what. Do a search for John Hoagland and there will be some of his stuff on various web sites.
EKH

thanks ekh: im lookin’ now :)))...cheers, bob

ekh: wow, i just found some sites and im looking at your fathers powerful photographs…here is one site:

http://www.thedagger.com/archive/elsal/

im sorry to hear about your father’s death, but i am certain that he would be proud of your own work and the way in which you see things: with very little bullshit and alot of clarity….

his photos from from that horrible morass (the wars in central america) are remarkable and brave and honest and unflincing…..they are a powerful testimony to his consciousness towards ward…..extraordinary work…..

that he was killed while shooting, killed as a conscientious objector is another profound and sad negative ballast erasure of this fucked life….

but im glad i have discovered his work….

thanks for sharing with me your fathers work….

cheers,
bob

ps. you know the poetry of carolyn forche about central america?

Yeah, John Hoagland…never made the connection till you mentioned it. I have a book about Gamma somewhere with some of his work in it. My stuff is all in boxes at present, but I’ll have to dig it out.

I couldn’t agree with you more Eros. The trick is to try to make sure a search engine can actually find the pictures, without being driven off into a tangent by the additional info.

If the search engine is confused, you can hope for the pics to last into posterity, but ironically, they’ll be harder to find over time. I once did a search for ‘Paris’ on an agency website. The first pictures that came up?

Eiffel Tower?
Champs Elysee?

Nope – a beach in Beirut…because the photographer had placed additional contextual info in the caption which said Paris was ‘considered to be the Paris of the Middle East’

Oops. Well, yeah, I’m sure it is, but you dont want that info in the primary caption.

Another classic was a search for ‘Tour De France’ which brought up war graves in Normandy…don’t ask.

Needless to say, get a few thousand of those in a database and you not only won’t find anything, you’ll get so annoyed you won’t come back – not good business for a photo agency search engine, and certainly not a good idea for building a long term searchable archive.

You’d need to think about either having a parallel cross referenced text archive, or placing addional contextual info in an area of the IPTC fields which aren’t picked up by search engines, or ranked lower in search importance.

The info will be seen in the IPTC/File Info metadata attached to the image, it just won’t be ‘seen’ by a search engine.

Basic keywords would be used to find the image, then context could be gained from that additional field or parallel captions.

Trying to find a universal system of captioning and archiving pictures for cross cultural and long term search is an evolving process, and theres a big conference in June which is looking at just that:

http://www.iptc.org/pages/prel_20070403.php

The current universal standard is known as the ‘IPTC Core’.

It’s all way beyond my headspace, but needless to say, doing some thinking about how pictures are located – mostly now in the digital space – will provide some useful pointers about how to caption your stuff now, and let you know how all those fields in the metadata windows of photoshop, Photo Mechanic etc, work.

My preference (so far) is to try to keep things as clear and simple as possible, while giving as much useful info as possible.

Another conference I wish I could attend.

Maybe I can.

Eros, here are some links you may find interesting:

MITs OpenCourseWare:

http://ocw.mit.edu

Take any of MITs courses online for free.

The One Laptop Per Child Project:

http://www.laptop.org

A $100-$150 Hand powered wi-fi enabled laptop.

Google Apps (free):

http://www.google.com/a/

Other free Google Software:

http://pack.google.com/

Google Wi-Fi:

http://wifi.google.com/

I’ve seen a lot of progress made online in just the past two years and I must say that a free online MIT education beats a pricey WKU one, through and through.

I think the whole world will eventually be engulfed in a free wi-fi internet signal. That’s what Tesla envisioned.

It’s possible now, it’ll be even more possible once the cost of putting up a satellite in orbit is less than $5-10 million.

Yes, I think the internet, with it’s exponentially growing amounts of free information will surpass books. Don’t newspapers contribute to over 60% of the world’s pollution/waste?

I know that every year at WKU, less and less students even bother to purchase their ‘required’ textbooks. Hell, sometimes I’ll just get an ‘outdated’ edition of a book on Amazon at a fraction of the cost.

No textbook is worth $150. College is becoming a scam.

All I can say is get ready.

The whole world is about to change.

It will be the era of the global generation.

Patrick
I better get ready eh? Your generation is gonna’ need to get ready for some shit way heavier than world wide free internet brother. The global generation has been underway for decades. Centuries even. I don’t know why people insist on believing that this concept is a new one.
I do agree with your coment on college becomming a scam. I’ve felt that way for years. I do, however, worry about your generation’s obsession with technology – just as, I’m sure each generation prior to mine has worried about one thing or another including ease of life – but withe the percieved “ease of life” come new complications that really make our lives more difficult in pyscic and emotional ways. I think we all better get ready for the big fallout – the DISCONNECT. It has been upon us for years but seems to be accelerating at an alarming pace as we “advance” at the speed of micro waves. Probably you are not old enough to have noticed the transitions of digression (not your fault of course) You were probably raised playing video games in your room alone, or with people you knew and trusted, not down at the arcade where you dealt with the basic logistics of getting there, social interaction with strangers, slapping your quarter up on the Donky Kong machine, and sometimes negotiating with the dude who used some tape and some fishing line to get free games that he would sell you at a discount (lessons in real economics.) My point is I lived in that time, and also through the introduction of Atari, I saw the transition. I also saw the transition from film to digital. I learned to use a computer and the internet, I have been getting ready my friend, I know whats comming Patrick, and it makes me sad, but I am the nostalgic sort.
We cannot truly communicate or forge real relationships by tele-commuting. Online college? No books, no face to face communication, that’s some grim shit. I always argued that the real value of college was learing social and political skills (one in the same really)And what happens when that little eye in the sky falls? Computer failure, hard-drive crash, my main frame (read brain) has been overheated by heavy waves, and I’m not talking about the beach.
I’ve been paranoid for years about extended electricity failures. And thats some relativly simple shit compared to what you speak of. Do you know how people behave when they are over-dependant on a basic service, and that service fails? Oh boy, society can turn 180 in a heartbeat. Do you know how to change a flat tire Patrick, or are you strictly an auto club guy? (I’m serious, many people your age have no fucking clue – no insult intended.)
a laptop for every child? Someone is smoking way too much dope. I will quote one of the great poets of our times:
“Who needs information when you’re living underground?”
I’m not going to explain the empty spaces between the lines of my rant, just hang on it a while Patrick, it is not a tangent.

Hmmm…I’m pretty good at flint knapping, for when the oil runs out in about 8 years time…pity there ain’t no mammoths left to hunt.

So I’ll just have to go stalk the bread shelf in the rolling savannahs of my local supermarket – local, as in most of the food is flown in from Thailand by Boeing…

As for going to college to learn social skills? Ya mean like how to get so fucked up, you gun down 32 people?

Colleges in the UK are going the same way as corporate business. Students are being squeezed by managers to produce results for league tables. League tables means more investment. Its pure business, and students are beginning to sense it. There’s widespread scepticism in the UK about the value of some college educations.

As for classrooms – who needs teachers when you can sit all the kids in front of screens? Screens dont ask for a pay rise. Its called ‘empowering students’ I believe…George Orwell would have a laugh.

And whats on all the screens? Google mostly. Thats one company, that for some bizarre reason we seem to trust like the Voice of God.

The issue isn’t really the information, its developing the skills to process and discriminate the info from a variety of sources.

Thats what’s being lost and thats what is no longer being taught in a lot of academic institutions. Like a UK Govt minister said some years ago, when they ‘reformed’ our education system:

“People must be once more educated to know their place”.

Back to the subject…its tangentally related to captioning, because if you dont know how to discriminate and judge information, you aint gonna be much good at passing on accurate non-judgemental info in your captions.

Sion, The teachers aren’t getting paid shit in relation to what the students are paying.

The college industry in america is one of the most unregulated industries.

Many teachers are catching on to this.

I think it makes sense for teachers to start producing videos of independent lectures and make money licensing them off their independently produced videos to video agencies so than can make royalties off their videos in perpetuity and the agency takes a flat 10%-ish.

That way educators can be rewarded royalties based on the merit of their presentations.

Not a flat rate paid by universities.

No lazy inefective professors with tenure.

Eros,

I believe in self reliance and survival skills.

I believe it should be taught in elementary schools.

I believe in working hard and earning what you deserve.

I used to go to arcades and not know what a cellphone was.

I lived through that change.

I’m more comfortable with change because of it though.

It’s a timeless tail, the liberalism of youth.

A timeless pattern of sorts.

I’ve seen some people become more selfish and more withdrawn with technology over the years, but not most people, not enough to matter.

People are people and most of them will always be socially motivated.

Case in point; its only human natural to fear change.

If change is going to happen, I’d rather be an optimist about it.

Pessimism just reinforces more problems than it solves.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is a quote for the books;

© Patrick Yen 2007

Here’s another quote,

“Nothing worth learning can be taught.”

Henri Cartier-Bresson, my hero

nothing worth learning can be learned

fuck my copyright…..;))

bob

If you think that nothing worth learning can be taught, Patrick, why are you spending so much on your new-media education? I’ve learnt a hell of a lot from people who have taught me a lot, and I have a lot of respect for these people. I’m sure there are things you’ve been taught in your college program that you would not have learned had you not been in the program… maybe take a chill pill on the quoting yourself for time being, mate, and keep on learning from the learned… that’s what I’ll keep doing, at least.

patrick,if you want to learn about something,you will have to start digesting information that requires more than one sentence to encapsulate it.soundbite culture is ok for politicians,because they all talk bollocks anyway,and the shorter their nonsensical utterances are,the better.but if you really want to learn about something,you have to go a lot further than page one on google,and express your understanding in more than random one liners.