Here’s an odd thing:
For the past few months, a 2014 Risk Bites video on nanoscale silver has been getting hundreds of views a day — up from 30 – 50 views per day pre-coronavirus. Yet between May 7 – May 9, views from YouTube searches dropped from over 200 per day to zero.
Has the video somehow been blacklisted by YouTube?
(Update: despite the awesomeness of this course, there was so little interest amongst students that we’re putting it on hold … we’ll see what we can do though to do something cool in this space though. Stay tuned!)
This is really exciting — this summer I’ll be teaching an online undergraduate course at ASU with my colleague Anna Muldoon on infectious diseases and movies.
Of course, this is a direct response to COVID. But it also builds on three years of experience using sci-fi movies to explore the relationship between science, technology, society and the future, in ASU’s popular Moviegoer’s Guide To the Future course.
One of the many hats I wear is Chair of the Master of Science and Technology Policy program at Arizona State University – a really interesting program that prepares its graduates to be policy experts in a tech-rich future.
It’s always a bittersweet moment when it’s time to graduate our students — bitter as I love having them around and working with them, and sweet as I get to see the amazing ways they go out and change the world.
This year, with coronavirus, we didn’t have thew chance to congratulate them in person, and instead held a virtual convocation for all of the school’s graduating students.
Here’s my brief address as part of that – my CONGRATULATIONS to some of the most fantastic students I get to work with:
… and because I, quite frankly, was disturbed by the pomp and ceremony of donning full academic regalia for this as we’re all learning to navigate the impacts of coronavirus from our homes, and authenticity is more important than ever as we do, here’s my “you’ve got to be kidding …” making of 🙂
Enjoy!