Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/03/24/1960s-civil-defense-movies-are.html
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For anyone too young to understand the beeps, this is from what was called a “filmstrip”. These beeps – the soundtrack of my childhood – served the same role then as “next slide please” does today when someone is giving a powerpoint presentation but the remote presenter has walked away from the AV cabinet.
We had lots of scary presentations like this in school when I was a kid, also very strange classroom activities where we had to work out least-worst solutions to end-of-the-world scenarios.
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I’d love to see this inter-cut with footage of atomic tests ripping the shit out of houses.
Many courses in junior colleges all over California in the middle 1970s were augmented by a room of little sit-down voting booths with a Philips audiocassette player and a filmstrip projector in each one, and headphones. A paid student sat in the tape-and-film closet all day doing his own schoolwork and checking the resources out and reshelving them. I loved it. Astronomy, biology, all the sciences, at whatever speed worked for you. You could stop and start again any time, go outside and come back, go back over hard parts until you understood it, pursue something far beyond what the taught class was doing. It was genius, and free, unlike the hugely expensive textbooks. A lot of what I learned there is in memory in a way that comes back when I need it-- better than things that happened in class. The computer way of doing all this isn’t as good, to me, as filmstrips, and I’m not sure why.
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I agree. Another learning system popular in the 70s that doesn’t seem as good in computer-based form was the “programmed text”. (David Merriell’s Calculus texts were the best example I know). The format should translate immediately to computer-based learning systems, and in fact some popular learning system (like Duolingo) are pretty much a recreation of the old programmed text, but to me they lose something by not being on paper. Maybe it is because the motivation to get the right answer is higher if you have to search back and forth through the text (or, in the case of cassette+filmstrip, rewind and recue) when you miss something, rather than just clicking on links or the back button.
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My problem with Duolingo is that I have just enough linguistic ability (at least with Western European languages) to very quickly get far ahead of where I really should be. Aside from that, to really make progress, I’d need for it to give me more help on how the grammar works, and it doesn’t really do a good job of explaining.
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And dinner would be the last of the 2020 pasta stash.
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