“In February 1929 London was lifeless and numb, seeming to take its temper from Westminster, where the Government was dragging out the weeks of its last session. Talking films were just being introduced, and had set back by twenty years the one vital art of the century. ”
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When I first came across that paragraph, I was astonished. I’ve always understood that “the talkies” were a great innovation, which everyone embraced with joy and jubilation. Well, apparently not.
How come?
The first talkie as we know them today was The Jazz Singer, featuring Al Jolson. That came out in October 1927, and was the most successful of several experiments to incorporate diegetic sound, sound that is embedded in the film which the characters in the film can hear. It was an astonishing breakthrough, yet it still was mainly silent, with intertitles, those cards which contained the speech of the characters. But what was amazing about it, apart from the sounds of the songs, was Al Jolson’s comments outside of the songs. Take a look at this clip to see what I’ve talking about:
Great, yes? So what on earth was Waugh moaning about?
Well, because the silent films had to do so much work, without the benefit of being able to rely on sound, their directors had made incredible strides as far as technical brilliance was concerned.
In particular, the movie Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans, featured special effects that were far ahead of their time, and far superior to anything in The Jazz Singer. You can watch the whole film on YouTube by clicking on that link.
Unfortunately, it came out in September 1927, and so was completely eclipsed by The Jazz Singer even though it was a better film.
I think similar things happen in the world of education technology. When I started teaching, video cameras and video players were hard to come by in schools because of how expensive they were. To give you an idea, in my interview for the first school I worked in, I asked if the school had any video equipment.
The headteacher said:
“We have a large TV monitor in the hall, and we’re hoping to raise enough money from the PTA to buy a video player and a video camera.”
I worked there for three years and neither camera nor player materialised.
In the late 1980s I worked in a school which had video players — and one video camera that could be borrowed. I seized upon the opportunity to make videos for my lessons, and to get the students to do so. But it was tough. There was no editing equipment, and to have a whole class make videos I had to organise a rota lasting for the whole term.
New tech vs old tech
It was great to be able to use videos for my lessons. For example, I recorded an interview with my girlfriend at the time, as she was running her own business, and I was teaching Business Studies and Information Technology. My students had to attend to the video very closely in order to answer questions like: “Which of the costs mentioned by the interviewee would you classify as fixed costs, which variable, and why?”
In other words, it worked. But boy, was it basic! I’d propped up the camera on a bookcase, pointed it in the direction of my settee, pressed the record button and sat down next to her and asked her questions. Let’s put it this way: it wouldn’t have won an Oscar for best photography.
The technology I used in the early part of my career was an overhead projector. This used transparencies (acetate sheets) that you wrote on with a special felt tip marker.
Overhead Projector (OHP) by Terry Freedman
This sounds pretty basic too, but the great thing about the OHP was was that you could overlay transparencies so as to build up a process on the screen. If students missed a section, or wanted to see it again, you could just build up the sequence again.
If you wanted to demonstrate a set of circumstances in which alternative things could happen, you could create a transparency with additional sheets fixed on with flaps, like this:
OHP transparency, by Terry Freedman
You could say to the class, “What would happen to GDP if we increased exports or government spending?” (the green arrow); “What would happen if imports and savings increased )the red arrow)?”
It was even possible to buy animated transparencies, not that I ever did.
Conclusions
You can probably tell from those examples that, in its way, the OHP was a far better teaching aid than video, at first. It was easy to use, ubiquitous, the transparencies were not terribly expensive, especially if you wrote on them with non-permanent markers so that you could reuse them, and they had facilitated really innovative uses of the technology.
Thus although the writing was on the wall from the moment the very first camcorder and video player appeared, you can understand why to some people the advent of video might have been seen as a backward step, much in the same way as Evelyn Waugh regarded talkies.
My “takeaway” from this is: if you’re frustrated that a colleague won’t wholeheartedly embrace some new technology, try to see it from their point of view. If they’re using some technology in innovative and effective ways, and getting more out of it that they would from newer technology, and with more certain results, why on earth would they change?
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